The use of essential oils is subject to special regulations, as are standards.
Here is a summary of the official (French and international) standards for essential oils and their specific characteristics.
AFNOR is the French standards association. Founded in 1926, it now covers a wide range of sectors, including essential oils via the T75A Essential Oils Commission. This commission brings together the industrial and public players in the sector and is responsible for defining standards relating to the quality and methods of analysis of essential oils. Each of the players uses its analysis history to map the regional or varietal characteristics of the plants in order to define one or more standards representing their quality. These are known as Normes Françaises (NF) or NF ISO if the French and international standards are identical.
An AFNOR essential oil standard mainly contains the following characteristics:
Created in 1956, ISO is the international standards body, made up of national standards bodies. In the field of essential oils, ISO is working to pool data and information from national committees to create a single reference system. To this end, several dozen AFNOR standards have been submitted to ISO and, after consultation with the various national bodies, a common ISO standard has been defined. These standards share much the same structure and type of information as the AFNOR standards, but have an international scope.
In the context of the European Pharmacopoeia, we do not refer to essential oil standards but to monographs. The essential oils described in these monographs have been or are still being used in pharmaceutical preparations as active substances or excipients. In order to ensure the safe use of these essential oils, the quality has been precisely defined in these monographs. These monographs may be criticised for not being mutually consistent with the equivalent AFNOR and ISO standards. The pharmacopoeia monographs are also more generic and do not systematically list the geographical characteristics of the same botanical origin. However, they remain a solid guide for selecting essential oils and generally provide the same type of information as ISO and AFNOR.
In the same vein, it is possible to find monographs from the Food Chemical Codex published by the USP (United State Pharmacopoeia). Unlike its European cousin, this pharmacopoeia does not offer a chromatographic profile, as is conventionally done, but an infrared analysis. This analysis is too imprecise to be used as a basis for quality selection. However, these monographs define limits for physico-chemical constants (density, refractive index, rotatory power), which are more commonly used but insufficient data to fully attest to the quality of the essential oil.
There are some essential oils for which there is no public standard, because they have not yet been studied by standards bodies or are too difficult to establish in the current state of knowledge. Each player then creates its own standard which defines the type of essential oil to be obtained based on its analytical history. If it is directly involved in growing the plant, its expertise takes precedence over the resulting essential oil. In this way, an internal reference system is defined which must be respected to ensure the stability of the essential oil's composition.
In addition to these standards, there are other labels, both official and unofficial, to help better characterise essential oils.
Find out more in our next article: Focus on essential oil labels
EN 
FR 
