Lavender · Note 02
From field
to jar
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Cutting
The end of June into the first days of July, when the spike is in flower but not yet past it. The window is short and it is the same every year, because the plant does not negotiate.
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Twelve hours
Distillation has to begin within twelve hours of the cut. This is the hard rule of the whole process — not a recommendation but part of the standard. Flower held longer than that has already lost some of what it was cut for.
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Loading and venting
The still is packed by hand, evenly, then vented. An unevenly packed still channels the steam and leaves pockets of flower barely touched, which shows up later as a thin yield.
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Steam, forty-five to sixty minutes
Steam distillation at one and a half megapascals or above, run for three quarters of an hour to an hour. Longer does not mean more; it means pulling across heavier compounds that make the oil coarser.
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Condensing at 25 degrees
The vapour comes off and is condensed at around 25 degrees. Oil and water separate on their own from here — the oil sits on top, and the water underneath is a by-product with its own uses.
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Standing, one to two days
The oil is left alone for a day or two to settle and clear. Nothing is added at this stage, and the standard says so explicitly. What comes out of the still is what goes into the bottle.
Why it is written as numbers
Most of the materials on this site are judged by hand and eye — a sound, a smell, how a cut surface feels. Lavender is not, because it does not arrive as a plant. It arrives as oil, in a bottle, already several steps removed from the field, and by then there is nothing left to look at.
So the control moved upstream, into the method itself. The twelve hours, the pressure, the minutes, the 25 degrees: each one is a place where the oil could have been quietly made worse, closed off in advance.
This page describes a plant and its place in Chinese herbal tradition. It is not a description of what our products do, and nothing here is medical advice.
