Room Mist, Real Essential Oil

Details

The odour neutraliser in this range removes a smell. This is the other thing, for when you want a room to smell of something, and it is three ingredients: water, plant-derived ethanol at 12 percent to disperse the oil, and steam-distilled essential oil at 1.8 percent. Nothing else. The word natural does a great deal of unearned work in this category, so two figures do the work instead. The first is the allergen declaration, and it differs by scent, which is exactly why declaring it matters. Vetiver and cedarwood is one of the lowest-allergen combinations there is: limonene under 0.02 percent, linalool under 0.01 percent, and nothing else from the EU list of 26 above the detection limit of the GC-MS. Lemongrass and basil is not. Lemongrass oil is roughly three quarters citral, so at 1.1 percent lemongrass and 0.7 percent basil the declaration reads citral 0.83 percent, linalool 0.32 percent, geraniol 0.03 percent, limonene under 0.02 percent. Citral is a known contact sensitiser and 0.83 percent is the highest declarable allergen figure anywhere in this whole cleaning range. So if anyone in the house reacts to fragrance, buy the vetiver and cedarwood, or buy nothing. Natural has never meant hypoallergenic and it is dishonest to let the word imply it. The second figure is the purity test, because essential oils are routinely cut with synthetic isolates: synthetic citral added to lemongrass, synthetic linalool added to basil. GC-MS alone cannot catch that, because a synthetic isolate and a natural one are the same molecule. Chiral GC can, because the natural molecule is optically pure and the synthetic one is racemic, and that is the test we run per lot.

• Three ingredients: water, plant-derived ethanol 12 percent, steam-distilled essential oil 1.8 percent
• Allergens quantified per scent and printed on the label, not summarised as parfum
• No synthetic fragrance oil, no phthalate fixative, no synthetic musk, no aerosol propellant, no dye, no formaldehyde donor
• The trade-off, stated because it is the point. Real oil with no fixative is noticeable for about ninety minutes and gone within two hours. What makes a mainstream room spray hang around for six is a fixative, commonly diethyl phthalate, and a molecule engineered to persist in the air is exactly what you do not want persisting in a closed bedroom overnight
• No preservative and none needed, at 12 percent ethanol with no surfactant, no thickener and nothing for an organism to eat
• Two pumps in the middle of a room. It also goes on a pillow, a curtain, a linen cupboard or a car vent
• Not for skin, and test a seam before spraying silk or a light upholstery
• Do not spray it in a closed room where an infant sleeps. Essential oils at any concentration are not for a baby's airway, and the fact that this one is honest about its contents does not make it suitable
• Glass bottle with a reusable pump. There is no pressurised can to throw away
• Two pumps is about 0.3 ml, so 330 uses from the 100 ml at Rs 1.06 and 660 from the 200 ml at Rs 0.83