EP6. Essential Oil Safety with Robert Tisserand

Hello and welcome to the Formula Botanica Green Beauty Conversations podcast. If you are interested in taking one of our award winning online organic cosmetic science courses, then please head over to formulabotanica.com and check out our free sample class. In this episode, we interview Robert Tisserand, aromatherapist, educator, and renowned essential oil safety expert. We chat about all things safety and the recent lavender and tea tree oil controversy. Enjoy. Hello and welcome to the podcast Rovit.

Thanks, Emma. Good to be here.

I just wanted to say thank you for your willingness to do this podcast. You're a very well known and respected member of our community and I know that all, all of our listeners are going to be very excited to hear what you have to say.

Oh, well, thank you. I guess. We'll see.

We'll see. So let's get stuck right in and talk about why is safety a thing? I mean, why did you write your book?

Well, I wrote the essential safety version. The edition that came out in 2014 was actually the third. It's the second edition of that book. It's actually the third book I've written on safety, but the original one just had a slightly different title. So the first book I wrote on safety came out in 1985, and I feel like I've been writing this stuff and rewriting it since 1985. So why did I do it? I don't know. Sometimes I wonder the same thing myself. It's taken up a large chunk of my life, really. I did it initially because I felt like, oh, there are safety issues with essential oils and aromatherapists don't know about. And why would they? Because. Because the information was published in academic journals that aromatherapists certainly at that time didn't read and had no idea they even existed. I don't even remember how I first came across this, but what I found was the first guidelines published by IFRA, the International Fragrance association in the mid-70s. And that that's what caught my interest. And I thought, oh, okay, there are some essential oils and constituents that have safety issues. This sounds interesting. So I was partly shocked. I thought, oh, no, well, so this might be dangerous. Oh, God, I'm not sure if I want to know about this, but then I guess I was curious.

So, I mean, I imagine it was quite a large undertaking, Right? I mean, how many years have you spent on this in total?

I don't know. A lot. A lot. I mean, the number of citations in the latest version of the book is exactly 4,000.

Wow.

And I did read all those Research papers. Not just the abstracts. Some of them I'm very, very familiar with, and I've read them many, many times. And that's not all, you know, that was just the ones that made it into the book.

Yeah, okay. Yes. So you've been very thorough, and that's probably why your books are reference books for so many different courses, including our own. So let's have a little chat about the different essential oil safety guidelines.

Well, in the book I refer to IFRA guidelines, and there are also EU guidelines, and I'm calling them guidelines because they're a little bit different. The way IFRA works is that if you're a member of IFRA and you are a member, usually if you're quite a large cosmetics company, they pretty much all become IFRA members. If you are a member of IFRA as a company, you can't be an individual member, but then you agree to abide by the IFRA guidelines, but otherwise they're voluntary. So no one anywhere in the world sort of has a gun to their head and that they have to abide by IFRA guidelines. So they've always been a voluntary code. The EU guidelines are obviously law in Europe. And the EU guidelines concerning allergens, there are currently 26 listed allergens. I know that's kind of in. That list is going to get longer pretty soon, but right now there are 26. 16 of those are constituents found in essential oils. The EU legislation says that if you have more than a certain amount, you have to declare that allergen on the label of your product. The legislation itself doesn't say you can't use more than this amount. However, if you want to sell your product, say in a department store in London, the buyer will ask you if you're compliant with the EU guidelines, interpreting them as if they were a maximum. So it's kind of become a de facto regulation, even though it isn't actually a regulation in the sense that you can't use more than this amount. The problem I have with the EU legislation, which by the way, often is the same as ifra, but sometimes they're different. Well, one of the problems I have with the EVE legislation is that limonene or limonene is, is listed as an allergen. It's the major constituent in all citrus oils. So orange oil or grapefruit oil have about 90% limonene. So the. The maximum for a leave on product is 0.001%, which basically means you can't use citrus oils in your cosmetics. And the Problem I have with this, I haven't said. Well, the problem was yet is that we know from lots and lots of research published by dermatologists that limonene is not an allergen. Oxidized limonene is when it becomes oxidized, which, you know, any of these substances can become oxidized just by coming in contact with air. It very much is an allergen because of the hydroperoxides that are formed. These are quite potent allergens. So if we have products that contain limonene and that limonene has not oxidized, it's not allergenic. If we have a product that contains oxidized limonene, it is potentially allergenic. The issue of how to protect a product from oxidation has not been explored in relation to the legislation. Nobody's ever said, well, you can sell a product as long as it's protected in the following ways or in one of the following ways. And I just think that's really unfair.

