WHY DO SOME OILS COMPANIES SELL OILS MORE CHEAPLY?

Most essential oils are sold more cheaply because companies cut corners to save money. If you spray your crop with pesticides, you have more crop to distill. If you use a chemical solvent to extract the oil,

you pull more out. If you dilute it with a cheaper oil, or a carrier oil, you stretch the oil you have distilled, and can easily sell more cheaply.

HOW OILS ARE MADE:

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It takes a great deal of work to produce a tiny amount of essential oil!

60,000 rose blossoms provide only one ounce of Rose oil

Lavender is abundant—220 pounds will provide seven pounds of oil

Jasmine flowers must be picked by hand before the sun becomes hot on the very first day they open, thus making ione of the most expensive oils in the world! It takes eight million hand-picked blossoms to produce 2.2 pounds of oil

A Sandalwood tree must be 30 years old and 30 feet high before it can be cut down for distillation. Gary Young’s Sandalwood trees must be 90 percent dead before they are harvested.

But a little goes a long way. Most oils are $10 to $30 a bottle. Depending on oil thickness (viscosity), a 5-ml bottle contains about 90-100 drops, and a 15-ml bottle contains about 200-240 drops. Each application is one to three drops, meaning even a small bottle will get you 45 to 90 applications. Thieves cleaner is made of plants only and costs about $1.50 a bottle to make. You can’t even get that in the organic section at the grocery store! It replaces a multi-purpose cleaner, glass cleaner, and floor cleaner. The organic versions of those can run you $4 to $6 a bottle.

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ARE THEY SAFE?

There are certain oils that are photosensitive, meaning you don’t want to wear them and go outside. These are mostly citrus oils, like Grapefruit, Lemon, etc.

When using on your skin, always watch for redness and dilute with a carrier oil. Dilute oils on children, because their skin is more permeable and absorbs the oils more quickly. What is a carrier oil? It’s a fatty oil like olive oil or coconut oil, and its molecules are much larger than those of essential oils. Using a carrier oil with an essential oil slows down the rate the body can absorb the essential oil, because it has to ping pong through the large molecules of the carrier oil to get into your skin.

Some oils, like Cinnamon or Oregano, are rather strong, so you may not want to diffuse them.

Be wary of putting the oils topically near your eyes. Some oils, like Peppermint, can cause a burning sensation. If you are placing an oil near your eye, apply the oil to a Q-tip instead of tipping the bottle toward your face.

You can become desensitized to an oil if you use the same one day after day, so I rotate my oils every three to four days.

What about internal use of essential oils? NAHA, one of the top aromatherapy schools in the United States, doesn’t advocate essential oils for internal use. Why? Most oils companies don’t carry any GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe) essential oils. Many argue that internal essential oil use is unsafe, and I would agree, in some circumstances. You need to make sure you’re checking the labels first. Young Living Vitality oils are approved for internal use, just like a food additive. You have been consuming essential oils internally for most of your life—when you chew gum or put Oregano in your pasta.

NAHA also bases a lot of their decisions on the British model, which advocates topical use only. Many of the British studies are flawed, for example, done at extremely high doses or in ways the oils aren’t used, like pouring a bottle inside the body. Young Living utilizes all three methods, British, French, and German. The French have been safely using some essential oils internally for decades. Young Living’s Vitality line has distinctive white labels so you can easily recognize which oils are safe to take internally.