Guaiacwood essential oil benefits include skin tightening, age mitigating and purifying. Guaiacwood essential oil heals and soothes skin with its non-irritating, non-sensitizing and anti-inflammatory properties.
Guaiacwood essential oil contracts blood vessels and skin tissue creating a tightened more youthful appearance. It works as a diuretic moving excess fluid. Guiacwood essential oil is able to mitigates signs of aging because it’s antioxidant rich. Antioxidants fight free radicals that cause aging in skin.
Guaiacwood essential oil benefits include skin restoration. This is why cosmetic companies will formulate the oil into their therapeutic skincare.
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A Comprehensive List of Guaiacwood Essential Oil Benefits
skin tonifying; astringent/skin pore tightening
cleansing and purifying to tissues and skin
supportive of venous and lymphatic circulation (so necessary for radiant skin)
balsamic (sharing a root with the word ‘balm,' balsamic here means healing to skin)
antioxidizing (for slowing down the visible signs of aging)
soothing to swollen or injured skin tissue
anti-fungal (especially for skin)
anti-inflammatory
antiseptic (therefore good for acne and oily skin)
astringent
diaphoretic/sudorific (stimulating sweat)
diuretic
laxative
anti-rheumatic
tight muscle loosening
easing of respiratory challenges
stimulating to the genito-urinary system
aphrodisiacal, calming, relaxing and tension relieving (slows down reflexes)
mood uplifting
mental clarity sharpening
balancing anxious or depressed emotional state
emotional pain relieving
creativity enhancing
restful sleep supportive
meditation experience enhancing
Technically known as Bulnesia sarmientoi, guaiacwood essential oil benefits enhance a number of PHYTO5 skincare products:
organic certified Zen Massage Oil and
organic certified Ageless La Cure Nourishing Cream.
Guaiacwood essential oil benefits skincare products like the PHYTO5 products mentioned above in part, because it’s very viscous.
Unfortunately, even though the guaiacwood essential oil benefits for skin are numerous, it’s more often used for foods, beverages, candles, soaps, and perfumes because of its inherent intriguing flavor and scent.
Guaiacwood essential oil serves as an excipient or medium for the delivery of other ingredients in many products.
The cosmetic and perfume industries often utilize guaiacwood essential oil for its excellent fixative properties and delicate wood-rose odor.
Guaiacwood essential oil benefits include scent balancing. It smoothes out strong or harsh fragrances with its sweet, delicate balsamic fragrance reminiscent of tea roses.
Guaiacwood essential oil benefits and balances the rose notes in Chanel No. 19 with its own woody notes.
Once reserved strictly for use as incense, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) now regulates and protects guaiacwood and its trade.
Guaiacwood essential oil benefits or those from the pure burning wood itself (often called palo santo) offer a calming fragrance similar to the burning of cedar. The calming nature of palo santo explains why meditating people enjoy when it releases its smoke into the air.
Guaiacwood essential oil possesses high levels of a highly complex mélange of odorant terpene compounds.(3) Roughly two thirds of guaiacwood’s terpene composition are guaiol and bulnesol. Guaiacwood is composed of approximately twelve different terpene compounds.
Click through the following links to learn about terpenes in our articles on the topic:
Many soaps contain unpleasant smelling synthetic ingredients. The soap manufacturers utilize the natural fragrance guaiacwood essential oil benefits to potently mask the chemical odor.
Guaiacwood essential oil benefits include the flavor component. It’s used in baked goods, meat products, gelatins, puddings, confectionary, beverages including alcoholic, and frozen dairy desserts.
Guaiacwood Essential Oil Benefits In Folk Medicine
Guaiac grows endemically as a tree with beautifully fragrant wood in the Gran Chaco region(1) of South America.
For hundreds of years, the local population takes advantage of guaiacwood essential oil benefits in the wood as a multipurpose folk medicine. They make infusion remedies by brewing the tree’s bark, crust or leaves. Guaiacwood essential oil benefits seep organically into the tea. And the people enjoy a whole range of health benefits from the tea.
The Gran Chaco people tap into guaiacwood essential oil benefits as:
blood cleanser
perspiration inducer
diuretic
gastric pain reliever and
wound and skin healer.
They use guaiacwood essential oil to treat serious diseases and conditions like syphillis, leprosy, gout, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. And they treat less serious conditions with guiacwood essential oil such as common colds, flu symptoms and headaches.
Guaiacwood Essential Oil Benefits Derive from the Exemplary Strength of the Tree Itself.
Guaiacwood possesses a high resin content and is particularly dense. It makes an excellent wood in some construction, in floor parquetry and handicrafts.
Essential oil manufacturers produce guaiacwood essential oil by steam distillation of the heartwood,(2) sawdust and wood leftovers of the tree.
The wood of the guaiacwood tree grows 20 to 65 feet tall. And the age of the guaiacwood tree determines how potent the essential oil will be.
As mentioned earlier, guaiacwood grows in the Gran Chaco region which includes Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and to some extent Brazil.
Essential oil producers in the Gran Chaco region yield roughly 100 metric tons of guaiacwood essential oil per year.
In the Gran Chaco region, the people call guiacwood—palo santo (holy wood). The name palo santo originated in the jungles of Northwest Argentina.
But guaiacwood goes by many more names:
champaca-wood
pockwood
lignum vitae (wood of life)
essence bois de guaic in French.
If you come across guaiac resin understand that it’s an entirely different product from guaiacwood essential oil. Guaic resin comes from the tree Guaiacum officinale of the Bahama Islands. They use this resin to produce drug store stool tests looking for hidden blood in a sample.
Perfumers rarely use guaiac resin. But the tincture prepared from this resin does have a pleasant balsamic vanilla-like odor with a slightly smoky undertone. This particular guac tincture is the same tincture Sherlock Holmes used to identify blood stains in a murder scene.
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Endnotes:
The Gran Chaco region is a lowland plain in central South America that extends from southern Bolivia through Paraguay to northern Argentina.
Heartwood is the dense inner part of a tree trunk, yielding the hardest timber.
Terpenes are aromatic metabolites found in the oils of all plants. Almost without exception, when a plant produces a scent or flavor, that odor or flavor comes from the terpenes present in the plant.
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Sources:
Tissandié L, Viciana S, Brevard H, Meierhenrich UJ, Filippi JJ. Towards a complete characterisation of guaiacwood oil. Phytochemistry. 2018 May;149:64-81. doi: 10.1016/j.phytochem.2018.02.007. Epub 2018 Feb 23. PMID: 29477626.
Schmidt, Erich, and deGroot, AntonC.. Essential Oils: Contact Allergy and Chemical Composition. United Kingdom, CRC Press, 2021.
Arctander, Steffen. Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin. N.p., Lulu.com, 2017.
Abourashed, Ehab A., and Khan, Ikhlas A.. Leung's Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients: Used in Food, Drugs and Cosmetics. Germany, Wiley, 2011.