Do you address this in your book and you talk about the differences in what I mean, do your sort of guidelines and your recommendations differ at all?

Oh, absolutely, yes. So I treat limonene as if it was absolutely fine. But for any essential oil rich in limonene, limonene I will recommend in a product that needs shelf life, you protect it by means of usually a tocopherol based antioxidant, which we know works. Exactly how long it's going to work in any particular product depends on the formulation, of course, but also there are a couple of other ways of protecting. One is by micro encapsulation. So this is not something that a small manufacturer is going to be able to do, but I believe there are a couple of, couple of companies that sell micro encapsulated essential oils. I don't have the names handy right now, but if you micro encapsulate an essential oil, it can't oxidize, it's not exposed to air until you put the product on your body, and then it's not going to happen. Because oxidation is a slow process. It doesn't happen in minutes, it happens in weeks and over weeks and months. The other way of protection is keeping the product away from light and cool. We know that this helps to, you know, inhibit or slow down the oxidation processes, which is something that we should be aware of anyway, not just because of citrus oils, but it's a good idea to protect essential oils in general from oxidation in products. So, I mean, I think this is an important topic.

Yeah, let's have. I mean, can you give us any more examples of where perhaps your, your guidelines differ from that of IFRA and the eu?

Well, I'll give you a couple more examples. So coumarin is another one of the EU allergens. The research on coumarin uses synthetic coumarin and it's been demonstrated that the allergen responsible is only found in synthetic coumarin. It's not coumarin itself that is allergenic. It's a couple of impurities, I guess, that are only found in synthetic coumarin. So an essential oil containing coumarin wouldn't be allergenic. So therefore I don't see coumarin naturally occurring as an issue. Another example would be. Well, there are a few essential oils, particularly basil, different types of basil oils that sometimes contain eugenol, methyl eugenol and. Or estragol. Eugenol is allergenic. Not contesting that it is. It is allergenic. Methyl eugenol and estragol are rodent carcinogens. Which opens another sort of Pandora's box. Yes. So if you give a rat enough estragol or enough methyl eugenol, you produce liver tumors. If you're not familiar with toxicology, this probably sounds really, really scary. Well, I'm not using basil because I don't want liver cancer. But if you've ever eaten pesto in your life, if you've ever eaten fresh basil in your life, in fact, if you've ever drunk water in your life, you have ingested carcinogens, the real issue is how much and how potent are they and what else is there at the same time?

Yeah. So I bet you those are points that people would like to debate over and over. Another thing that I've been itching to talk to you about as an essential oil expert is about the different reasons why people would want to use essential oils in cosmetics. I mean, why do so many people want to use them in their cosmetics? What are the benefits? What are the different know areas of different benefits that it can give to a cosmetic product?

Well, I don't, I don't know why anyone else uses essential oils. I mean, I can't speak for other people in your opinion, but from my perspective, I see there are several. There's a combination of factors. So you have the fragrance potential. So if you want your product to have a fragrance and you want it to have a natural fragrance, then you're probably going to use essential oils or similar natural extracts such as CO2 extracts or absolutes. So as far as fragrance goes, if you Want to go the natural route, then you're going to use essential oils. There are also. I know the society of cosmetic scientists doesn't like the word cosmeceutical, but I would call them cosmeceutical effects. For example, antioxidant. Sounds kind of crazy after what I was just saying, but many essential oils are actually antioxidant in the skin. They also have allegedly properties such as anti aging. Not a claim you can make, but skin cancer prevention. I mean, the other, I guess the other function is topical absorption. So many essential oils are able to aid skin absorption of other constituents and of other essential oils. And this is one of the main functions of citrus oils. In fact, limonene is one of the best transdermal absorption enhancers known to man. So if you have a certain amount of lemon oil, perhaps half a percent to 1% in your cosmetic, this does tend to aid absorption of any vitamins, for example, that you put in your cosmetic. This has been quite well researched. Vitamins don't have great absorption capabilities, but they do when combined with limonene. So these are some of the benefits that we, you know, we might see with essential oils.

Okay. I mean, is there any other reasons that you can think that besides the reasons that you mentioned? I mean, what. What are some more of the benefits in your opinion? What makes them, you know, stand out ingredients?

