Abstract

ESSENTIAL OILS: AT A GLANCE

*Ashish Arvind Mahajan, Usha Yadav Shelke, Pallavi Shankarrao Gadhave, Kiran Rajendra Bhalerao.

ABSTRACT

Essential oils have been important substances since early times. A large number of herb materials contain Essential Oils with extensive bioactivities. Essential oils are highly concentrated substances extracted from flowers, leaves, stems, roots, seeds, barks, resins, or fruit rinds. These oils are often used for their flavor and their therapeutic or odoriferous properties, in a wide selection of products such as foods, medicines, and cosmetics. Acknowledging the importance of plants and its medicinal value, recovery of Essential Oil (the value added product) from the raw botanical starting material, its extraction methods and applications were treated in this study since the quality of the oil is greatly influenced during these steps. There are a variety of methods for obtaining volatile oils from plants. Extraction of essential oils is one of the most time- and effort-consuming processes. The way in which oils are extracted from plants is important because some processes use solvents that can destroy the therapeutic properties. There are wide number of ways to extract the Essential oil but the quality never remains the same. Here we discussed most of the promising techniques for raw material collection, size reduction, drying, extraction, concentration and purification which is the cheapest way for production of essential oils from the different parts of the plants.

Keywords: Essential Oils, Extraction, Aromatherapy, Terpenoids.