Bergamot essential oil 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 flavoring and top note in perfumes. The scent of bergamot essential oil is similar to a sweet light orange peel oil with a floral note. The "sfumatura" or slow-folding process was the traditional technique for manually extracting the bergamot oil. By more modern methods, the oil is extracted mechanically with machines called "peelers", which "scrape" the outside of the fruit under running water to get an emulsion channeled into centrifuges for separating the essence
Bergamot essential oil three thousand tonnes of declared essence of bergamot are marketed, while the genuine essence of bergamot produced annually amounts to no more than one hundred tons. Natural source analysis based on the Carbon-14 method can identify adulterated essences by detecting synthetic chemicals manufactured from petroleum that are used to mimic the chemical profile of bergamot oil and other essential oils. Gas chromatography with columns having a chiral stationary phase allows analyzing mixtures of enantiomers. The analysis of the enantiomeric distribution of various compounds, such as linalyl acetate and linalool, allows the characterization of the bergamot oil according to the manufacturing