YLANG-YLANG SCENT VS. COCONUT ODOR

Our country the Philippines is blessed with abundant plants and flowers. Cananga Odorata or more popularly known as ylang-ylang is a kind of flower that blooms all year round in our country because of our country’s location which is in the tropical region. The ylang–ylang tree grows in rural and urban areas and is therefore very accessible to people. It has a very fragrant smell and is usually used for aromatherapy.

Our research project was all about the Effectiveness of ylang-ylang flower as a coconut deodorizer. Its main objective is to find out an alternative use of ylang-ylang flowers. Ylang-ylang flower’s scent is usually neglected because of its abundance. Our group is trying to make more uses of the fragrant scent of this flower. Our group chose to deodorize coconut oil because of its great uses to people despite its awful smell. It is extracted by pressing and boiling method of grated coconut meat. Most people use coconut oil as massage oil and hair conditioner but the number one problem mostly faced by people is its foul smell. A natural scent needs to be mixed to make the coconut oil soothing and fragrant to everyone’s skin. We have come up with this study for the benefit of coconut oil users.

Our research design was a descriptive type of research. It does not involve any experimental treatment which means it does not involve calculations and significant differences of values. It is just pure description which means we describe what we see or smell during the experiment.

In our research procedure, we extracted coconut oil from grated coconut oil. Then we soaked overnight the ylang-ylang flowers to ethanol. The source of our flowers is outside the Administration building of UP College. We then collected the ethanol extract and placed it on a condenser. We then extracted the ylang-ylang extract and mixed it with the coconut oil to increasing volumes of ylang-ylang extract. Our objective was to determine the exact ratio of fragrance of the ylang-ylang to coconut oil extract. We are trying to determine the ratio where the ylang-ylang scent completely dominated over the coconut oil odor but not too acidic that it would be irritating to the nose. Our problem was we do not have a device to determine the acidity or basicness of the scent. We just trusted on our noses and we have concluded that the ratio 3:9 is the most soothing of all the mixtures. Actually, our procedure was quite complicated. We still counted the number of days the ylang-ylang scent dominated over the coconut oil odor but our conclusions are accurate.

With our study, we hope that the people who are using coconut oils for hair and body massage would love the ylang-ylang scent of the oil and we hope that people would go back to the traditional way of conditioning their hair through coconut oil. And for the industrial commercial companies, our group is hoping that they would develop a product which is ylang-ylang scented to make use of the abundant ylang-ylang flowers in our country.