Hi, love your blog! I have an essential oils question, but feel free to ignore! I sell bath bombs on etsy (The Personal Bubble Store, with puns and glitter!) and I was planning on making a bergamot bath bomb. Now, the bergamot oil I have says it is safe to use on skin when diluted and says it is furocoumarin free (that the photo sensitive compound has been removed). But I saw the post you reblogged recently about bergamot oil in soap and now I’m really paranoid. Should I be worried? Thank you!

thebibliosphere:

nonsenseandstuff:

thebibliosphere:

Bergamot is one of those oils, even when the furocoumarin has been removed, that I’d personally never put near my skin care routine because people can be so chemically sensitive to it they still get a burn. The deoderant I tested (from that other post going about) uses body safe bergamot oil, and it left behind a strip of burned skin where I tested it on my inner arm. Took weeks to heal and months to fade.

Not everyone will react that way of course, some people will be fine with it. But for a lot of people the reaction can be sudden and quite severe and the thought of having that reaction on my entire body cause I had a bath in it just made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

It’s why synthetic bergamot fragrance is used a lot in regular alcohol based perfumes.

So I guess you could use it, cause, well it is technically body safe. Just not just for everyone. And unfortunately the only way people will find out they have the allergy is if they use your product and get the equivalent of a body wide chemical burn, and that’s maybe not what you want popping up in your reviews…

Hey, thanks! I really appreciate you taking the time to answer, I know you’re not just an essential oils ask blog! 

Okay, I’m going to rethink that recipe then. Chemical burns are an automatic no. 

Tracking down reliable essential oil information is so difficult. When I was researching them, half the time it’d be like, okay this seems like a good source, uh huh, dilute in a carrier oil, safe for ingestion… Wait what? And then I’d go looking for a new source

No problem! I like to help where I can. Might as well do something with all those years of learning haha.

And yea. There’s a lot of stuff, even in what I consider to be credible sources that make me wince because it doesn’t jive well with what we know now vs what we knew even a few years ago about drug interactions and other stuff.

It’s why when I was learning a lot of holistic stuff I also went the basic physiology + basic chemistry route, because well, I feel you need to if you’re going to be a holistic practitioner. It’s not enough to know about the positive effects of something if you’re also not going to understand how it’s formed or how it interacts with other base elements. Like people not seeming to understand that water doesn’t dilute oil because oil floats on water. It just does. It doesn’t mix. That’s the end of the discussion.

And if your oil does mix with water, it’s already been diluted with something, likely an alcohol base. So all those claims about how “pure” essential oils mix with water and are ergo safe to drink are doubly full of shit cause a PURE essential oil will not dissolve in water. At all. Meaning the purer your oil is, the less safe it is to drink so yeeeea…..

Incidentally a good way to dilute oil and get it off the skin in a hurry is
glycerine. I know it’s not exactly ideal for a bath product (though it is in a lot of bath products) cause it can make people prone to yeast infections if it gets near the vagina, but it’s good to have in a pinch when you get it on your skin and water doesn’t help to get it off. I’ve avoided a few bad burns that way.