It took me a while to find a clary sage essential oil I could warm up to, and I eventually settled on the organic French clary sage from Aura Cacia. I have sampled other organic French clary sage oils and have found them to have similar olfactory products. It's been a while since I purchased a bottle and I thought I should freshen up my supply so I bought a new one. In fairness to Aura Cacia, this is a natural unadulterated product and variation from batch to batch and year to year is to be expected. Not every batch can be stellar. I compared the bottle I received to my old bottle and the new one does not make my heart sing like the old one did, but it's pleasant. It's a more mild fragrance and doesn't have that oomph that a really great distillation has that transports you to your happy place, but this is a good quality clary sage and it has a pleasant fragrance. If I didn't still have a bottle from the best batch I ever came across I would be none the wiser. Since that one set such a high standard this bottle is a bit disappointing, but again I want to emphasize that I would still recommend it and I consider it to be a high quality clary sage. It's just not phenomenal, but that is a lot to ask, and the price for the quality is very reasonable. One quibble is that the code on the bottle that represents the date the essential oil was bottled (if you know how to read the dates according to the format Aura Cacia uses) is worn away so much that it's not possible to read, but it does appear that it may be a couple of years old. If that's the case that might explain why the fragrance is a bit flat. Although my preferred bottle is older it has been kept under refrigeration for it's entire life. The bottle I received in my most recent order may have been stored in suboptimal conditions at some point along its life cycle. Light, heat, and exposure to air all degrade essential oils (with few exceptions and clary sage is not among the exceptions), so that might be a contributing factor. But it could also be that they are sourcing from a different distiller or that the weather the year this particular batch was grown created plants that had a less favorable oil content. It happens all the time. So I do recommend but if you don't love it don't give up on clary sage. And if you do love it, just know there might be another one out there that you will love even more. I know I would have become a fan based on this bottle, and I couldn't stand the first clary sage I ever sampled. This is a respectable specimen.
