Bergamot essential oil

Bergamot essential oil is a cold-pressed essential oil produced by cells inside the rind of a bergamot orange fruit. It is a common top note in perfumes.

Bergamot essential oil is a major component of the original Eau de Cologne composed by Farina at the beginning of the 18th century. The first record of bergamot oil as a fragrance ingredient is from 1714, found in the Farina Archive in Cologne. One hundred bergamot oranges will yield about three ounces (85 grams) of bergamot oil. The scent of bergamot essential oil is similar to a sweet light orange peel oil with a floral note.

"Earl Grey tea" is a type of black tea that contains bergamot essential oil as a flavouring.

The sfumatura or slow-folding process was the traditional technique for manually extracting the bergamot oil.

Today the oil is extracted mechanically with machines called "peelers", these machines "scrape" the outside of the fruit under running water to get an emulsion channeled into centrifuges for separating the essence from the water.

A clear liquid (sometimes there is a deposit consisting of waxes) in color from green to greenish yellow, bergamot essential oil consists for the most part (average 95%) of a volatile fraction and for the remaining (5%) of a non-volatile fraction (or residual). Chemically it is a highly complex mixture of many classes of organic substances, particularly for the volatile fraction terpenes, esters, alcohols and aldehydes, and for the non-volatile fraction, oxygenated heterocyclic compounds as coumarins and furanocoumarins.

The main compounds in the oil are limonene, linalyl acetate, linalool, γ-terpinene and β-pinene, and in smaller quantities geranial and β-bisabolene.

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