ESSENTIAL OILS - HOW GOOD ARE YOURS?

We’ve all seen our newsfeeds inundated with ads for essential oils and they seem to be everywhere now. I can’t walk into many stores without seeing a display for essential oils, including the local hardware store. To the unsuspecting person who is new to using essential oils this may seem wonderful, especially the prices! Honestly, you can get a bottle of frankincense or jasmine for $14.99! That price seems too good to be true!

It IS too good to be true and here’s why;

You get what you pay for, it’s as simple as that! When you purchase a bottle of frankincense or jasmine for $14.99, how much of the actual essential oil do you honestly think is in that bottle? Well guess what, you have no way of knowing because it’s a highly unregulated industry with no one policing any of the essential oils on the market. Yes, the bottle can say 100% pure essential oil, but there are no labeling regulations on the term “essential oil” so a bottle of 100% synthetic essential oil can be labeled as pure and sold to unsuspecting customers.

Many essential oils are manipulated so the end result is a less earthy and more pleasant smelling product. This is achieved by removing some of the heavier molecules or adding small amounts of another species of plant. Remember grandma’s lavender? It was kind of a heavy, sickly, sweet smell whereas a pure lavender essential oil (lavendula angustifolia) smells earthy and exactly like the plant that it came from. Fun fact; there is far more lavender essential oil sold every year than what is actually distilled. That is simply because much of it is synthetically produced.

Lavender field

We should expect our pure essential oils to smell slightly different from one batch to the next because there will be variations in growing conditions such as temperature, how much sun and rain the crop gets, soil conditions and harvesting conditions. Mother Nature is never really consistent is she?

I personally choose to use Young Living essential oils in our home because Young Living produces and sells authentic, pure essential oils backed by their Seed to Seal guarantee. Let’s have a quick look at what that is;

SEED

Seeds are selected based on the previous year’s crop and are carefully selected to ensure the highest quality.

CULTIVATE

Young Living uses standards that are far beyond organic grade standards. They use only sustainable methods and no harmful chemicals are ever used. The fields are hand weeded and essential oils are used for pest control and to help support healthy growth.

DISTILL

Plants are spot tested in the fields to ensure potency and are harvested at their peak for a high quality essential oil. The oils are distilled using steam extraction and the distillation temperature, pressure, and amount of distillation time varies from plant to plant to maximize therapeutic potency of the oils.

Fun fact; most commercial cypress is distilled for 2 hours and 15 minutes which allows the producers to cut costs but it results in oil with little or no therapeutic qualities. Young Living distills cypress for a minimum of 24 hours at 265 degrees F with 5 pounds of pressure to extract most of the therapeutic constituents.

Idaho Blue spruce being distilled at the Highland Flats farm.

Producing pure essential oils is very costly. It can take hundreds of pounds of raw plant material to produce a single pound of essential oil. Like melissa! It can take 2-3 tons of the plant to produce one pound of oil. It takes 5000 pounds of rose petals to produce about a pint of rose essential oil! Now you know why those oils are so costly.

TEST

Young Living test all oils using internal labs as well as third party testing. They use up to 20 tests on each batch in triplicate two separate times during the process. YL standards are much higher than international standards. Once the essential oil passes all the testing, the bottling is done in a state of the art facility and the oil is tested again to verify that no contamination has taken place.

SEAL

For the final step of the Seed to Seal process each bottle is carefully packaged to ensure a perfect product shipped directly to you.

One thing you will likely not find with any other essential oil company, is the fact that you can visit all of Young Living’s corporate and partner farms and and participate in planting and harvesting at some of them. I’ve had the privilege of visiting 3 of the farms so far and I was able to spend an entire week participating in winter harvest at the Highland Flats farm in Idaho. We were harvesting Idaho Blue spruce and we did everything from cutting the trees down, running them through the chipper, loaded the chips into the distiller, danced on the chips to pack them down tightly, and watched the beautiful light pink shade of oil come through the condenser into the collector. It really felt like watching a miracle happening before my eyes!

Next came bottling oils for each participant to take home. Almost everyone that received one of these special bottles of Idaho Blue Spruce essential oil put the label on upside down so we would know that was the special oil that we helped to harvest and distill. The rest of the essential oil went into stainless steel containers to go for testing.