Essential Oils
What are they, are all essential oils the same quality
What are essential oils?
Where do essential oils come from? What are essential oils used for? What are common uses for essential oils?
Where essential oils come from
If you would have asked me about essential oils a few years ago, I wouldn’t have even known what they were. Today I see them as one of the most effective tools for natural health and alternative medicine that I know.
Scientifically speaking essential oils are naturally occurring, volatile aromatic compounds found in the seeds, bark, stems, roots, flowers, and other parts of plants. What exactly is a volatile aromatic compound? They are called volatile because they change state quickly. Essential oils aren’t true oils like almond oil, olive oil, or flaxseed oil — those are called fixed oils. Fixed oils don’t vaporize the way essential oils do, and they are much heavier. Over 3,000 varieties of volatile aromatic compounds have been identified to date. Essentially, there is an oil for everything!
Where essential oils are used
Essential oils are super-concentrated. For example, it takes about 16 pounds of fresh peppermint leaves to produce an ounce of essential oil. These oils are key active ingredients and flavors in many common products — candies, syrups, toothpastes, cleaning products, skin creams, lip balms, shampoos, bath salts, and soaps. They are also in many common spices: nutmeg, allspice, thyme, oregano, basil, and savory also all contain essential oils.
Essential oils are also one of the oldest forms of medicine. Believe it or not, most forms of modern-day medication started by scientists, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies extracting the beneficial properties of essential oils. In other words, the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs started as essential oils that were harvested from plants and other sources. In order to patent products, pharmaceutical companies create synthetic versions.
Common uses for essential oils
1. Use essential oils for natural, self-directed healthcare. If there is one area that makes most people feel powerless, it is healthcare. That shouldn’t be, nor does it have to be! I have helped thousands of people use essential oils to support the body’s wellbeing. If you want to learn, take my free essential oil class and you’ll know exactly what to do.
2. Essential oils provide powerful emotional support. When you are seeking to heal a relationship or seeking to have the strength to move away from a toxic relationship, essential oils literally shift your body chemistry and can change your mood. This enables you to take a step back and do what you need to do to grow and heal.
3. Essential oils are a rapidly growing industry. With everything going on, now is the time start an essential oil business and help people.
Are all essential oils the same quality?
How do I find a good quality essential oil? What are certified pure therapeutic grade essential oils? What are the best essential oil brands?
What makes an essential oil good quality?
There is no regulation specifically for essential oils, which means that many essential oils are full of synthetic chemicals, artificial smells, filler oils, or are just not the oil they claimed to be (it doesn’t matter what the label says!)
One classic example of this is when I bought my first high quality oregano oil for the first time. Before this, I had been buying large bottles of oregano oil from a health food store and I would take full droppers of it at a time.
Once I got my first pure oregano oil, I was warned to only use one drop and to dilute it in olive oil. Unfortunately I didn’t listen and I put a drop directly on my tongue. Ouch! It was so strong it burned me. But even despite the pain, it rapidly helped my body get over the sniffles.
Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade oils
The only essential oils worth using are Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade (CPTG). This label means:
- Every litre of the essential oil has been third-party tested with at least 13 different standard tests.
- The exact testing results for that particular bottle of essential oil are linked to on that bottle’s packaging.
- All this testing ensures that the essential oil is pure and safe for therapeutic use (which includes internal use for most oils).
If an essential oil is not CPTG it is only good for, at best, making your house smell good (but even still, you may be diffusing harmful chemicals into the air without knowing it).
How to find pure essential oils
There is one brand which consistently has the highest-quality essential oils, and this is the only brand which has CPTG oils safe for therapeutic use. That brand is doTERRA essential oils.
Now that doesn’t mean you can’t use another highly-trusted source, but it is a risk. Even the most kind-hearted, authentic local essential oil maker won’t have done the thorough testing to make sure that each drop of essential oil is pure and safe. The smallest errors in the manufacturing process can kill healing properties or even create negative ones.
If you’d like to learn more about doTERRA essential oils, take my free essential oil class or buy some and experience the quality firsthand.
Want to learn more?
If you learned something from this article, you may enjoy diving deeper into the fascinating world of essential oils!
Learn how to support your health with essential oils in this comprehensive eBook.
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If you’ve got a health challenge you’d like a natural option for, let me share my experience!