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I'm planning to prepare natural toothpaste. Some recipes include ginger essential oil while others include ginger powder.

What is the difference between them? Will ginger powder be as effective as ginger essential oil for my intended use?

Here in my country, ginger essential oil costs about 11-12x more than ginger powder.

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  • $\begingroup$ Welcome to Chemistry.SE! Take the tour to get familiar with this site. Mathematical expressions and equations can be formatted using $\LaTeX$ syntax. I'm not sure this is the right place to ask that. Maybe health, maybe even cooking. The difference is painfully obvious, too. The one is dried powdered ginger (basically letting the water evaporate), the other uses some form of extraction to get to the oil. Unless you are interested in the extraction of a specific compound from ginger, I believe this is off-topic here. $\endgroup$
    – Martin - マーチン ♦
    Commented Dec 5, 2017 at 14:06
  • $\begingroup$ Gingerol and gingerone are the phenolic compounds that give ginger its kick. eic.rsc.org/soundbite/ginger/2021241.article $\endgroup$
    – user55119
    Commented Dec 5, 2017 at 14:14
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    $\begingroup$ I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because we cannot state on the effectiveness as preparing toothpaste is outside our scope and the difference between powder and oil is clear enough to not warrant a question. $\endgroup$
    – Jan
    Commented Dec 13, 2017 at 7:15

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The main constituant of ginger essential oil seems to be zingiberene, which is what gives ginger its peculiar flavor.

So if the ginger is added for flavoring, I would say that the oil will be much more potent than the powder. I don't know if it will be 10x more potent, though.

I would suggest trying both and seeing which is more economical.

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