Air Travel with Essential Oils

[Heritage Essential Oils]

Nicole asked about TRAVELING WITH ESSENTIAL OILS: We're taking our children to Greece this summer and I'd like to bring my oils. Any suggestions on packing... could I keep at least the lemon in my carry on?

Answers offered by others:

My husband and daughter travel to Honduras, and my daughter traveled to Israel last summer, and they didn't have any issues. Just make sure your liquids follow the size rule and are in a quart size ziplock (each bottle needs to be under 3.4oz). You could then pack refills in your checked luggage if you think you'll need more. - Kelley

I have not heard of any problems from people traveling via airlines with essential oils. Consider making a hand sanitizer with Aloe Vera and essential oils. There's a recipe at the end of this article: Is the Obsession with Antibacterial Products Harmful? Natural Alternatives to Triclosan and Other Toxic Chemicals   ENJOY YOUR TRIP!! 

I would like to assure you as a physicist that it is unnecessary to be concerned about essential oils being x-rayed at the airport because of the time that the oil is exposed to the ionizing radiation. If the oil is irradiated for a long period, let's say a few hours, then there could be some degradation of the oil. The most vulnerable molecules to radiation will be the top notes, the smallest molecules in your oil, which usually leave our bodies in the quickest time and have less therapeutic value. 

Will Airport X-Rays Harm Essential Oils?

(excerpt from Dr. David Stewart's book, The Chemistry of Essential Oils Made Simple)

People who carry their essential oils onto airplanes want to know if the x-rays at the security gates will damage them. The answer is probably yes, but only to a very minor extent and what damage occurs is repairable.

When a high frequency photon of electromagnetic energy (like an x-ray) makes a direct hit on a molecule, it can splinter it into pieces. Fragments of a molecule are free radicals, electrically unbalanced ions or groups of atoms looking for their missing parts.

Free radicals are not nice to have floating around in your body because they will grab electrons and atoms from your tissues, accelerating the aging process, damaging organs and tissues, and, in some cases, causing cellular mutations that eventually become cancer. That is why when we are personally exposed to high doses of x-rays, gamma rays, nuclear radiation, or other high frequency electromagnetic energies we can suffer various levels of radiation sickness.

Being irradiated by x-rays and other high frequency electromagnetic energy is not such a problem for essential oils as for people because oils contain no living cells that can be damaged and result in sickness. All that can happen in an oil is that a few molecules may be fractured into pieces. Percent wise It won't be many, say one in 10,000. That is because molecules and compounds are mostly space through which x-rays can pass harmlessly. It is only with a direct hit that a molecule is fractured.

Interestingly, one of the healing properties of essential oils is that they can remove free radicals from our bodies. This is because they are powerful antioxidants. Antioxidants are substances that can neutralize the damaging effects of free radicals and remove them from our bodies. Fresh fruits and vegetables are high in antioxidants, but no food is as high In antioxidants as most essential oils, which are many times more concentrated than undistilled produce. Table Thirty on the next page lists eighteen representative essential oils and an equal number of fruits and vegetables with their ORAC scores. ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) is a scale developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in cooperation with scientists at Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts. The scale measures the antioxidant potential of various foods and substances.

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Reference: The above excerpt is paraphrased from Dr. Stewart's book, The Chemistry of Essential Oils Made Simple (God's Love Manifest in Molecules) 896 pages.