Rules about naming names - Part II - cont.

[Guest guest]

Hi Marcia,

Your point is very well made, and I do hope that our less

experienced members will take the time to read and absorb your point

of view.

Should there still be any on our group who doubt the accuracy of

your account within the supply trade, I would like to add that due

to the circumstances you describe I eventually had to close my

business many years ago. Customers could not understand why I was

unable to send out sample after sample, particularly when they never

bought anything.

In what other business can you request and receive samples when you

are purchasing only small value orders. If you are spending a

hundred Pounds/Dollars etc then that is fair enough, but for orders

valuing just 20 or 30 Pounds/Dollars it is impossible because the

annual cost of this - plus the shipping - can be astronomical, and

well beyond the means of a small, specialist supplier.

I can't tell you the number of times customers would want to return

an oil because 'it doesn't smell like the oil I usually get from

Brand X', when Brand X was well known in the industry for selling

cheap adulterated oils. The problem usually was that a customer had

just smelled real Neroli, Thyme linalool or whatever for the first

time in their lives - so of course it smelled `different'.

Without any reference samples to train and develop your nose, it is

almost impossible to know precisely what smells either as it should,

or should not, because you have no point of reference. I recall a

very embarrassing confrontation I had many years ago, when I (with

only a few years experience) was silly enough to declare to a very

high profile French supplier that there was something wrong with my

first delivery of Egyptian Geranium from them.

'It's the wrong colour!', I declared indignantly. 'It is golden

coloured, and anybody who knows anything will tell you geranium

should be pale green.' Oh, the embarrassment of it all when I think

back! A previous supplier that I had been using for this oil had

been passing off Chinese Geranium (green) as the more expensive

Egyptian which most definitely should have been golden.

To my inexperienced little beak, the fragrance was quite similar,

but the point was that back then the Chinese oil was almost half the

price of the Egyptian, so I had been getting ripped off for nearly 3

years before the aroma of coffee finally woke me up. This was my

first lesson on the importance of knowing your country of origins

and training your nose.

Only last week we had a member here who had been told by a supplier

of the effects of `overcooking' vetiver during distillation, thereby

producing a burned note. From my experience, vetiver from Java

generally does have a detectable burned note (overheated or not),

but on the other hand the more expensive vetiver from Haiti does

not. These differences are not a flaw in the process of extraction,

it is a natural variation due to the country of origin, and this

accounts for a *huge* number of misunderstandings/discrepancies

regarding the true aroma of an oil.

Before declaring that the oil you just got from a supplier does not

smell `right', please be sure that you really know what it should

smell like before sounding off and possibly ruining the reputation

of some hard-working supplier. You may not know as much about

essential oils as you think you do :-)

Thanks again Marcia, for your well written account.

Bev