Well, when I think of essential oils in the skin, I. For me, there is no borderline between cosmetic use and skin healing. It's just not the way I think. So I think of sandalwood oil as being useful for dry skin, for warts, for acne, for eczema, and for psoriasis. I know half of those are cosmetic claims and half of them are not, but I just see the benefits of sandalwood oil, which are based on its antimicrobial, anti inflammatory and antioxidant effects. And also the way it repairs barrier dysfunction helps repair barrier dysfunction.

In your opinion, again, as an expert in essential oils, what do you think are the biggest challenges facing the industry in essential oils? So I'm talking about some of the kind of slightly contentious issues, and I know we touched on some of them when we were talking about allergens and those sorts of things. But there's more than that. I mean, I see constant discussions on kind of your Facebook page about the different. And recently you did a video about the tea tree oil lavender debacle. I mean, what other sort of contentious issues are there that warrant exploration?

I think legislation is a challenge, and it's A challenge because you only get more legislation, you never get less. I'm not aware of any legislative body in the world that has ever said, oh, no, we got that wrong. We're taking it.

Yes.

No, you can do it now. It's okay. I don't think they just don't do that. So legislation will always increase. There are issues with the different legislative requirements in different regions. Of course, we don't need to talk about that. But legislation as a whole is a challenge, I think, in terms of safety, separately to legislation. Certainly the one you mentioned, the issue of possible estrogenic effects, hormone disruption, effects of essential oils, is fairly contentious. Just to sort of dwell on that for a moment, there was some research published in 2007. They said that two young boys between the age of four and seven had used lavender oil and started to develop breasts, and a third boy had used tea tree oil and started to develop breasts. And when they stopped using these products, the breast growth disappeared, which sounds like an open and shut case, especially when they added that. We did some in vitro testing and we found that tea tree oil and lavender oil had estrogenic effects in vitro. But the whole thing actually comes tumbling down when you look closely at what was claimed. So the tea tree products were Paul Mitchell hair products. And you may actually, you know, there may be somebody listening who owns one or both of these products. There's a tea tree shampoo and there's a tea tree hair gel. If you smell those products, you cannot smell tea tree oil. That's how little tea tree oil is in there. And I worked out that it would take something like three years of daily use of both products for your scalp to absorb one drop of tea tree oil. And you're telling me that there was enough tea tree oil in this boy's body to cause a drastic hormonal effect. You know, a shampoo and a hair gel. That was it. There has never been another case of gynecomastia prepubertal breast growth from tea tree oil, but it now has this. It's been slandered. And then some new research came out. It hasn't been published yet, but it was debated briefly at a conference this past weekend in the US at an endocrinology conference. I did view the presentation by Mr. Ramsey. I don't remember his first name, but he was saying, so we now know that these constituents of tea tree oil and these constituents of lavender oil are endocrine disruptors, and they could be dangerous in all kinds of ways. And you listed all the ways that could be dangerous, including causing diabetes and cancer. And I think that's scaremongering. What's really interesting to me is they tested eight essential oil constituents, all found in either tea tree or lavender. They use the same in vitro test as the O7 researchers, and they found either estrogenic or anti androgenic properties for all of them. What's interesting is that the plastics used in the testing contain estrogenic phthalates and bisphenol. And this is almost certainly what's happening, is that the essential oils are leaching estrogenic substances out of the plastic. And that's why all these in vitro tests are coming out positive. So when, you know, when you look at the whole thing more closely, it doesn't actually add up. What we don't have is an explanation of why these various children. There have been a few other cases related to lavender oil, why they develop breast growth and why it went away when they stopped using the products, sometimes suspiciously quickly. But anyhow, it's also interesting in none of these cases where the estrogen levels increased in the children's bodies. So what we're seeing is whatever it is, it's not a systemic increase in estrogen.

One of the things that we chatted about when we were preparing for this podcast was the misuse of essential oils and this assumption that, you know, because they're natural products, that your natural things occur, that, you know, it's safe to use them in all these different varieties. And I know that we talked about some examples and you gave me some really good anecdotal evidence. But, you know, when I said that, you know, people had come to me before and said, oh, you could, you could, you know, you can use tea tree internally and you can, you know, do this and do that, and, and you gave me some really good examples about why we do need to have some sort of guidelines on usage. And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit.

