Natural Oils UK
This article is an introduction to natural oils UK. It is designed to deliver a broad-brush overview of UK natural oils, but also provides links to resources that go into a lot more detail, should you wish to gain a deeper understanding of the subject of UK natural oils.
Nevertheless, in this article you will find the answers to all the preliminary questions you are likely to have about natural oils UK, including a few that haven’t occurred to you.
The information in this article has been prepared by Rachel Wild of Wild As The Wind Natural Skincare & Essential Oils, who creates highly acclaimed body oils and face oils using some of the purest, natural oils available in the UK.
Both UK essential oils and UK carrier oils are used for this purpose.
What Is A Natural Oil UK?
Good question!
The term Natural Oil UK is very much a loaded dice… it relies just as heavily on perception as it does on fact… and, it needs a little unpacking…
The term ‘natural’ is perhaps the most trixy element of the term Natural Oil UK. This is because, in law, the term ‘natural’ is a lot more vague than most of us would like, or expect. It’s a complex subject getting to the root of what is deemed natural where UK law and UK natural oils are concerned, which would result in a very protracted and ‘dry’ article that few would have the stamina to read…
Thankfully, it is a lot easier and simpler to state what a natural oil UK is not, which will be just as enlightening as a deep dive into the subject from a legal standpoint.
Carrier Oils & Essential Oils
The two main kinds of natural oils UK are carrier oils and essential oils.
Well produced carrier oils are extracted via a process of cold pressing, and are packaged and stored in amber glass bottles. the amber colour helps to prevent oxidation and the glass prevents contaminents from plastic entering the contents.
Well produced essential oils are steam distilled or C02 extracted.
Absolute essential oils are not pure. This is because absolute essential oils are solvent extracted, which is a process that leaves toxic solvent residues in the oils.
Many essential oils are adulterated and made from synthetic chemicals in a lab. For example, the most popular essential oil in the world is Organic Lavender Essential Oil. However, over 90% of all Lavender Essential Oil is produced in a lab, using synthetic chemicals, costing pennies.
Selling fake aromatherapy oils is big business because profit margins are high if fake ingredients are used. Actually farming plants, harvesting them and distilling them involves very costly processes, so circumventing all of the time consuming, fuel-intensive processes eliminates much of the cost for the increasing number of unscrupulous fake essential oil producers.
Learn more about how the UK is being deluged with fake oils from abroad in this Essential Oils UK industry report. The report lists some of the best UK essential oil brands, and it also shows you how to avoid buying toxic unnatural oils, no matter how convincing the marketing is.
Marketing sophistocation is very much a problem within the Natural Oils UK market. This report lays is all out bare.
Natural Oils UK, Natural Or Not?
Again, good question… here’s the short answer…
No oil, sold in a bottle, is an oil presented entirely how nature intended!
For an oil to be in a bottle, it has had to go through at least one process to liberate it from the plant materials that contained it. Quite often, an oil will go through several processes before it is suitable for human use. [Please note, Wild As The Wind does not advocate the internal use of almost all UK natural oils that are obtained from nuts and seeds. Please read, Omega-6 Fatty Acids Are Extremely Bad For Our Health and Healthy & Unhealthy Fats & Oils for more information.)
Thus, based on the fact that at least one unnatural process must be undertaken to produce seed and nut oils, this makes plant oils, in the strictest sense of the word… unnatural.
The long and short of it is that no commercially available plant oil is truly ‘natural’.
And the same is just as true for UK essential oils as it is for UK carrier oils… Perhaps even more so…? This is because essential oils are extracted via a much more complex process than carrier oils.
Extracting Carrier Oils UK
Carrier oils are often just simply squeezed firmly, between two rollers, in order for the pressure to expel the oil. The cooler the rollers are, the more the natural constituents, of these plant oils, survive.
A carrier oil that is cold expressed in this way is called a cold pressed carrier oil, or simply cold pressed oil.
It costs a lot more in time and energy to run the machines slowly enough, to keep the stainless steel rollers cool, throughout the natural oil extraction process. A lot of friction is created as the seeds and nuts are forced through the rollers at high pressure, so if the machines are running at maximum capacity, the rollers soon become burning hot.
Hot Pressed Oils?
