Essential oil comes with regulated hazard statements.
Many of them sound ominous. One of those is the (in)famous H351 warning, that bluntly states "Suspected of causing cancer".
And it is one of the ones that has to be included for rose oils.
What ? Could this gorgeous oil used for centuries, so warm, radiant, fragrant and so beneficial be, well, ... that !?!
I saw the question popping up in a dedicated forum today, and recently a client asked me about it again. So I decided to make this post.
In very short, to cut the suspense about the the current informed hypothesis from aromatherapy experts : no.
This approach looks beyond the (low) presence of methyleugenol in rose oil (an heavier volatile, important for a full rose fragrance, but also considered carcinogenic) in isolation and looks instead at its interactions with other molecules.
From available research results, it is hyptothezised that other components of Rosa damascena essential oil may counteract the carcinogenicity of methlyeugenol.
Some research also showed that Rose Essential oil was actually cytotoxic (cytotoxic drugs = drugs that destroy cancer cells) in several cases.
So this is the current stage of the discussion. It is always possible that things will evolve further with new research, or course.
Interstingly, with the same logics used by the hazard warnings system (looking at the presence of components in isolation), pesto would be carcinogeous too... read below
Some time back, we wrote a little blurb on the subject in our documentation, synthetizing the information from the Tisserand Institue, arguably the world leaders on the topic of Essential oil and safety, which I am pasting here...
