A new cost-effective approach for lavender essential oils quality assessment

The existing methods used to evaluate the lavender oils quality, is related generally to the percentage abundance of the specific compounds (linalool, linalyl acetate). The strict monitoring of these products was considered mandatory, for all involved counterparts (producers, consumers, and control authorities). A new reliable approach for the quality of lavender oils assessment is presented in this work. For this purpose, 31 volatile organic compounds were quantified using GC/MS system in 32 lavender oil samples, purchased from local stores and autochthon producers. Cluster analysis split the samples set in two main clusters based on volatile components. These results combined with those obtained by applying linear discriminant analysis allowed the identification of four commercial samples which were adulterated by addition of lower quality oil. The quality grades for every product were achieved applying the new developed algorithm, using the correlation between two calculated indicators: percentage abundance of the linalool and linalyl acetate and sum of all volatile organic compounds peak areas. The new algorithm, confirmed with chemometric models, allowed the classification of lavender oils as high, medium or low quality, without using the time consuming and expensive techniques such as quantitative analysis. The new developed approach presented also a very good correlation with quantitative analysis in terms of linalool. Therefore, the proposed model, constitute a robust, economical and fast method for quality determination of lavender oils and offer the possibility to be extended to other essential oils.