When oils are produced through burning hot rollers this understandably destroys the healthy natural constituents of the oils. There’s a term for it. Destroying the healthy natural constituents in seed and nut oils, through excessive heat, or other processes, is referred to as denaturing the oils.
Have you ever wondered why there is such a high level of variation between UK carrier oil prices? Well, you have just discovered one of the key reasons!
Natural oils UK that have been produced via processes that run hot are oxidative and harmful for us… but, they are cheap!
And, worse still, the natural goodness in these hot pressed oils will also have been destroyed.
The sad reality is, though, you will not find a single bottle of “Natural oil UK” that says “hot pressed natural oil” on the label. They will all say “cold pressed”.
However, if the price is too good to be true… then, simply put, it really is too good to be true!
Glass Bottles Versus Plastic Bottles For Carrier Oils
Other indications that you have unearthed a harmful version of the UK natural oil, you are looking for online, is that it will be sold to you in a plastic bottle. Sadly, plastic bottles, on top of all the other issues, will leech further toxins into the oils…
The primary toxin that gets released from plastic bottles into the contents, whilst in transit and during storage, are known as xenoestrogens.
Xenoestrogens are fake hormones, which, as you can imagine, are disastrous for our health, both physically and mentally / emotionally. [Please read Linoleic Acid Is Disastrous For Our Health for more information about xenoestrogens and natural oils.]
Carrier Oils For Soap Making
Another indicator will be that the business selling the oils is targeting them as raw materials for making other products, like soap etc… Artisan soap businesses are the new artisan candle companies!
People are wising up to the fact that scented candles are supremely bad for their health (neurotoxic etc…), so, there’s been a move towards artisan soaps instead. However, these soaps are largely made with the same kind of poisonous, toxic ingredients as the candles. The only difference being, they don’t expect you to burn the toxic ingredients to make them airborne, and just that little bit more deadly.
However, they really don’t need to… it takes huge amounts of essential oil to scent a bar of soap, so inevitably, fake essential oils, aka synthetic essential oils, which are produced for pennies in a lab, are sold affordably to these soap making enthusiasts, that can be found fouling the air in practically every craft tent at county shows up and down the full length of the UK for much of the year.
I rarely go shopping, but when I do, I head straight for independent stores. I can’t tell you how despondent I feel when I walk into the majority of them, however… I either have the option of being a Debbie Downer, or keeping schtum. For my own sanity, and to avoid being unceremoniously marched to the door, I often opt for silence… but, it doesn’t sit well!
I prefer to avoid, rather than ignite! And, besides, I am profoundly chemically sensitive these days, having suffered mould toxicity and indeterminate chemical toxicity that made me very ill about ten years ago.
The tragedy is that, I know all too well, the people breathing in that level of poison on a daily basis are going to bioaccumulate appalling levels of toxins, and their health will one day fall off a cliff, like mine did. They will not know what has hit them!
I just hope, for their sake, they find someone like me, who can explain what has happened, and who is willing and able to help them to reverse the damage.
Sadly, most will find their way to the doctor, where they will likely be misdiagnosed with “treatable conditions”, based on the symptoms, rather than the cause. They will then be put on more synthetic chemicals, [hormones or drugs], that will mask the underlying poisoning. But, left unaddressed, that poison will keep on poisoning, and rob the sufferer of their quality of life, before inevitably cutting it short, sometimes dramatically!)
Why Do We Call Any Oil Natural?
However, natural oils are deemed to be natural on the basis they come from a natural source. But, there are non-natural processes, and even non-natural substances, that can be labelled as natural in the UK. However, we will get into the truly unnatural realm of natural oils UK later on in this article.
For the time being I’ll concentrate on carrier oils and essential oils, so as not to confuse matters…
Refining Carrier Oils UK
Some natural oils need more refinement than others. And, some natural oils can be used in a relatively unrefined state, by comparison. But, the fact that all oils need to be processed in one way or another, leads to a few grey areas as to what is acceptable as a natural oil in the eyes of the law.
This murky, grey area could lead us into a lot more complexity than most could tolerate, so suffice to say, the term ‘natural’ on its own, in relation to the term ‘oils’ isn’t sufficient for us to determine if the UK carrier oils in question are truly natural in the way we wish them to be.
