April 2014

A new recipe for baby:
Lavender & Chamomile Nappy Ointment with NZ kawakawa infused oil
Makes 200g

80g calendula infused oil
40g shea butter, wildcrafted
40g kawakawa infused oil
20g coconut oil, organic virgin
20g organic beeswax
few drops lavender and chamomile essential oils

Method:
Melt everything (except the essential oils) together gently in a pot.
Take off the heat and add the essential oils. Stir.
Pour into a container and leave to set.

Check out our 200ml glass jars - they are quite solid, ideal for nappy cream.

What does it mean?
Extracting oils...

When you look at the ingredients available on our website, many of you are astonished at all the terms used describe the oils and butters. Last time we looked at how plants are grown. Now the plant is ready to be processed, so we'll look at some methods of extraction:

Cold pressed
Most of the 53 vegetable (carrier) oils that we stock are cold-pressed oils: The nuts or seeds are crushed in a 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 great for moisturising and nourishing the skin. The extra compounds often give these oils distinctive colour and aroma.
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. The harder the nut, the more pressure is needed. Once the nuts or seeds are ground up, they are crushed to extract the oil. A simple version of the process: A friend who visited an argan oil cooperative in Morocco described to me how the nuts were crushed in a stone mill, then the women hand-squeezed the paste to extract the oil.

Expeller pressed
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
We are familiar with carbon dioxide as a gas, or perhaps as a solid – the weirdly smoking ‘dry ice.’  But at very high pressure and a temperature above 31°C, it becomes something even stranger: a ‘supercritical fluid’ which is a safe and effective solvent for extracting compounds from plant material. This method has been used in the petroleum 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 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.

We currently stock just two of these oils, made from sea buckthorn fruit and black currant seed, both treasure troves of fatty acids and other skin nutrients. There are likely to be more of these CO2 extracted oils becoming available in future.

Solvent extraction
The only solvent-extracted oil that we currently stock is pomace, a grade of olive oil that is great for soapmaking. You'll also find it in commercial skincare products, where it is likely to be called olive husk oil.
Oils that are produced as part of an industrial process are much cheaper than handcrafted oils. Solvent extraction is widely used for getting a high oil yield from crops such as soybeans and canola - most supermarket vegetable oils are solvent extracted.
The most widely used solvent is hexane, which is one of the many hydrocarbons distilled from crude oil. 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 1/50th of a teaspoon per litre of oil.

Next time: Extracting essential oils - and what does 'virgin' mean?

Peppermint oil keeps mice and rats away
The first mice have appeared inside my (Jacqui's) house - every autumn I wonder if our cat is stocking the house with winter snacks, or whether the mice are checking out cozy spots before it's cold and wet. If you live in an old house, or in the country, chances are you'll be seeing signs soon. Try putting a few drops of peppermint oil on scraps of cloth or a paper towel around the spots where they may be coming in. They will be discouraged, and may even stay away! Last autumn the mice found a way into our laundry/garage. I put a dozen bits of pepperminty cloth in spots they seemed to favour - renewed the peppermint oil a week later - and the mice just disappeared!

Kind regards
Elinor, Chelsea, & Jacqui