Beyond the Bottle: Understanding Essential Oils with Petra Ratajc, PhD
Do you ever wonder if judging an essential oil’s quality or purity must involve some kind of superpower? Biologist Petra Ratajc is going to uncloak this mystery and pass this specialized ability on to you.
This four-part online certification course is a deep dive into how essential oils are made from the soil up. This is the complete journey from cultivation to cracking the lid on the bottle in your hand, with highlights on production, sustainability and quality control.
What is a flower wax? Should you grow your own lavender for home distillation? How do you really know what you’re getting when buying essential oils? How do you know if an essential oil has been adulterated, or has oxidized? And how can you make sensible, sustainable choices?
In this groundbreaking course, you’ll no longer be at the mercy of marketing that may not be accurate, or doesn’t address what you really need to know. Instead, you’ll learn about analyzing essential oils by decoding their growing conditions and plant biology, as well as their composition.
Price
- Sign up by May 30 to get a bonus webinar (value $39)
Beyond the Bottle: Understanding Essential Oils with Petra Ratajc, PhD
Have you ever thought the ability to judge an essential oil’s quality or purity must be some kind of superpower? It is – and Dr. Petra Ratajc is going to uncloak this mystery so you can do it, too.
This four-part online certification course is a deep dive into how essential oils are made from the soil up. This is the complete journey from cultivation to cracking the lid on the bottle in your hand, with highlights on production, sustainability and quality control.
What is a flower wax? Should you grow your own lavender for home distillation? How do you really know what you’re getting when buying essential oils? The truth is, they could be adulterated or oxidized. They could be coming from sources that are endangered.
In this groundbreaking course, you’ll no longer be at the mercy of marketing that may not be accurate, or doesn’t address what you need to know. Instead, you’ll gain the power to analyze essential oils by decoding their growing conditions, plant biology and composition.
Price
- Sign up by May 30 to get a bonus webinar (value $39)
What You Will Get in this Course
(hover over each box to learn more)
4 Live Lessons
4 Live Lessons
Join Petra on four 60-minute live webinars over four weeks.
4 Live Q&A Sessions
4 Live Q&A Sessions
Ample time for participant’s questions included with each live webinar.
Printable Course Material
Printable Course Material
Downloadable handouts and course notes with links to additional resources.
Dedicated Group Discussions
Dedicated Group Discussions
Online forum for your questions and interaction with Petra, the TI team and classmates.
Certification
Certification
A signed Certificate of Completion from the Tisserand Institute.
4 Extra Weeks!
Ongoing Course Access
Ongoing access to recorded sessions for four weeks after course completion.
What You Will Get in This Course
(click on each box to learn more)
4 Live Lessons
4 Live Lessons
Join Petra on four 60-minute live webinars over four weeks.
4 Live Q&A Sessions
4 Live Q&A Sessions
Ample time for participant’s questions included with each live webinar.
Printable Course Material
Printable Course Material
Downloadable handouts and course notes with links to additional resources.
Dedicated Group Discussions
Dedicated Group Discussions
Online forum for your questions and interaction with Petra, the TI team and classmates.
Certification
Certification
A signed Certificate of Completion from the Tisserand Institute.
4 Extra Weeks!
Ongoing Course Access
Ongoing access to recorded sessions for four weeks after course completion.
Plus, Get These Extra Bonuses
Essential Oils Buying Guide
Essential Oils Buying Guide
A valuable infographic that leads you through the decision process for making smart, environmentally friendly essential oil purchases.
Nomenclature Quick Reference
Nomenclature Quick Reference
A handy chart of botanical and common names for easy reference, with an extra column to add names in your language.
Sign up BEFORE MAY 30 and get a BONUS webinar on essential oil oxidation and storage by Robert Tisserand (value $39)!
Essential Oil Creation, Purpose and Sustainability Certification
Upon completion, your certificate – issued by the leaders of evidence-based instruction – shows your deep knowledge of essential oil production and sustainable practices.
Course Breakdown:
What You’ll Be Learning Over 4 Weeks Starting June 6
- What is an essential oil? Defining it in scientific terms
- How plants make essential oils – the biosynthetic paths of specific compounds
- Why plants make essential oils – the functions of volatiles in plants
- Detailed overview of botanical families that produce essential oils
- Demystifying botanical names and why they are crucial vs. common names
- How cultivation and growing conditions (environmental factors, age of plant, pollinators and microbes) influence essential oil composition
- Understanding chemotypes, and how they are determined
- Wildcrafting vs. cultivation – the pros and cons
- Conventional vs. organic cultivation: standards, certifications and sustainability
- Proper times of year and optimal plant development phases for harvesting
- How different methods of extraction can mean different properties, even from the same plant
- Compositional comparisons: essential oils, hydrosols, absolutes, C02 extracts
- Steam-distilled oils, expressed oils and hydrosols/hydrolats
- Solvent-extracted absolutes, concretes and flower waxes
- C02 extracts, oleoresins and other resinoids (gums and balsams)
- Essential oils vs. water extracts, alcohol tinctures and oil macerations
- Why a ‘pure’ oil is not necessarily a ‘quality’ oil
- Types of adulteration and manipulation, and their consequences
- Hydrosols/hydrolats and contamination
- What Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) can tell us, and how to read a GC-MS report
- The pros and cons of essential oil standardization
- How to evaluate an essential oil in terms of quality, composition and price, and how to prolong shelf life
Course Breakdown:
What You’ll Be Learning Over 4 Weeks Starting June 6
- What is an essential oil? Defining it in scientific terms
- How plants make essential oils – the biosynthetic paths of specific compounds
- Why plants make essential oils – the functions of volatiles in plants
- Detailed overview of botanical families that produce essential oils
- Demystifying botanical names and why they are crucial vs. common names
- How cultivation and growing conditions (environmental factors, age of plant, pollinators and microbes) influence essential oil composition
- Understanding chemotypes, and how they are determined
- Wildcrafting vs. cultivation – the pros and cons
- Conventional vs. organic cultivation: standards, certifications and sustainability
- Proper times of year and optimal plant development phases for harvesting
- How different methods of extraction can mean different properties, even from the same plant
- Compositional comparisons: essential oils, hydrosols, absolutes, C02 extracts
- Steam-distilled oils, expressed oils and hydrosols/hydrolats
- Solvent-extracted absolutes, concretes and flower waxes
- C02 extracts, oleoresins and other resinoids (gums and balsams)
- Essential oils vs. water extracts, alcohol tinctures and oil macerations
- Why a ‘pure’ oil is not necessarily a ‘quality’ oil
- Types of adulteration and manipulation, and their consequences
- Hydrosols/hydrolats and contamination
- What Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) can tell us, and how to read a GC-MS report
- The pros and cons of essential oil standardization
- How to evaluate an essential oil in terms of quality, composition and price, and how to prolong shelf life
About the Tutor: Petra Ratajc, PhD
On her myth-busting plant biology blog, The PhytoVolatilome, Petra refers to herself as an aromatic plants enthusiast. But click through to just one of her posts, and it’s obvious that she’s so much more than that – and backed by some serious credentials.