If we want a UK oil to be 100% natural, then we are going to have to look on the label, or do a deeper dive into the product descriptions provided on the website, for other adjectives that can reassure us as to the source of the oils we are interested in.
Wild As The Wind Natural Oils UK
Wild As The Wind is a leading supplier of natural oils in the UK. All of our oils are supported by 5-star reviews, across the board, on the Wild As The Wind website. The Wild As The Wind natural oils UK range includes the following:
Essential Oils UK
Carrier Oils UK
Identifying Natural Oils UK
Looking out for any of the following terms is, therefore, a good idea when determining if you have found a natural oil UK:
- Purely natural
- 100% natural
- Completely natural
- Genuinely natural
- Ethically sourced
- Practitioner grade / therapeutic grade
Sadly, the terms medical grade, food grade and cosmetic grade do not provide a clear indication of whether a product is natural or not. More often than not, the products with these kind of descriptions will contain synthetic, unnatural elements, and could be 100% synthetic, in reality.
However, businesses that operate with integrity will not be using these terms to mislead you. They will simply using these terms to aptly describe what’s on offer.
Looking for the terms listed above in conjunction with each other is your best option, if you are unsure of the ethics of a business selling oils…
For example:
- 100% pure & natural
- Ethically sourced, pure & natural
Reading The Ingredients In Natural Oils UK
However, when all is said and done, all of the descriptive words on a label, or on a website, fall into the realms of “marketing materials”, and are potentially subject to manipulation… Marketing materials are there to present the “marketing message” the supplier wants you to believe. They are not there to necessarily help inform you of the reality… depending on the integrity of the business.
So, the most reliable information is likely to be found in the ingredients list, either online, or on the lables. Learning to read the chemical names of important ingredients is important for understanding whether a product is genuinely natural, or synthetic, based on the ingredints list.
Thankfully, every single last one of us has some insights into artificial chemicals that are often listed on product labels, including E numbers, etc… This is a very helpful article to help you do a deeper dive: How to Read Ingredients Labels on Personal Care Products.
This third-party article is good, but as with any article, it might not be 100% right. (I have written things that we have since discovered are not entirely true, so our knowledge needs to be constantly revised and updated in order to be as accurate as possible. So, looking at the date of when an article is published is important. The details may have been true at the date of publication, but new research may be giving different results these days…)
For exmple, the article relating to learning how to read the labels on personal care products suggests that sun creams that contain zinc oxide may be safe to use. However, recent scientific research revels that both zinc and titanium oxide, in sun creams, is carcinogenic..
Please read Carrier Oils For Sun Protection for more information.
Best Ways Of Spotting Natural Oils UK
Looking out for the Latin name of the plant or what is known as the INCI is also advisable, especially where single ingredient products are concerned.
I have been remiss in not putting these things in some of the online product descriptions, and on the labels, but it’s somethiung I am going to remedy soon. (It’s one of the reasons I am stepping back from producing natural health information that doesn’t directly relate to the Wild As The Wind product range.
I have been writing general health articles that, whilst containing critically important information for you to know, have consumed my time and energy to the extent that I have neglected providing all of the product information needed on the website.
There’s easily two year’s worth of research and product information to write for the existing Wild As The Wind product range. I’m looking forward to getting on with this, as neglecting it has felt increasingly uncomfortable for me.
I have produced a huge article about UK carrier oils which permits you to compare these oils easily, taking some of the pain out of making well informed choices about which carrier oils are best for the application you need them for, and, of course, your skin type.
This article will be published soon. It has been written so that you can easily compare carrier oils to find the best option for you, and your specific application. It will be entitled: List Of Carrier Oils
You will be able to access it here when it’s available:
If you are unable to find this article, please mention this in the comments. Conversely, you can email to find out when the List Of Carrier Oils article will be published.
Other important carrier oil UK articles:
- Carrier Oil Uses
- Carrier Oils For UV Protection
- 10 Carrier Oils We Need In Our Bathroom Cabinet
- Healthy Fats & Oils
- Castor Oil Compress
- Linoleic Acid [AKA Omega-6] Is Disastrous For Our Health
All of the above natural oil UK articles appear on this page: Carrier Oil Articles
They are also listed on the Health News page, alongside all other free-to access natural health information.
As articles on natural oils UK relate to the Wild As The Wind product range, you can expect to find new articles on these lists over time.