Liberty Natural Products’ website at http://www.libertynatural.com/ is a mix of useful information and complex presentation. Liberty Natural, a provider of essential oils and other bulk ingredients, offers good prices on a wide assortment of ingredients. Their website offers a form for online shopping but doesn’t provide a secure interface; calling them by telephone is a much safer option. Liberty Natural’s site may have a distance to go before it is a fully-featured shopping site, but the great thing about it is that it’s about more than shopping: it’s about informing consumers. Look on the left side of their frame-based site and you will see a link for “Botanical Info”. Clicking on that link provides an “Info/Resource Menu” with several paths to insights about the traditional uses of the products Liberty Natural sells.

The “Essential Oils” link provides one long, very crowded page; the format (clearly marked as still under construction) is difficult, but the page is worth reading. It contains practical insights (basil oil is first aid for wasp stings; cedarwood oil has been used against hair loss, dandruff, acne, psoriasis, and more) and, unusually for this kind of site, identifies sources for some of this information; there isn’t enough detail provided to make it easy to track those sources down, but it’s encouraging to see a few names of researchers and hospitals included among the usual “has been used for centuries” and “has been found to be”. For natural materials with long traditions of use, what researchers can do is not so much to discover a use but to explain it, making it possible to understand the structure and mechanism of the material; that understanding can be essential to knowing not only what else may be possible with that material but how to most effectively formulate it in combination with other materials. Liberty Natural is to be applauded for this effort, unfinished as it is, at integrating traditional and scientific insights into the potential uses of essential oils.

Back up from the “Botanical Database” link, and you can find a link to the “Glossary of Botanical Terms”. The terms offered here aren’t really those related to botany, which is the study of plants; words a botanist would use to describe the parts of plants, categorize plants into families, or discuss their roles in ecological systems are notably absent. Instead, the “Glossary of Botanical Terms” defines vocabulary most useful in understanding the process of formulation, especially as related to the use of natural fragrances and essential oils. For anyone interested in reading product labels, this glossary is a good resource: if you would like to discover the differences between extracts, essences, and tinctures, or understand how solvent extraction differs from CO2 extraction or water distillation, this is a place to begin.