When it comes to essential oils, why is purity important? Let’s take a quick look at how and why oils are adulterated so we can answer this question.
An independent laboratory, the Aromatic Plant Research Center, has conducted research and found that more than 80% of essential oils on the market are adulterated in one of the following ways:
Aroma-enhanced oils (synthetic fragrances are added)
Cheap oil/mislabeled oil (lavandin is sold as lavender or wild mint as peppermint)
Reconstituted oil (other plant extracts are added or sometimes molecules are removed)
Synthetically extracted oil (produced in a laboratory)
Diluted or modified with added oil components
Most of the adulteration occurs through the intermediate trade, around 70%. Then about 10% is adulterated at the distillation plant and 10% by the retailer. If a company buys an essential oil from a middleman and doesn’t test it closely enough, the company may truly believe that they are selling pure essential oils even though the middleman has adulterated the oil. This is why essential oil testing is so important. GCMS testing of essential oils is the gold standard in the industry, but there is no law in the world that requires companies to test their essential oils before selling them.
Dōterra itself tests all its essential oils with GCMS. This test is extremely thorough and checks more than 20 factors for each oil. It checks whether the oils contain synthetic substances, pesticides, herbicides or other chemicals and heavy metals. But Dōterra goes even further. They send a sample of each batch of oil to another laboratory that does not belong to Doterra and have the oils tested there using GCMS. This laboratory publishes the test results on the sourcetoyou.com website. So if you have Doterra essential oils at home, take out a bottle and look for the number on the bottom of the bottle. Enter this number in the appropriate field on the sourcetoyou.com website and you can read the test results for yourself.
Why do people adulterate essential oils? Quite simply: to make more profit. If they can sell a cheaper oil as a more expensive oil, they make more money. If they can make a synthetic oil in a lab and reproduce it over and over again without having to do all the work of growing, harvesting and distilling, they make more money. Unfortunately, this desire to make more money by deceiving people has a very negative impact on the essential oil industry. For example, someone buys an oil that they believe is lavender oil to help their body achieve restful sleep. In reality, however, this oil is not lavender oil and therefore does not have the same effect on the body. This person will use the purchased oil, not achieve the desired effect and assume that essential oils do not work. Using impure essential oils can be dangerous. They can have negative effects on the skin when used. Diffusing synthetic molecules instead of natural plant molecules can also have a negative effect on our respiratory system.
As you can see, knowing that we are using pure essential oils is extremely important. Fortunately, dōTERRA goes one step further and has its oils tested with the best available tests and gives us the assurance of their purity by giving us access to the test results. So we can use these gifts of the earth with the confidence that we are using pure essential oils.