Petra Ratajc has a post-graduate degree in Biological and Biotechnical Sciences from the University of Ljubljana. Her PhD extends from fieldwork to molecular research in the quality, safety and efficacy of aromatic herbs and their essential oils. Petra specializes in medicinal and aromatic plants, secondary plant metabolites, pharmacognosy and pharmacology – specifically focused on plant volatile constituents.
Besides bringing an unequivocal depth of knowledge to this course, Petra is an experienced lecturer and presenter at various seminars and workshops.
What previous students say about the Tisserand Institute:
Seriously, though, if you are into essential oils or aromatherapy at all, you really should check out Tisserand’s work. It’s fascinating, accurate and well researched stuff.
Having completed the two courses now I love how your platform works. It’s easy to navigate, the modules are presented in a way that is easy to follow and the open book format really suits mature adults who haven’t studied in a long while and also have a lot of other situations to accommodate in their lives.
Dear Hana, Robert and Team,
I thoroughly enjoyed this course! I had many conflicts in my schedule but you and your team set everything up to be as easily accessed by computer as possible. Hearing the Q&A as well as the print outs was also a real bonus. I learned many new things I was unfamiliar with and those are the real value!!
Thanks and again and many blessings to you all.
I’d just like to say thank you so much for producing this amazing class. When I first signed up, on a bit of whim to take advantage of the special price, I wasn’t calculating the cost in Australian dollars. So I got a bit of a shock when I got my visa bill! However, the course was worth every cent. The webinars were great with an abundance of extra material and research links (still getting through it all). Also the opportunities to have questions answered, despite not being able to join the Q&A sessions.
Thank you so much!
Kind Regards,
Many thanks to [the Tisserand Institute team] for a very useful and interesting course, which was really nicely presented and well supported (with the forum and Q&A sessions and of course your email help & support!) and with such a nice interface for the education portal.
You guys have managed to strike the perfect balance between handouts, webinar, video lectures, chat, Q&A and testing that information has been digested. The information presented was WOW and the interaction between you both on the Q&A was fund and really welcoming. Thank you thank you thank you!
Discover how to evaluate essential oils from the soil up to ensure that you know what’s in the bottle, and that you get the quality you need.
And remember, when you sign up BEFORE MAY 30 you’ll get a BONUS webinar on essential oil oxidation and storage by Robert Tisserand (value $39)!
FAQ
The lessons will be live on Tuesdays starting March 10, at 11am PST. Afterwards a recording will be posted so you can watch later if you cannot attend live, or you can rewatch as many times as you need.
Not a problem. Each live webinar lesson will be recorded so you can watch it later, and you will be able to ask questions through our learning portal. The recordings will be available to you for the remainder of the course, plus an extra six weeks after the last lesson at least.
Yes. Each lesson comes with printable handouts of the slides used in the lesson, and additional lesson notes. These are sent to you before each lesson and are for you to keep and refer to at any time.
Many of our students have commented that our courses helped them grasp what they learned elsewhere in more detail, or complemented their previous education. Some of our students are lifelong learners, and some are teachers.
We will let one of our previous students answer this one:
“The information presented is appropriate for all levels, and although I am just beginning my aromatherapy journey it all makes sense.”
Each weekly lesson is followed by a multiple choice quiz, and there is a summary test at the end of each of the two courses. Passing both the weekly quizzes and the final tests is a requirement for certification.
There will be live Q&As after each of the live lessons. You can ask questions any time on our online platform.
Absolutely! In addition to the live Q&A sessions, you can post your questions in the dedicated student forums.
The lessons are first done as live webinars, and then posted as recordings within a few hours.
Because we have students from all over the world and of many professions we are not able to offer credits for specific organizations – there are simply too many. However, we issue a confirmation of CE hours gained on the course that you can apply with your professional organization and will be happy to assist with any additional documentation.
We have found that running classes on specific dates works best to help you finish a program. You join a class of students, and learn along with them. Many students help each other with queries, and of course our tutors are there too. That said, if you miss a few classes you should be still able to comfortably jump right back in and if you do fall behind you can request extra time. Of course this cannot be indefinite, but we do our best to help you get your certificate.