So we had this blog post planned for a couple of weeks ago, but decided to hold off on it because well Dan C said it a lot better than we could have. By now hopefully most of you have seen his video on this subject, but if not we will provide a link to it down at the bottom of the post.
So what are we referring to when we say the great debate? Well we are talking about Essential Oils vs. Fragrance Oils, and if they have a place in ones beard....
In the interest of full disclosure we here at Man Beard Co. use both in our scent blends, but that is about as much as we are going to say about that, because those blends are what we hold proprietary. We will talk all day long about the oils, and liquids that go into our product, and even put them on the label. We however will never talk about two things. First being our process for building our oils, and the second is the scent combinations. Those are both tightly held secrets that as we grow will continue to stay as an in-house operation.
So why do we use both, why do we put fragrance oils in our product to begin with? Well the biggest factor us is consistency. While we can probably produce the same scents using strictly E.O.’s the quality of the scent will not be the same, and we will lose consistency which is what we truly strive for at MBCo. The one biggest set back we were having with a strictly E.O. product was a variation of scents from one batch to the next, mainly do to the concentration of the oils. Sometimes we would have to use more of a particular oil in one batch than we used in the last batch. We would have to reformulate based on a batch by batch basis. While this isn’t a huge deal to start off making only a few batches a month to start off, we knew that to truly grow it would not be sustainable from a cost prospective. We wanted to make high quality oils that were affordable to the every day wearer.
The second issue we were encountering was scent duration, not only in beard but in the bottle themselves. We were finding that E.O.’s weren’t having the long lasting scent that our customer base was wanting. Compound that with the fact that the scent would only last between 3-6 months in the bottle before it faded away. It did not mesh with our quality, and again would end up driving our prices up.
So what now then? As a company we didn’t have the brand recognition that some of the larger brands had at the time, so the idea of having product sitting on our shelves as ticking timebombs of scent we needed to come up with a plan. So we started researching. We went out and reviewed products for months to find a suitable alternative, and what we ultimately decided on was a blend of both E.O.’s and F.O.’s but we needed to make sure it didn’t make our beard fall out like we had heard in the rumors.
All of our testing came back with the same result, and that result was we were losing any of the qualities that we originally wanted our oils to have by going with this blend, and we were getting a more consistent product from batch to batch. Which is really important as we started scaling the company for growth.
But what about the benefits of the essential oils, vs the lack there of in the fragrance oils? Well we looked into that as well. To really get the true benefits of the essential oils we would have had to more than double the amount of essential oils we were using in our batches because of the dilution with the rest of the oils in the bottle, again affecting the cost and going against what we stood for as a company. The cost vs benefits for us just wasn’t there.
So there it is. We aired our dirty laundry. If you would like to know more about the debate make sure you check out Dan C’s video here. In the mean time keep Punching The Bear and growing that beard.
Cheers