There is a blog by a rep from one of the Multi-level marketers of essential oils that some of us keep an eye on. My friend Gretchen from Adirondack Aromatherapy sent me a link to another one of her outrageous posts again and I just have to put some REASON and TRUTH out there. Really, it IS true that with all the information in the world at our fingertips (literally) there is no excuse for stupidity. Being stupid for most people in this day and age is a choice.
Here is the blogpost: http://scentsable-living.com/2012/04/26/essential-oils-not-all-created-equal/
Take a few moments to read it for your self before you continue with my blogpost, or better yet, open it in another window so you can refer back to it.
First of all, I find it interesting that she would choose Clove to do her little comparison. Clove is one of the strongest skin sensitizers there is in aromatherapy. So, yes, you want to be extremely careful should you decide to use this oil. It has a VERY high phenol (eugenol) content and may cause burning on your skin (and certainly your digestive tract) if it isn't HIGHLY diluted! If you look at the Young Living website they recommend ONE drop in FOUR ounces of vegetable oil for internal use. This is WAY diluted.
The problem bottle in the picture she has up is with the Young Living bottle not the Aura Cacia bottle. Why? Essential oils are not nutritional supplements, for one thing. For another thing, it is ILLEGAL to prescribe essential oils for internal use in the United States. Even in France where you CAN obtain aromatherapy products compounded for internal medicinal use it's illegal to do so unless you have formal medical/pharmaceutical training AND formal aromatherapy training. I'm talking clinical training and not a weekend seminar over at Young Living. Aura Cacia is protecting the consumer from misuse and protecting themselves from lawsuits from ill informed consumers. Essential oils are natural but it's still chemicals. Essential oils are EXTREMELY concentrated! In fact, if you look through some of her other posts, she has one where she puts a drop of lemon oil on a Styrofoam cup to show how YL oils destroy petrochemicals in the body. WHAT? Little does she realize that she is actually proving what powerful SOLVENTS they are. Not only will they eat through a Styrofoam cup but also corneas and mucous membranes.
She starts off talking about how they used essential oils in biblical times. Nope. No stills. What they were using were infused herbal oils. Don't interpret the word "oils" as essential oils.
She also says that if the plant is edible then the oil should be too. There are MANY problems with this theory. If you distill a plant for the essential oil you are not distilling all the components of the plant, just volatile oil. You may be boiling away another constituent that was there to protect you from the damaging effects of the essential oil. It takes dozens of roses to make one drop of rose essential oil, so ingesting one drop of rose oil is equivalent to eating three dozen roses. Now a little rose flavoring is nice but you don't want to eat a pound of them. And when you start talking about oils with more toxic components,like sage, you are actually concentrating the dangerous parts of the plant. A little sage in your stuffing is harmless, but ingesting a drop of sage essential oil a day is endangering your life. I'm allergic to dill. If I eat food with dill on it I become violently ill, and have even passed out once. I didn't used to be allergic to dill. I LOVE dill. This happened in my 30's out of nowhere after years of ingesting this delicious herb. Somehow, my body became sensitized to it. This can happen with ANY substance, natural or not. If you are ingesting essential oils or applying them undiluted to your skin you may be fast tracking this process and you never know when the reaction will occur.
There is no such thing as Therapeutic grade. There is no agency that decides if an oil is "therapeutic" grade. Most reputable suppliers test their oils. Honestly, they can't test for purity-they can only analyze the chemical constituents to make sure there are no pesticides or to determine if there is a really unusually high level of a certain component. Let's take Lavender as an example. One of the relaxing chemicals in Lavender is Linalool. You can add artificial linalool to an oil and a chemist won't know it's synthetic. But if they get a Lavender with 80% Linalool content then they will know something's wrong because that's WAY too high. And yes, Young Living has had oils tested that turned out to have synthetics in it. The fact is, that unless Gary Young is standing there at every distillation and personally overseeing every single step of every of every single distillation and every single step of bottling and so forth and so on................even he can't be 100% sure that 100% of his oils are 100% pure. That's a fact.
I have been looking around on the Young Living website and I saw that their Valor blend is presented as a blend of pure essential oils yet if you look at the list of ingredients you'll see that it comes in a base of almond oil. Well, that doesn't sound pure to me. Then if you look at the directions for using it it recommends diffusing it for an hour. So I should put almond oil in my diffuser and light a CANDLE under it? Really? Fire under oil...............
I read through some of her blogposts and she has a post up suggesting using very lightly diluted lavender oil in your dogs ears to loosen earwax. Infused calendula oil would work better and it won't eat your dogs ear drums.
I have left comments on her blog several times. She moderates them and she won't post any of them that are not in line with her corporate training. That's convenient.
Don't buy into the hype from Young Living and Do Terra. There's nothing wrong with their oils and I do believe they have high standards but their business tactics are sleazy at best. At worst they are robbing people of their hard earned money with outright lies. And they do harm to the entire aromatherapy community. Not only do they trash the many MANY reputable producers and suppliers of essential oils, but they also have the nerve to treat people like me like charlatans merely because we want others to share our joy of these oils without doing harm.
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7 comments:
I tried to use your link but it has been removed.. I was really hoping to read it and agree with all you've said!
same here :/
That blog has been removed now. Someone had posted a comment that they were turning her into the FDA so maybe they did.
Question, why in the world would you want to use a heated difffuser? When oils are heated you loose the quality and purity of that oil. Cold air diffusers are what she is probably talking about. What a lot of you are not aware of is that companies like mine (Simply Aroma, YL, DT) educate and encourage education on each of their advocates.
My biggest fear with the misuse of essential oils, especially with the oily Moms using undiluted oils constantly on their kids, is we are going to have an entire generation of people sensitized to essential oils.
Not all people follow the tactics that this person was posting. I am proud to say that I am a doTERRA Wellness Advocate and the first rules of oils are: dilute, less is more, and never put them in orifices. Yes, I do ingest oils. doTERRA follows the French method of Aromatherapy and ingesting a unadulterated oil in moderation is considered safe. I believe choosing to ingest an oil is a personal choice. I would think if you load up a glass with 10 drops of oil, you are asking for something bad to happen. One drop in a bottle does not eat away your stomach lining. There is no scientific proof stating that ingesting is proven to be unsafe.
I see some of the things posted by others in what you refer to as a MLM company. At times I just shake my head. Some people choose to ignore safety and follow "recipes" they find online and I cringe. If something on Pinterest tells you to put 90 drops of oil in a 5ml roller with 10 drops fractionated coconut oil, a warning should be going off in your head. I teach classes every week and I spend the first 15 minutes of each class covering safety with a heavy concentration on proper dilution that is recommended by Tisserand. I pride myself on my knowledge and safety that I have. I have probably spent more hours learning safety, oils, chemistry of oils and distillation processes than many people who went to school for it. I was terrified to hurt others or myself with the oils.
I take a personal responsibility to educate anyone interested in being a wellness advocate to make sure they are not putting outrageous suggestions out there and hurting people. I even have people come to my classes that choose not to use doTERRA. I still welcome them because I want them to walk away educated and understanding dilution.
About the heated diffusers-that isn't correct because the oils are created using much higher heat. I do find the ultrasonic nebulizers more efficient, however, and I like that there is no fire involved.
You can google "eye drops with essential oils" and more of these type of articles come up.
If YL and DT encourage real education among their reps then they need to crack down. Many threaten their downlines if they join safety groups or seek education outside of the company.
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