“Alcohol-free” appears on a lot of bottles and does not always mean the same thing. Worth being precise, because for a lot of customers this is the reason they are buying an attar in the first place.
What it means here
No ethanol is used at any point in making a NAGI attar. Not in the distillation, not as a carrier, not as a solvent for extraction, and not as a preservative in the finished bottle. The flower vapour condenses directly into sandalwood oil in the receiver, and what goes into the bottle is that oil.
Where alcohol usually appears
Three places, in mainstream fragrance:
- As the carrier. Around eighty percent of an eau de parfum is ethanol. This is the obvious one.
- As an extraction solvent. Absolutes are often produced using ethanol to wash the aromatic compounds out of a concrete. Residual traces can carry through.
- As a preservative or viscosity adjuster in small quantities, sometimes not prominently declared.
An oil-based perfume can therefore be described as alcohol-free while containing an absolute that was extracted with ethanol. That is a legitimate use of the phrase by most standards, but it is not the same claim.
Fatty alcohols are a different thing
Cetyl alcohol, stearyl alcohol and cetearyl alcohol appear in creams and conditioners. Despite the name they are waxy emollients, not ethanol, and they have nothing in common with drinking alcohol beyond a shared chemical suffix. If you are avoiding ethanol, these are not what you are avoiding — though none of them appear in our attars either.
How to check any bottle
Put a drop on the back of your hand. An alcohol-carried fragrance flashes cold, smells sharp for the first few seconds and dries within a minute. An oil sits, warms, and is still there an hour later. It is not a laboratory test but it separates the two reliably.
Why it matters to us
A large part of our catalogue is bought for use before prayer, and for many customers ethanol is simply not acceptable in that context. Saying alcohol-free and meaning it partially would not be worth the sale.
Attars are cosmetic products for external use only. They are not medicines.
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