Hi everyone, I'm Christine with Mountain Rose Herbs. I'm the Products Manager and
Aromatherapist on staff. I've been working with the essential
oils at Mountain Rose for close to 16 years at this point,
and one that I have come to love and is dear to my heart
over the years is clary sage essential oil.
I love the oil, I love the plant, and before I actually
get into some details about the oil, I just do want to tell a little story
about the plant. Last spring... two spring...
two springs ago I scattered a bunch of seeds in an area of my yard that I don't
take a lot of care of, doesn't get a lot of attention, doesn't
get a lot of water, just in the hopes that something would
happen. And come last fall, I had one little clary sage plant coming up
and was so excited about it. And clary sage is a biennial, so it grows the first
year and then actually doesn't flower until
its second year of growth. So this summer I had this huge
plant that was taller than me with these beautiful spikes of purple pink flowers
and then this just heavy, thick, resinous clary sage scent.
It was intoxicating and amazing and I really encourage you to grow the plant
if you can. Now to talk about the oil. Clary sage essential oil is steam
distilled from Salvia sclarea fresh leaf and flower. And it's going to
result in this really fluid liquid that's going
to come out of your reducers right away. There's no extra work
working with it. You can work with it right out of the essential oil bottle.
It is almost clear translucent yellow in color, but very
light, almost no color at all to it. Like I said, the oil is very fluid. It's
going to be easy to work with and it dries really quickly on the hands.
It's not tacky or sticky. The scent of clary sage is absolutely
amazing. I find it to be a very complex oil just
on its own. It has a really tenacious, strong aroma.
It's dry, floral, it's bitter, it's got herbaceous notes to it, and it
does have a slightly fruity top note as well.
The only aroma characteristic that I wouldn't apply to this oil would be
spicy. But it's a very beautiful dry, bitter
floral. Similar to lavender essential oil, it's
mostly made up of linalyl acetate and linalool.
That's one of the reasons why they're used interchangeably a lot and why they
blend together really well.
Clary sage is considered a middle note when we're talking about
top, middle, and base, but it is also used as a fixative.
Its sort of dry, bitter tones to it do help hold on to a lot of top notes.
It makes a really lovely fixative when you're working with citrus
or other florals and even conifer oils: your firs, your scotch pines, that
type of thing. It's not going to weigh down your oils
too much when you're using it as a fixative in that way.
It does blend well with all of those different notes that I was talking about
earlier: your citrus, your florals, your resins.
I've never worked with clary sage and spice but that doesn't mean that you
couldn't. I encourage you to check it out and
maybe kind of blend with it a little bit. And using the clary sage, you can use it
similar to lavender in most cases and it's going to give you a slightly
different floral while you're getting that dry bitter
clary sage floral and lavender is a little bit sweeter.
You can use it in skincare products. I like to use it in a lot of grounding and
relaxation blends as well. Clary sage is generally considered safe
but with all essential oils you are going to want to dilute it down to a
skin-safe percentage if you're putting it on
your skin. You can also find clary sage hydrosol
on the market. I wouldn't expect it to smell quite like
the essential oil. It does have the green and herbaceous
notes and some of the florals, but it is kind of missing that dry, bitter punch
that you get from the essential oil. But it is still a really amazing
hydrosol base if you like working with hydrosols. And
we also offer a clary sage roll-on, which is two percent essential oil
blended into fractionated coconut oil, and I think the roll-ons are always a
really fun way to introduce yourself to something that you may not be used to or
may not know very well, and that way you can learn the oil and
then if you really love it you can get a bottle and start playing with it
from there. Again, this is clary sage essential oil
distilled from Salvia sclarea fresh leaf and flower and I think it's
one of the most complex oils on the
market.