What Is an Absolute in Perfumery? Absolutes, Essential Oils and Concretes Explained

An absolute is not a stronger essential oil. It is a different product, made a different way, and for many flowers it is the only version that exists.

If you have read an ingredient list and seen "jasmine absolute" next to "bergamot essential oil", you have already met the distinction. This article explains what each term actually means, why some flowers can never be distilled, and what the difference smells like in practice.

We are going to use the definitions from ISO 9235, the international standard for the vocabulary of aromatic natural raw materials. It exists precisely because these words get used loosely, and its third edition was published in 2021 by ISO Technical Committee 54.

What is an essential oil?

Under ISO 9235 (clause 3.11), an essential oil is a product obtained from a plant raw material by one of exactly three routes:

1. Steam distillation — steam is passed through the plant material, carries the volatile molecules with it, and the vapour is condensed and separated from the water.
2. Mechanical processing of citrus peel — the oil is pressed or scraped out of the outer rind. This is why a cold-pressed lemon oil counts (clause 3.5) and a "lemon fragrance oil" does not.
3. Dry distillation — heating wood, bark, roots or gums without water. Birch tar is the standard example.

That is the whole list. If a material was made any other way, it is not an essential oil, however natural it is. The watery layer left behind after steam distillation has its own name too: an aromatic water, or hydrolat (clause 3.3) — rose water and orange blossom water are the ones you will have met.

Two things follow from that definition, and they matter for everything below:

• Distillation involves heat.
• Distillation involves water.

What is a concrete?

A concrete (clause 3.7) is what you get when you extract a fresh plant material with a solvent instead of distilling it, and then remove most or all of that solvent.

In practice, fresh flowers are washed with a hydrocarbon solvent — hexane is the usual industrial choice. The solvent dissolves the fragrant molecules, and also the plant waxes and pigments. Evaporate the solvent off and you are left with a thick, waxy, coloured paste. That paste is the concrete.

A concrete smells extraordinary and is almost useless on its own. It is roughly half wax, so it will not dissolve properly in the alcohol that a perfume is built in.

What is an absolute?

An absolute (clause 3.1) is the concrete cleaned up so that it can actually be used.

The concrete is washed with ethanol. The fragrant molecules dissolve; most of the waxes do not. The standard describes the next step plainly: the ethanolic solution is cooled and filtered to eliminate the "waxes", and the ethanol is then removed by distillation. What remains is a highly concentrated, alcohol-soluble liquid — the absolute.

ISO also allows an absolute to be made the same way from three other starting materials:

• a pomade (clause 3.23) — the perfumed fat produced by enfleurage, the historic technique of laying flowers on fat until the fat takes up their scent. It is now rare and expensive, but it is still a defined term rather than a piece of folklore.
• a resinoid (clause 3.27) — the solvent extract of a dry raw material, such as benzoin or incense.
• a supercritical fluid extract (clause 3.28) — what everyone calls a CO2 extract. Carbon dioxide, held under pressure until it behaves as something between a gas and a liquid, is used as the solvent and then simply allowed to expand away. It leaves no solvent residue and needs very little heat.

So the shortest correct answer is this: an essential oil is defined by distillation or pressing; an absolute is defined by ethanol washing of something that was solvent-extracted first.

Why can't you just distil everything?

Because heat and water are not neutral. They change what comes out.

Some flowers do not survive the still

Jasmine is the standard example. There is no commercial jasmine essential oil; there is jasmine absolute. The molecules that make jasmine smell like jasmine — indole among them — are heavy and heat-sensitive, and distillation degrades them while returning very little material.

A 2017 study in Science International compared extraction routes for Jasminum sambac directly and found the same pattern from both sides: hydro-distillation gave a lower yield than supercritical CO2 (0.291% versus 0.334% concrete), and produced fewer identified components (30 versus 35). Tuberose, mimosa and violet leaf sit in the same category. If you see them in a formula, you are almost certainly looking at an absolute or a CO2 extract.

