There are in fact two main techniques for the manufacturing of tea tree oil on the market: traditional squeezing techniques and chemical leaching technique.
Let’s try to tell you what’s the difference between these two techniques. Squeezing is a physical method to squeeze the oil out of tea tree. The first squeezing oil is the most valuable. Without decolorization, deodorization and other processing procedures, the raw pressed oil keeps the original flavor of tea tree, and tea tree’s nutritional components are retained to the greatest extent.
On the other hand, the chemical leaching technique is a chemical method with a short history. Leaching is to soak the tea tree with chemical solvent, and then separate the solvent and tea tree oil to get the latter. The traditional squeezing method can not extract the oil from tea tree completely. That’s why the price is much more expensive. It looks like that the leaching process is more complex, but because of its low cost and recycling use of solvent, the price of the oil obtained by the leaching process is much lower. And because the oil obtained by the leaching method will have residual chemical solvents, it often needs to be refined to remove the odor.
Tea tree oil on the market mainly includes the following:
- Traditional tea tree oil
- Chemical extracted oil labeled as traditional oil
- Blending of tea tree oil with other oil products
- Chemical leach oil
The color of fresh tea tree oil is golden yellow with light green. As time goes on, the color of tea tree oil will gradually fade. The aged tea tree oil is more suitable for medication use. Due to low supply, aged tea tree oil is also more expensive.