Lime Oil

Distilled lime oil from a premium Italian manufacturer, Capua, this is a particularly lovely oil.

One of the more powerful of the citrus oils – try putting 20% Lime Oil with 80% Sweet Orange Oil – the characteristic orange note is overwhelmed buy the equally distinctive, but more potent lime: something to keep in mind when blending with this material.

Arctander writes quite extensively about the lime oils including this: “Distilled Lime Oil is a pale yellow or almost water-white mobile liquid of sharp, fresh, terpene-like, somewhat perfumey-fruity citrus-type odor.

The oil is very volatile (poor tenacity), but shows increasing sweetness on drying out, the notes becoming more orange-like, less lemon-like. As pointed out above, the general impression is that the odor of this oil is very reminiscent of the odor of fresh limes when they are halved and squeezed, In the author’s opinion, however, the odor of distilled lime oil is considerably more “paint-can-Iike” or harsh-terpeney than that of the scratched peel of a green lime fruit. But when a halved lime fruit is squeezed in the preparation of Iimeade, the very acid juice is flavored with squirts from the peel; this mixture of acid juice and peel oil has a flavor very different from that of the oil alone.”

While the Expressed Lime Oil is sometimes preferred from an olfactory viewpoint, the distilled type offered here has the advantage of being fourocoumarin free and can therefore be used in much greater amounts.