Some materials exist in both versions — and they are not the same smell

Rose is the clearest case, and the chemistry explains itself.

Rose otto is the steam-distilled oil. Rose absolute is the solvent-extracted one. They come from the same petals and they smell noticeably different, because one molecule behaves badly in a still: 2-phenylethyl alcohol, which carries much of the fresh, dewy, unmistakably petal quality of a rose, is water-soluble. In distillation it largely stays behind in the rose water.

Published analyses put the gap somewhere near this: 2-phenylethyl alcohol makes up roughly 60–70% of the volatile fraction of rose absolute, and under about 3.5% of a typical distilled rose oil. That is not a small difference in a trace component. It is the difference between two products.

The practical result: rose otto is bright, spiced, honeyed and structural; rose absolute is deeper, sweeter and much closer to the smell of the flower in your hand. Neither is the "real" one. They are two different materials that happen to share a plant.

Is an absolute better than an essential oil?

No — and this is the most common misunderstanding we see.

An absolute is usually closer to the living plant, because it was never boiled. That is a genuine advantage when the goal is to reproduce a flower faithfully. But it is not automatically the better choice:

| | Essential oil | Absolute | |---|---|---| | How it is made | Distillation or pressing | Solvent extraction, then ethanol washing | | Heat involved | Yes (except cold-pressed citrus) | Little to none | | Typical character | Cleaner, brighter, more transparent | Fuller, heavier, closer to the fresh plant | | Colour | Usually pale | Often deeply coloured | | Behaviour in a formula | Lifts, moves, evaporates in stages | Holds, deepens, lasts | | Residual solvent | None by definition | Trace levels, controlled by specification |

A distilled oil is often the right answer when you want a material to be legible — to lift off the skin, to move, to leave room around itself. An absolute is the right answer when you want weight and truth to the flower. Choosing the wrong one does not make a perfume smell cheap; it makes it smell like it is trying to be two things at once.

How we approach it at SHŌ ITO

We work with a lot of natural material, and this distinction is a live decision for us rather than a piece of trivia.

Three principles guide how we buy:

1. We choose by smell, not by the label on the drum. A material is not better because the word "absolute" is on the paperwork. We evaluate the actual batch on blotters against the alternative form of the same botanical, and the more expensive one loses often enough that we keep doing the comparison.

2. We treat the two forms as different materials, not as grades. When we discuss a floral with our perfumer, "rose" is not a decision. "Which rose, in which form, doing what job" is a decision. Swapping an absolute for a distilled oil at the same dosage does not adjust a formula — it rewrites it, because the two carry different molecules in different proportions.

3. We accept that some choices are made for us. For several of the flowers we love, the distilled version simply does not exist at commercial quality. That is not a compromise to apologise for; it is what the plant permits. We would rather explain that than imply we had a choice we never had.

What we will not do is use the vocabulary as a marketing device. "Contains absolutes" tells you almost nothing about a perfume on its own — it tells you about a production method, not about whether anyone composed the thing with care. We wrote about the same trap in our piece on natural versus synthetic ingredients, and it applies here just as directly.

The short version

• An essential oil is made by steam distillation, by pressing citrus peel, or by dry distillation. Nothing else qualifies (ISO 9235, 3.11).
• A concrete is a solvent extract of fresh plant material — fragrant, waxy, and not usable as-is (3.7).
• An absolute is that concrete washed with ethanol and de-waxed, so it dissolves in perfume (3.1).
• A CO2 extract uses pressurised carbon dioxide as the solvent, with almost no heat (3.28).
• For jasmine, tuberose and mimosa there is no real essential oil — only absolutes and CO2 extracts.
• For rose there are both, and they are genuinely different smells, largely because of one water-soluble molecule.

If you want the next layer down — how several of these materials get combined until they stop smelling like themselves — we covered that in what is an accord in perfumery. And for a material where the extraction question gets genuinely strange, see what is oud.

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