Essential Oil Spotlight: Birch Tar

Silver Birches - and Their Precious Bark!

This is the first in a series of posts highlighting some of our essential oils and how they're made. So how do we get the amazing smoky campfire scent into our Reykr candle? Well, the smoke element comes from purified birch tar.

Our candles use American birch bark for their scent, which is a by-product of the timber industry and grown sustainably in well-managed forests.

Birch bark was first turned into tar by neanderthals around 200,000 years ago- but the process of making it into an essential oil is a bit more refined than that

First, the birch bark is heated in a closed vessel to a high temperature, turning the bark into a mix of ash and tar.

Next, this mixture is steam distilled- steam is passed through the oil to get rid of any volatile compounds and leave behind the smoky tar.

And lastly, through a process called "rectification", the tar is vacuum distilled to remove more toxins and impurities. This results in a fraction of birch tar that retains that smoky, almost medicinal campfire scent while being pure enough for you to breathe as a fragrance.

Birch tar is apparently a very good slug and snail repellent, and is also an effective antiseptic