There have been quite a few posts on this subject. I found 2 threads of particular use to you, but if you search using the facility at the bottom of the main page, you might find more. http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/herbs/msg0612342914001.html Here is a link that might be useful: essential oils

tapeworm, my only suggestion is to persist with with your project. The fact that the product does not exist conveys to me that it must be impossible to extract with existing methods. Even if the process would have been frightfully expensive and/or complicated, it would have been discovered, documented and filed away somewhere. You may be at the same mental intersection where Friedrich Wohler was in 1828 before he synthesized urea. Thereafter, ordinary folk, scientists and fertilizer companies would use the term "organic" conveniently; to suit their own purpose.

This is an old thread but I just had to post as I've seen the comment on the monoi oil. Maybe that oil isn't that natural smelling at all. There's a scented and an unscented one. It's true that monoi is composed of tahitian tiare flowers soaked in coconut oil, BUT to have a strong scented oil gardenia oil like that of monoi, a ton of Tiare flowers may need to be used. As an example, It takes hundreds of strongly scented jasmine and rose flowers to have only a few ml of essential oil and that cost and arm and a leg. If that would be the case then scented monoi would cost a lot more than it actually cost. The scented monoi is enhanced with fragrance. My Tiare flowers doesn't smell like the monoi oil I have here, so don't expect the scent of true Tiare flowers to be like the scent of Monoi. Also there are plumeria, sandalwood and pikake scented monoi and it still have natural Tiare extract BUT not it's scent. Also, there's no natural Gardenia jasminoides essential oil, just natural or synthetic aromatic compositions. Juan

I have been looking into little alembics for a while, but I haven't taken the plunge yet. The little ones cost $200 and up, but if this is a serious hobby, money spent on a good alembic would make the process a lot easier. For a casual hobby, I'm not sure if it's worth it -- and there's the matter of storing the alembic and then getting it set up every time it's time to distill. Essentialoil.com has a few, and they have some instructions in how to use them, which is interesting to read about, even if you never go that far yourself. Here's a quickie homemade distillation process: 1. Start by puting a small clean brick into a large stock pot or canner, as a base for the pot that will catch the distillate. 2. Add water and a reasonable amount of the plant matter you are trying to distill. This will come up and over the brick a little, but not too much. 3. Set a heat-proof pan onto the brick. 4. Put a lid on the large pot and weight it down well. The lid really needs to fit tightly. 5. Bring the water to a boil and let it boil a little while. The essential oils will boil first with some water vapor, rise to the lid, condense, and drop down into the pot inside. Obviously, some will drop back into the water -- this isn't a perfect system. 6. You can put ice onto the lid if it has a rim. The encourages condensation to a certain extant, but I don't do that. The resulting distillate is fragrant, like rose water or orange flower water. I'm not sure this is type of distillate would have the strength you are looking for, but the process is fun and it does work.