JUNIPER BERRIES OIL
JUNIPER BERRIES oil
Natural ingredient for perfumery overview
🔎 Botanical Name: Juniperus Communis
Olfactive description
Fresh, sparkling, extremely terpenic, yet warm, rich-balsamic, woody-sweet, and pine-needle-like odor.
Specific character: Terpenic-Aromatic
Where it grows
The shrub, Juniperus Communis, grows wild all over central and southern Europe, southwest Asia, northern Asia, North Africa, and North America. The best berries are collected in northern Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, eastern Europe, and France. Lower grades are collected in Germany, Poland, Russia, Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria, India, and Scandinavia.
The gin distillers are also large consumers of juniper fruits. Some of them make their own distillates from juniper berry tinctures rather than using a sesquiterpeneless juniper berry oil which never gives the same “body” of flavor to the beverage. The actual production of steam-distilled juniper berry oil is surprisingly small.
Method of extraction
The best oil is steam distilled (or steam-and-water distilled) from crushed, dried, or partially dried, ripe berries (fruits). Occasionally water distillation is used.
How or when to use it
Juniper berry Oil is used in perfumery for its fresh-balsamic notes, as a modifier for various pine needle oils (with which it blends very well), with citrus oils in room spray perfumes, in ambres, fougères, chypres, after-shave fragrances, spice compositions, colognes, etc. Labdanum absolute is an excellent fixative for juniper berry oil. Other fixatives and blenders are mastic, opopanax, fir needle absolute, oakmoss products, elemi resinoid, cypress oil, clary sage, borneol, nopyl acetate, abitol, lavandin oil, lavandin concrète, benzoin resinoid, toluresinoid, etc.
In flavors, it is customary to use a sesquiterpeneless oil, produced from a high-grade true juniper-berry oil (steam distilled from the fruits).
Essential oil is distilled in Eastern Europe from fruits and twigs of Juniperus Smreka. The odor of this oil is somewhat lighter than that of true juniper berry oil, less ambery-sweet, and less rich on a dry out. The oil of Juniperus smreka is produced on a very limited scale and is not yet widely known outside Eastern Europe.
Appearance
Juniperberry Oil (steam distilled from the fruits) is a water-white or very pale yellow, mobile oil, that has a fresh, yet warm, rich-balsamic, woody-sweet, and pine-needle-like odor.
Adulteration
Juniper berry Oil is very frequently adulterated. More justly, one could say that commercial juniper berry oil is rarely the true distillate from the berries. Other adulterants are pinene, camphene, turpentine oil fractions, juniper wood oil, juniper twig oil, etc. Only a thorough organoleptic evaluation will reveal a poor or adulterated oil among samples of true oils, produced from freshly crushed fruits by steam distillation.
Sources and Information
Fulvio Ciccolo, 2022, Scentspiracy
Scentspiracy research team
Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin, S. Arctander (1961)