Occasionally oil from the East African Cedar, juniperus procera, appears on the market. It is similarly priced but of rather finer odour than the American.

Botanical Name: Juniperus Virginiana

Origin: USA

Colour: Yellow

Safety Data:
Most emphatically, Cedarwood Essential Oil should not be taken by mouth and should not be used during pregnancy at all.

All types of Cedarwood Essential Oil have been used extensively to ward off insects and rodents. Cigar boxes used to be made of cedarwood for this reason. Great buildings (including Solomon's temple) used cedar not only because it continues to exhale its fragrance for hundreds of years but also because it is less liable to attack by insects.

The Ancient Egyptians, who prized cedarwood so highly that they annexed Lebanon where the finest trees grew, oiled their papyri with its oil to protect them for posterity.

An oil extracted from cedar leaf is occasionally offered under the name thuja which name refers to cedarwood as a species. It has a bright, dynamic fragrance but is toxic and should not be used in aromatherapy.

Thuja (Gr) means 'to fumigate' or 'to sacrifice' which indicates that the Greeks valued cedarwood chippings as an incense.

The notions of incense and sacrifice were closely linked in the mind of the ancients, the smoke carrying the supplications of priests and others to the heavens. The word 'fumigate' comes from the Latin fumare - to smoke and is the basis of our word perfume (per fumum - through smoke).

The etymology of words connected with the subject of smell is a tangled trail always leading us back to man's first experience in controlling the nature of his olfactory environment - incense. That first experience probably happened at the same time as the discovery of fire since, in the case of labdanum, cedar, sandal, pine and many others, all man had to do was to throw it on the fire.