In this issue:

• Win skincare products and a great vegetarian recipe book
• What's new: Smaller sizes for some oils; We stock books; Postage stamps; South Island make-your-own classes; Chelsea acting in Wellington
• Substitution: Make your own version of some local products
• Recipes: Whipped Babassu and Borage Butters, Chest Rub for autumn colds
• What does it mean?  Cold pressed - expeller pressed - CO2 extraction - steam distillation - solvent extraction

Enter the draw
Beautiful, vibrant skin needs nutrition from the inside as well as the outside. Our giveaway package takes care of both!
Revive is a wonderful Auckland vegetarian cafe that has published the best cookbook ever - it's inspiring to look at, and makes it easy to create delicious food simply. Our favourite section has double-page spreads with multiple options for making salads, curries, stir fries, fritters and smoothies.

And to nurture the outer person, we have a selection of skincare products made with Go Native ingredients.

Everyone who orders from Go Native from today until the end of April goes in the draw to win the Revive cookbook along with the two Babassu butter products and rosehip oil balm featured in our recipes below.

What's new...

Smaller volumes of products:
We have responded to your requests for smaller volumes of our products. It is more economical to buy larger volumes but many options are there for each product.

Not sure how to order quantities other than the one you can see?
Just click on the white bar to see the other sizes available for this product.

And on the left, you can click on the name of the product to see background information about it.


Books:
We now carry a small range of books to help you with making your skincare products. Making Natural Beauty Products has proved particularly popular and we had to quickly order in more.

Stamps:
Go Native has its very own personalised 60c stamps. Pretty cute they are too! We have them for sale in the Miscellaneous section.

Chelsea acting in Wellington:
A shameless plug for Chelsea's play in Wellington.
These Are the Skeletons of Us is on at BATS from March 27 to April 5. It's a very funny play about a relationship from the end to the beginning. Well worth a night out.

South Island cosmetic classes:
Learn how to make simple effective products and the science behind them. Brianne offers maybe the only skincare classes in the South Island. Maximum of 5 people per class.

   Soapmaking: $150 per person, 3 hours
   Learn how to make your own real soap and take home your creations.
 
   Cosmetics Level One: $190 per person, 3 hours
   This course covers lotions, creams, cleansers, moisturisers, etc,
   as well as how to make a basic shampoo and conditioner.
 
   Cosmetics Level Two: $260 per person, 3 hours
   This course teaches more advanced methods.

Contact Brianne@ethique.co.nz for more details.

Substitution
Ever wondered how to make something you see on the shop shelves?

• cold pressed
• expeller pressed
• CO2 extraction
• steam distillation
• solvent extraction

In the last newsletter we talked about different methods for growing the plants we get our ingredients from.
The next step is extraction. The 64 vegetable (carrier) oils and butters that we stock are extracted in several different ways.
Oils vary from the delicate to the robust. Some oils are quite fragile and contain compounds that break down when exposed to air, heat or light, while others remain stable for years. So when extracting the finest quality oils, different methods will suit different oils.
 
Cold-pressed oils – how are they made?
Once nuts or seeds are gathered and cleaned, they are crushed in some way that doesn’t raise the temperature above about 40°C. This means that the antioxidants, vitamins and other beneficial compounds remain intact, making cold-pressed oils and butters great for moisturising and nourishing the skin. The extra compounds often give these oils distinctive colour and aroma (and flavour, but that’s not so relevant here).
In Europe, oil described as cold pressed will be unrefined, and extracted at temperatures below 50°C. In the USA, however, the term may be used more loosely.
Nuts and seeds vary hugely in hardness (just think of the casings of a macadamia nut and a large walnut - one is rock-hard, while the other can sometimes be crushed by hand). The harder the nut, the more pressure is needed. A friend who visited an argan oil cooperative in Morocco described to me how the women hand squeeze the stone-ground nuts  to extract oil for their own use.
Many of the tropical butters and oils that we stock are made using traditional cold-process techniques and are obtained directly from cooperatives and local producers, so they represent very good value.

