Hydrosols

Fakes and Adulteration

Over the past few years, more and more people have begun selling hydrosols. This  is wonderful news, since an ever increasing number of varieties are becoming  available. However, I am constantly amazed by what I am offered  in the way of fakes. Fake Jasmine, for instance. Jasmine is gorgeous, and I am not such a purist that I avoid solvent-extracted absolutes, as some French aromatherapists are known to do. However, there is no distillation  involved in the production of Jasmine absolute, which involves a purely chemical extraction process, and therefore there is no hydrosol. What is being sold as jasmine hydrosol is either a totally synthetic product or a mixture of water and jasmine absolute. Manufacturers in India do produce a unique product called attar of jasmine, which involves the hydro-distillation of jasmin flowers in a base of sandalwood oil.

This production method, which has not changed for centuries, does produce a jasmin water, but it is not widely available and may never be. The samples I have received are very beautiful but retain much of the sandalwood personality. Perhaps one day we will have a real jasmine hydrosol; a recent sample has given me high hopes, but for now it is mainly a myth, and a chemical one at that. This production method, which has not changed for centuries, does produce a jasmin water, but it is not widely available and may never be. The samples I have received are very beautiful but retain much of the sandalwood personality. Perhaps one day we will have a real jasmine hydrosol; a recent sample has given me high hopes, but for now it is mainly a myth, and a chemical one at that.

Other common fakes are the citrus, for example, orange, lemon, tangerine, and grapefruit. These oils are cold-expressed  from the zest of peel without distillation, and therefore no hydrosols exists for these fruits. I was shocked recently to read a paper by a well-known, highly qualified aromatherapists and M.D that repeatedly mentioned citrus-rind hydrosol. Heaven knows what products the paper is referring to because they are certainly not true hydrosols. One intrepid distiller I know has managed to produce and orange-zest hydrosol from the dried peels of the Valencia orange, which is a most extraordinary accomplishment. So who knows what the future will bring, but for now you can be sure that most flower waters are not hydrosols.

Lime oil is occasionally steam-distilled, and I have encountered lime hydrosol once or twice, but as the provenance was unknown and commercially grown citrus fruit is heavily sprayed with chemicals, I opted not to use this hydrosol for therapeutic  applications. Clementine orange, and lemon leaves  are particularly desirable and have profound appetite - stimulating properties  that are very useful in treating eating disorders and appetite loss caused  by pharmaceutical medication. 

Then there is rose, sublime rose. Rose hydrosol does exist, of course, but many of the products on the market are synthetic and produced for use in the food and flavour industry. Also remember the subject of cohabitation: there is a depth of flavour and scent to un-cohabitated rosewater that, once tried, is never mistaken, but is hard to find and you must be willing to pay more for it. If rose water is not cohobated during distillation the resulting essential oil is incomplete chemically, aromatically , and therapeutically, and the already infinitesimal yield further reduced.

For these reasons un-cohabitated rose is very rare and most of us must buy the cohobated hydrosol--which in this case is not really a hardship! Some small distillers who do not have enough roses  to produce essential oil are distilling their flowers  only for the hydrosol, which is most exquisite, and because they are not producing oil, they do not cohobate. Rose is so much in demand, however, that much of the real rosewater available is now produced from dried rose petals or flowers. It is nice, tastes good and smells sweet, but it pales in comparison to a distillate from fresh flowers. Rose petals are extremely delicate : the smell of dried roses compared  with that of fresh Rosa damascena or R.centifolia will give you an idea of the difference in the water products.

So it seems that hydrosols are a bit of a tricky business. They are still a little hard to find, especially in true therapeutic grade, but then so are therapeutic -grade essential oils. There is still much less known about them than about the oils, and their primary use up to now has been in cosmetic products and aesthetic treatments. But hydrosols offer so much more scope and benefit that they are worth pursuing, and I hope the information in these pages will broaden their appeal for all their myriad applications.

Reference: Hydrosols: Suzanne Catty

What isn't a Hydrosol?

Now that we know what hydrosols are, let's look at what they are not. They are not distilled, spring, or tap water with essential oils added. Nor are they water and essential oils combined with a dispersant (alcohol or glycerin) to dissolve the oils in water. Water with fragrance oil or other synthetic  compounds added to it is not a hydrosol, nor are the cohobated distillation waters, with exception of rose and melissa, which are virtually unavailable in any other form.
(Cohabitation means the hydrosols are recycled repeatedly through the plant material in the still to extract the maximum amount of water-soluble components.)

One product on the market called French Rose Water contains the following ingredients: aqueous extract of rose, imidazolidinyl urea, methyl paraben, carmine and French rose essence concentrate. This is definitely not a hydrosol!

 Many aromatherapy books describe ways to "make your own hydrosols" by mixing essential oils in water, but if you are not distilling plant material in a still you are not making a hydrosol. No ifs, and, or buts. A true hydrosol does contain both essential oil and water, but that is only a fraction of what is in it, and you cannot extract all the other ingredients, or the aroma, by combining water and oil. Besides, the water and oil don't mix. Distillation does not release any of the alkaloids that alcohol extraction draws out: therefore, tinctures mixed with water are also not a replication of hydrosols. 

 Every liter of hydrosol contains between 0.05 and 0.2 milliliter of dissolved essential oil, depending on the water solubility of the plant's components and the distillation parameters. However, the essential oils in solution in a hydrosol will, when analyzed, show a chemical profile different from that of the pure oil from the same run. Why? Because some of the chemicals in the essential oil are just too lipophilic ( oil loving) to stay in the water and others are just too hydrophilic  (water loving) to stay in the oil): therefore, are found only in the hydrosol. Furthermore, each product is unique. Hydrosols contain water-soluble substances from the plant material, such as those you would obtain in making a decoction or tea. These water-soluble components are not found in the essential oils and are made up primarily of water-soluble acids. Therefore, mixing plain water and essential oil gives you only half the story, at best. 

The essential oils found in hydrosols are frequently in solution, meaning that they are not visible on the surface and do not separate out of the water. It is for this reason that a cohobated hydrosol is undesirable, since in the cohabitation  the majority of the essential-oil micro drops will bind together and become big enough to separate from the hydrosol, improving oil yield but reducing the therapeutic ingredients in the water.

Finally, there is the key issue of PH. Hydrosols have a wide range of pH but are always on the acid end of the scale, ranging from a low of 2.9 to a high of around 6.5. Distilled water has a neutral 7.0 pH, and tap water can have an alkaline pH of up to 8.0, depending on where you live. Essential oils have a pH somewhere between 5.0 and 5.8: thus, in combination with water, they will have a midrange 5.0 to 7.0 pH, eliminating the particular benefits that very acid waters can provide.

Reference: Hydrosols: Suzanne Catty

Table of Common Latin Names and pH Values - P - S

Read More....Table of Common Latin Names and Ph Values T - Y

Reference: Hydrosol : Suzanne Catty

Table of Common Latin Names and Ph Values - F - O

Read More... Table of Common Latin Names and Ph Values P - S

Reference: Hydrosols/Suzanne Catty