Well, of course, essential oils are natural in the sense that they occur in nature. But you don't just sort of walk out into your backyard and squeeze something and get essential oil out. You have to go through a whole process of distillation or other form of extraction. So yes, they're natural, but they're also kind of artificially concentrated. Yeah, I mean, one of, one of the examples I often give is bitter almond oil. Because in the UK bitter almond oil was sold for, I don't know how long, a century maybe for food use. It was used in food flavorings. So housewives would buy it. You know, chefs would buy it, use it as food flavoring, and you could walk into your local chemist and buy an ounce of bitter almond oil. The problem is that bitter almond oil contains about 3% of hydrocyanic acid or cyanide. So if you actually ingest. I mean, if you were to drink an ounce of it, that would be very, very, very fatal. So when people started falling down dead from using bitter almond oil, I think it was in 1886 or so, or 1860 something, they said, okay, you can't produce natural bitter almond oil as is any longer. We have to remove the hydrocyanic acid first. Otherwise, you know, it can't be sold. And ever since then, the cyanide has been taken out, which kind of makes sense. But if you want natural bitter almond oil, you know, if you can get hold of it, if you could get hold of it, it would have 3% of cyanide. So my point is it's natural, but I wouldn't want to drink it, you know, I wouldn't want to flavor my cornflakes with that.

So we need to have a.

And, well, I mean, there are a few other instances of. Of constituents that are generally removed from essential oils just for safety reasons before they're commercially solved.

Yeah. So we need to be using them responsibly also, is what you're saying.

Well, I didn't. I didn't say that. That sounds like a good idea. That sounds like an excellent point. And people sometimes say, well, essential oils are really powerful medicines. Well, sometimes, yes. Sometimes, yes, they are. And it is a truism that the powerful medicines, whether natural or not, tend to have side effects. Tend to have sometimes effects that you don't want. Cinnamon bark oil is one of the most potent antimicrobial oils. It's a really, really good. I wouldn't use the word broad spectrum, but it really. It kills most bacteria and fungi very effectively, more effectively than most other oils. But the problem with cinnamon bark oil is that it's also the most potent skin allergen of really, of all essential oils is cinnamon bark. So there's a, you know, a good side and a bad side. And these two are connected because when you. When cinnamaldehyde, the major constituent is cinnamon bark, which is its active. Main active constituent, if you will. The way it works is it ruptures the cell membrane or bacteria, but it has similar effects on skin cells. The same is true of most preservatives. In fact, that most preservatives, they're Very good antimicrobials, but they tend to have risk as well for exactly the same reason.

Let's have a little chat about what the future is for Robert Tisserand and the Tisserand Institute. I know we talked last week about some upcoming projects and webinars and things. Could you give us a few details about what you might be doing over the next coming months?

Sure, yeah. Well, one thing I realized was that there isn't any kind of training course that just focuses on safety. A lot of companies have safety guidelines. Most training courses for aromatherapy have some safety guidelines, but there isn't anything that just focuses on safety. And I decided that that's something I should do. That's something I wanted to do. So we have an upcoming online training course just focusing on safety, which will cover inhalation safety, skin safety, and also we'll talk about safety in general, why we need safety guidelines, why they are, what they are, the rationales behind them, and also how to weigh up risk and benefit. Because sometimes you might be looking at a serious problem, and this isn't really cosmetic, but you might be looking at a serious problem, thinking, well, what can we do? We've tried everything else. What can we do? And it might be a serious infection or whatever, or what can I use as natural? And sometimes essential oils are an option. So if there's a massive potential benefit and little risk, but there is some risk, you might want to take that risk. I mean, this is more medical, but it's really just how you know how to balance risk and benefit. What happens when you mix essential oils? You know, if you've got two or three essential oils and there's risk involved with all of them, how do you. How do you handle that? And so it will be put onto our new teaching platform, similar to yours, actually, there will be an assessment, and if you do well in the assessment, there will be some certification.

Great. That sounds really interesting. And you're going to be doing. I mean, I saw you did that really helpful video on the tea tree lavender oil issue, which I know was really well received in our community. I mean, are you doing any webinars.

And things the way we're doing the safety webinars? They will initially be live webinars. The first one's going to be actually go out on April 17th.

Okay.

And there will also be a recording of a free live webinar, which I think will have gone out by the time this podcast goes out, but it'll probably still be available. And you can find anyhow, you can find those by going to tisfaninstitute.org and.

We will include all of Robert's details and links and everything in the show notes that accompany this podcast so you'll be able to find out all that sort of information. I just wanted to say thank you again for joining us and for taking the time to share your wealth of knowledge. We really, really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to our interview with Robert Tisserand. I hope it proved helpful as well as enjoyable. If you are interested in taking one of our online organic and natural skin care courses, then please head over to formulabotanica.com and check out our first free sample class. Once again, thank you for listening and thank you for your time.