Expeller pressed – what’s this?
A traditional machine that is still widely used for extracting oils is the expeller. No extra heat is applied during extraction – just pressure. But very hard nuts will generate quite a bit of heat from friction. Sometimes expeller-pressed oils can get quite hot – and if this happens, they are no longer cold pressed. (There are more sophisticated expellers which cool the crushing mechanism.)
So… many expeller-pressed oils qualify as cold pressed, but not all.
 
Expeller pressing leaves some oil behind. In a traditional setting, this doesn’t matter at all, as the pressed cake can be used as animal feed. But in an urban factory, the residue may then be treated with solvents to extract a lower-quality oil.
 
CO₂ extraction – haven’t heard of that!
We are familiar with carbon dioxide as a gas, or perhaps as a solid – the weirdly smoking ‘dry ice.’  But at high pressure and a temperature above 31°C, it becomes something even stranger: a ‘supercritical fluid’ which is a very safe and effective solvent for extracting compounds from plant material. This method has been used in the oil industry for over 30 years, but is now being applied in many areas because of its minimal environmental impact. Carbon dioxide is available as an industrial byproduct, and after being used for extraction, it is evaporated from the extracted material and recycled – no residue, no pollution.

CO₂ extracted oils are of a very high quality and purity. They tend to be quite expensive, but as this process becomes more widely used (from decaffeinating coffee beans to drycleaning) the cost of smaller extraction plants will come down.
You may find this method described as SCFE (supercritical fluid extraction) - just make sure that the fluid being used is carbon dioxide.
We currently stock just three of these oils, made from sea buckthorn fruit, black currant seed  and kiwi seed, all treasure troves of fatty acids and other skin nutrients. There should be many more of these wonderful CO₂ extracted oils becoming available in future, both vegetable (carrier) oils and essential oils.

Steam distillation of essential oils – as old as the hills
A thousand years ago, Muslim chemists were using steam distillation to extract perfume from rose petals. Today, one of our favourite products is rose hydrosol. Steam distillation is still the main way of creating essential oils and their hydrosols. (Hydrosols are the water-based product of distillation, and generally contain skin-friendly compounds.)

This elegant glass apparatus, marketed by heartmagic.com, shows clearly the components of a steam distiller, though small commercial ones look more like this photo from our home page showing the extraction of our ylang ylang essential oil in Indonesia. The steam passes through the plant material, releasing compounds that move into the condensing tube. The hydrosol condenses first (think of windows on a winter morning) and then the oils, which are collected separately.
 
The magic of steam distillation comes from the way that steam effectively lowers the boiling points of the compounds we desire, so they evaporate at low enough temperatures to retain their aromas and medicinal properties. (Have you ever tried grilling food over a fire of herb twigs? I have – in the hope that some of the aromatic compounds would find their way into the food. They didn’t! Heat alone is not effective!)

Solvent extraction
We also have to acknowledge that industrial processes have a place in our mass-produced world. Oils that are produced as part of an industrial process are much cheaper than handcrafted oils and butters, and are effective for some purposes. Solvent extraction is widely used for getting a high oil yield from crops such as soybeans and canola.
The most widely used solvent is hexane, which is one of the many hydrocarbons distilled from crude oil (remember the oil refinery distillation tower in Year 10 Science?)
Hexane is added to the crushed seed or nut, and the oil dissolves in the solvent. Once it has done its work, the hexane evaporates from the oil, and is collected to be used again.
Nearly all of the hexane is removed from the oil. I’ve read that in vegetable oils tested in the USA, hexane levels were almost all under 0.1 mg/kg – that’s 1/50^th of a teaspoon per litre of oil.
But some people have concerns about these mass-produced oils. People’s tolerance of chemicals varies enormously, and some of us may be affected by the tiniest residues. Others would argue that the hexane leaves an indelible ‘energy footprint’ on these kinds of processed oils, so that they can never provide the same level of nutrition as an organically grown cold- pressed version.
 
In conclusion
It’s wonderful that scientific principles discovered long ago are still being used to give us the finest-quality products – and it’s great that modern science has brought the new technology of CO₂ extraction, as well as the less life-enhancing but extremely efficient solvent-based methods.
 
Each change of season brings the opportunity to make some new products to care for your skin in changing conditions. We hope you have a great time with your autumn creations!

Kind regards
Elinor, Chelsea, & Jacqui