Preservation of Jasmine Oil

An inherited love for jasmine flowers.

Mom loves jasmine, so I grew up finding little flowers tucked under my pillow, one of my mom's many uses for jasmine blooms. I still keep two plants. And when they bloom they will fill a whole room with scent. But just as quickly, they're gone. Even for flowers they are transients.

Recently, I tried to bottle it, find some way to preserve the scent, and through a lot of trial and error, I have found one method that works, though it's not easy.

Watching online tutorials there were two main methods described: using fresh flowers and heat, or using dry flowers and time. I found both methods, plus most combinations of them, ineffective.

These are the constraints we have to work with:

• Jasmine oil is quite unstable: can't be frozen or heated without altering its properties.

• Jasmine oil seems quite volatile: flowers after drying have little scent.

• Water mixed in with organic oils causes spoilage.

• Infusion is usually a week+ process at room temperature.

Methods that heat flowers in a carrier oil (I used sunflower oil) extracted the scent quickly, and evaporated the water, sanitizing the product, but turned the scent rancid, which, to me, made the whole endeavor pointless. Methods that dried the flowers beforehand suffer from low scent infusion. And methods that used fresh flowers faced spoilage issues before the infusion was even complete.

After much experimentation, I found that I preferred to do the whole thing in the fridge.

I picked fresh flowers that had just bloomed, placed them into a ziploc with silica desiccants. I let the desiccants do their job for a day or two in the fridge, then I placed the flowers into sunflower oil, left the lid of the jar open in a container with more desiccant.

Placed that into the fridge for a full week, occasionally capping the jar and shaking it to mix the oil up and coat the flowers. At the end of the week I squeezed out the flowers and funneled the scented oil into a dropper bottle.

I have the bottle labeled and stored indefinitely in the fridge. I don't know how long it will keep like this, and whether some natural preservatives might be a good idea.

All I know is that the scented oil is as close to the smell of the fresh blossoms as anything I've ever smelled that is not full of synthetic chemicals.