Great! Thank you for that.
So I am wondering- would it be safe to actually vape real ylang ylang? I have a small vial of pure ylang ylang extract (thats how I got interested when I saw you had the flavor) and I was tempted to use it as a flavoring when I ran out of my green bottle juice.
I've tried to look on the web but I can't seem to find out if its toxic or not.
You probably have ylang-ylang essential oil or "absolute" (there is a fine distinction between EOs and absolutes, but for the sake of clarity I will here treat them as effectively synonymous,) and this is a slightly different sort of a thing to a flavour concentrate, though there's a lot of overlap, and absolutes/EOs are a vital part of most flavours (even where those oils are recreated using nature-identical blends, rather than natural extracts from the named source.)
Essential oils are (usually steam-) distilled from herbal materials, and are a complex mix of volatiles in ultra-concentrated form, representing an aspect (often a broad aspect,) of the flavour or scent of the flowers/leaves/fruits/nuts/roots/whatever.
Some essential oils taste exactly the same as the flavour imparted by the unrefined flowers/leaves; clove springs to mind - utterly distinctive, and if you mixed clove oil with dark sawdust in the right proportions, you would not be able to tell by taste alone that it wasn't simply ground cloves you were tasting. Some others represent rather distinctive subsets of the unrefined flavours - most fruit absolutes, for example, don't taste much like the fruits themselves. This is because so many of the flavour components are non-volatile (all the sugars, starches and proteins, for example!)
Such extracts are fine for perfumery applications - because they only contain the volatiles, they do generally smell identical to the source, but it is trickier when you're trying to make them taste the same.
Now, it's very true that sugars aren't volatile in ejuice either (so you can't just add concentrated fruit juice to your nicotine,) but if you mix pear absolute with PG, it smells like pears, but it doesn't taste much like pears at all (not the sort of pear flavour you'd want to vape anyway! I know - it's one I'm experimenting with ATM, and it's proving a bit of a challenge.) It tastes unpleasantly solventy, a lot like nail polish remover. The skill of building a realistic flavour, is to find volatile components to restore the missing qualities provided by the non-volatiles, and recreate the flavour of the original. It's an often difficult, sometimes infuriating, but always ultimately satisfying aspect of the job
I am not aware that any of the components in ylang-ylang absolute are significantly toxic, and it is approved for food applications. The oral LD50s for most essential oils, even in the more hazardous herb oils like dill or sage or lavendar (also approved for food use,) are typically 3-5ml per kg of body weight, so are of little relevance to a delivery system that could at best deliver a few nanolitres per puff (for a good overview of the toxicity issues, I can recommend
this page)
I would advise not using more than a 1-2% solution max (and start off with 0.5% probably) - it's very strong stuff (as well as sometimes problematic to keep in solution in a glycol base.) And I'm afraid it's unlikely, on its own, to taste the same (or even as nice,) as our flavour concentrate.
But experiment, if you've a mind to - you may find that it modifies other flavours pleasingly (it could transform a plain coconut juice into something rather wonderful, I expect.)
Happy mixing!
