Teach Soap

This whole conversation brings up an interesting point that I have wondered about for a good while now.

As everyone here knows, no, there is no such thing as a fruit essential oil. However, fruits such as strawberries or raspberries clearly DO have an aroma, so even if those naturally-occurring compounds within the fruits responsible for their aromas are not "essential oils", they ARE present in the fruit, and obviously they ARE something, so why can't they be isolated in some manner? Even if they are water-soluble and not oils, I would think that there would be some way to extract and/or concentrate them --- osmotic separation, fractional distillation, etc. Separating components from naturally-occurring mixtures is done all the time in industry --- that is how gasoline and diesel fuel are produced from petroleum, for example, or helium from natural gas, or even brandy from wine for that matter. I fail to see why this could not be done with fruit mashes to distill out their fragrance components; as a chemist myself, it seems like it would be pathetically simple, in fact.

So is there ANY natural form of these fruit aroma components that are produced or marketed? I'm guessing that the answer is no, but if that is the case, then the bigger question still remains: why not? It seems like something is missing from this story (although it could just be a matter of cost, if for example it took 500 pounds of strawberries to yield one ounce of fragrance, as it might for a floral absolute).

Most likely fruit aroma components are not mass produced or marketed because of the prohibitive cost. They would not work in a cold process soap as the natural scent would dissipate.

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Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

SoapySmith, I love your curiosity on this subject! Sometimes all it takes is one person to think outside the box or to look at the problem from a different angle. You may be the one to come up with something new!

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Susie
Sometimes A Mistake is so much fun, You just have to do it again!