Fragrance Oil Versus Essential Oil: Why We Switched

What is fragrance oil?

Fragrance oil is a synthetic blend of aromatic compounds, overwhelmingly artificial with the occasional help of an essential oil or two within the composition. Fragrance oils are made to be cheap, robust, and customizable for virtually infinite scent possibilities. In our previous use of fragrance oils, we found that by far the biggest "plus" of fragrance oils is they transfer to skin easy, and can survive harsh conditions. Fragrance oil also usually has better shelf life, and retains their strength for much longer than essential oil.

What is essential oil?

Essential oils are the completely natural "essence" of a plant, resin, or herb. They are often extracted through distillation, and have their own natural chemical makeups. Essential oils have less consistency than fragrance oil, due to individual harvests, geolocations, etc. They are far more expensive to yield than synthetic fragrance oils, due to possible bad harvests and heavy demand swings that cause common shortages, and also often the enormous amounts of raw materials required to extract the smallest amounts of essential oil (250+ pounds of lavender flower for just 1 pound of essential oil!).

Essential oil is very, very fragile compared to fragrance oil. At the same concentration, your average fragrance oil will transfer to the skin far easier in the shower than essential oil. This is why you may smell your soap bar in the shower as you bathe, but possibly not at all as you get dressed if it is only scented with essential oils (like ours). There is anecdotal evidence that suggests that certain essential oils promote health benefits and wellbeing, although we recommend doing your own research and deciding that for yourself.

Why did AVSC switch? 

The simple answer is we just wanted to be completely all-natural. There is a peace of mind to the end product, as well as being one of very few shaving small businesses that use essential oils only, yet with the performance of most synthetically scented artisan shaving soaps and creams. After countless hours of our own research, and building up enough capital, we decided to officially go the all-natural route at the end of 2023. There is the risk of disappointing some customers that want their body to smell strongly like Alpha when they leave the shower, but to achieve that level of transfer we would have to use an unsafe concentration level of essential oil in bar soap, hence the downsides of all-natural. We also briefly considered doing a blend of essential oil and fragrance oil as an answer, but ultimately decided against it to stick with the all-natural route. You can always apply a small amount of AVSC Oil to your wrists and neck like an EDP, if you want to smell like AVSC a bit more.

Each have their pros, cons, risks, and benefits. In the end we concluded that for AVSC, essential oils were the better option for it's identity and goals.