Before diving into writing more about individual oils, I would like to take a moment to tell you why Young Living has the best Essential Oils on the Planet. When using Essential Oils for yourself, your children and your pets, why would you want to use anything that isn’t guaranteed to be 100% pure?
As we begin to understand the power of essential oils in the realm of personal, holistic health care, we will appreciate the necessity for obtaining the purest essential oils possible. For this reason, the entire process of obtaining oils must be carefully watched over from the beginning to the end. No matter how costly pure essential oils may be, there can be no substitutes.
Just as chemists can synthetically “copycat” the constituents of a pure essential oil, many essential oil companies today label their oils “therapeutic”, even though they buy from anonymous brokers and have no experience in meeting any standards. Young Living was the first to establish guidelines that define what a therapeutic essential oil is and to create oils that met or exceeded any known medicinal standard.
Grades of Essential Oils
- Synthetic or nature-identical oils (created in a laboratory)
- Extended or altered oils (fragrance grade)
- Natural oils and certified oils (pass oil-standard tests but may not contain any or just a few therapeutic compounds).
- Therapeutic-grade essential oils (pure, medicinal, steam-distilled essential oils containing all desired therapeutic compounds.
Synthetic or nature-identical oils are commonplace in the market and can be created cheaply and then sold in places like health food and drug stores or novelty and tourist shops for a very low price. They have no therapeutic efficacy and may even be harmful. For instance, fragrance-grade lavender may have a harmful effect instead of a healing effect on newly burned skin.
Extended or altered oils may have an essential oil base but are “enhanced” with certain lab-created constituents to increase volume or fragrance. Due to chemical impurities or an antagonistic balance among oil constituents, these oils may be either ineffective or even cause negative effects.
“Natural” and “organic” oils focus on growing in a natural, chemical-free environment but are not concerned with exactness of the time of harvest and the distillation to maximize the therapeutic potency of an essential oil. Such oils may be labeled “100% Pure Certified” or “Natural” but may have sub therapeutic values, and because of the 2011 decision to allow genetically modified alfalfa to be planted anywhere, the very word “organic” may soon not guarantee freedom from GMO contamination. If one GMO plant is approved, the door has been opened.
And here we go…… A very short explanation of the reason Young Living Essential Oils are the best on the Planet!
SEED TO SEAL
The Seed to Seal process is Young Living’s trademark.
Young Living Essential Oils is the only company dedicated to the medicinal use and application of essential oils that is able to guarantee essential oil quality from seed to seal.
The oils that Young Living provides to consumers are extracted through steam distillation from a wide variety of plants, roots, bushes, trees, and resins and are as powerful and pure as the botanicals from which they are derived.
The life-giving energy of the essential oils that is carefully distilled from nature cannot be duplicated in a sterile laboratory. Synthetic constituents may be similar in structure but have none of the living plant energy that holds the God-given medicinal value of the oil that is realized from the plant itself.
SEED
Herbs are selected for the proper genus, species and chemotype. Whether seeking Clove oil from Madagascar, Cistus oil from Spain or Helichrysum oil from Corsica, Young Living experts constantly travel across the globe to verify plant, cultivation and extraction quality to ensure absolute integrity of the essential oil.
CULTIVATION
Young Living’s essential oils are extracted from both wildcrafted and cultivated herbs, from established partnerships with growers and distillers all over the world. Some oils come from herbs cultivated in rural areas of countries such as Madagascar, Indonesia and Brazil, harvested by indigenous people, who have untold years of experience with the plants and their growing conditions. Other oils come from Young Living farms in Ecuador, France and the United States, where organic practices are adhered to with great care and exactness.
ORGANIC HERB FARMING
The key to producing oils with genuine therapeutic quality starts with the proper cultivation of the herbs in the field.
Plants should be grown on virgin land uncontaminated by chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, or herbicides. They should be grown away from nuclear plants, factories, interstates, highways and heavily populated cities, if possible.
Because robust, healthy plants produce higher quality essential oils, the soil should be nourished with enzymes, minerals and organic mulch. The mineral content of the soil is crucial to the proper development of the plant, and soils that lack minerals result in plants that produce inferior oils.
Land and crops should be watered with deep well, reservoir or water shed water. Mountain stream water is best because of it’s purity and high mineral content. Municipally treated water or secondary run off water from residential and commercial areas can introduce undesirable chemical residues into the plant and the essential oil.
Different varieties of plants produce different qualities of oils. Only those plants that produce the highest quality of essential oil should be selected.
HARVESTING
The timing of the harvest is one of the most important factors in the production of therapeutic grade oils. If the plants are harvested at the wrong time of the season or even at the incorrect time of day, they may distill into a substandard essential oil. In some instances, changing harvest time, by even a few hours, can make a huge difference. For example, German Chamomile harvested in the morning will produce oil with far more azulene (a powerful anti-inflammatory compound) than if it is harvested in the late afternoon.
Other factors taken into consideration during the harvest include the amount of dew on the leaves, the percentage of plant in bloom, and weather conditions during the two weeks prior to harvest.
DISTILLATION
A master distiller must oversee the entire process by harvesting at just the right time for the plant maturity and distilling with the proper temperature, pressure and time, which varies with different plant material. Young Living often experiments with innovative distillation techniques on its farms to maximize therapeutic potency of the oils. Other oils are distilled traditionally, using techniques that have been passed down through generations from father to son.
There are several different types of distillation processes; Simple distillation, Hydro distillation, Traditional distillation.
TESTING
At Young Living, each essential oil must pass extensive testing to ensure an optimal bioactive profile. Young Living uses its own internal labs, as well as third party testing from essential oil experts in other countries, to validate the purity and potency of essential oils.
SEALING
The final step in Young Living’s Seed to Seal process is carefully sealing each bottle of essential oil in Young Living’s own clean room facility and shipping it to members worldwide.
Literally, from the plant seed that is dropped into the soil to the essential oil sealed in the amber bottle in Young Living’s clean room, the Seed to Seal process is carefully supervised from beginning to end to ensure quality and purity of Young Living pure, therapeutic-grade essential oils.
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