I have just returned from the most wonderful Young Living trip – it was a cruise which started in Athens, and from there we went to Santorini, Montenegro, Dubrovnik, Split, Rijeka and then Venice. The cruise boat was filled with Young Living members, so it was a wonderful opportunity to catch up with new and old friends, to network, share oily tips, and have a wonderful adventure together.

One of the highlights of that trip was the opportunity to visit Young Living’s Croatian distillery and warehouse in Split, and the new Helichrysum farm.

Every time I visit a Young Living farm, I’m in awe of the people who work there. They are so passionate about their plants, the distillation process, and all the many steps that create an exceptional quality essential oil – one that we will LOVE to use.

This trip was no different. I learned so much fun stuff about the art of distillation – things I had never heard before. I videoed a wonderful presentation by one of the staff there (Nicolas Landel), and I have merged his information with my own understanding of distillation in this post.

I’m sure you’re going to love what I have to share here. Enjoy!!!

What is Seed to Seal?

Seed to Seal is Young Living’s commitment to quality. It’s a multi-step process, reflecting Young Living’s proprietary process for creating the absolute best quality essential oils on our Planet. No one step is more important than any other step. If any one of these steps isn’t done correctly, you end up with a lesser quality oil.

When we are producing a top quality essential oil, every step is equally important. That includes:

• How we cultivate the plant;
• The timing of harvesting;
• The way we harvest the plant;
• How we distill the plant to extract its essential oil (the temperature, the pressure, the length of time we distil for);
• How the plant matter is compressed in the distillation chamber, to make sure the steam moves through it evenly and doesn’t create hot spots that will burn the plant matter;
• And then of course we have the testing process, which is also critical to ensure we have the right compounds in our oil. That’s because we can do everything right in producing an essential oil, but Mother Nature can work against us with the weather, and the essential oil that season may just not meet our standards.

People often think that an organic essential oil will be a hallmark of good quality. But that’s not necessarily the case. It’s great that suppliers who are producing organic essential oils aren’t using chemicals in the field. That’s important. But how are they harvesting their organic oil? And what rules are they using for distillation, to ensure that all those volatile aromatic compounds are captured?

Organic standards were designed for use with food, not for essential oils. So if you think about an organic carrot, when that carrot is ready to be harvested, you simply take it out of the soil. No distillation is needed.

So organic standards have no criteria around the actual distillation process for an essential oil. In other words, unlike a carrot, you can have a beautiful organic aromatic plant, but its oil can be rendered useless through the timing of harvest, and how it’s distilled.

So buying an “organic” essential oil gives you no indication of the actual quality of the oil itself.

That’s why at Young Living, we needed to create our own standard, and follow that very specific process for caring for the plant, all the way through to the distillation, bottling and testing process. And that’s our Seed to Seal standard.

Distillation is where the magic happens….

See this picture? This is me in a field of Helichrysum plants.

Notice how rocky the soil is? Helichrysum plants love rocky soil. Many years ago, Gary Young asked the question, “What sized rocks do they most like?”

It’s a great question, isn’t it? Loving a plant is like loving a woman. You want to find out exactly how that plant loves to be treated in order to thrive.

So Gary brought in a rock crusher, and had 3 fields side by side. One had large rocks, one had medium sized rocks, and one had small rocks like this field.

He discovered that Helichrysum loves growing in soil with small rocks – that’s where it most thrives. So now, our Helichrysum plants are grown in fields with small rocks. And they love it!

But creating a healthy plant and healthy soil and using “beyond organic” standards is important – but it’s not the only thing that creates a top quality essential oil.

Every step of the Seed to Seal process is crucial, and one of those steps is distillation. You could have an amazing farmer who does an incredible job in the field, but if you don’t know the art of distillation, you still won’t get a good oil.

Distillation is where the magic happens for an essential oil.

It’s the moment where, after a year’s work in our fields, we actually get to see if we did a good job. Or sometimes, if nature is a little harsh, we might have done a great job but we still don’t obtain the quality we are expecting. And as you know, if an oil doesn’t meet our quality standards, it’s not sold to you.

So what is Steam Distillation?

Steam distillation is the most common way of extracting essential oils from a plant. It involves “cooking” your plant material in water, to break down that plant matter and release the essential oil.

The first step is to turn on the boiler (which produces the steam), and to give it time to heat up. That boiler runs its steam into the distillation chamber.

This distillation chamber (pictured here) is full of plant matter, carefully compressed so that it’s all even in density.

That’s important, because if you haven’t compressed it evenly, the steam will find

“the path of least resistance” and will flow through the open spaces in the plant material, and potentially overheat those areas. When the plant matter is evenly compressed, the steam cooks the plant matter evenly. That’s what you want.

Distillation is very simple in principle. We’re going to heat water to produce steam, and we’re going to send that steam through the plant matter. This breaks the plant matter down, so its essential oil is released into the steam.

The steam and essential oil moves up through the distillation chamber, and exits the chamber through a pipe at the top (as shown in this pic).

From there, it moves down a refrigerated pipe (we call that a condenser). This causes the steam to return to liquid.

We capture that liquid into a “separator” (a glass container).

So we now have both essential oil and water with a little bit of essential oil still dissolved into it.

We call that oil-infused water “hydrosol” (if we’ve distilled the leaves, roots, bark, etc), or “floral water” (if we’ve distilled the flowers).

Ever wondered why we use steam to distill?

Why don’t we just heat the plant matter without steam? Wouldn’t that work just as well?

Actually, no, it doesn’t. When we put the plant material into the distillation chamber (also called a “cooker”), let’s say we heat that plant with no water, and we heat it to the boiling point of the essential oil (ie. hot enough that the essential oil will vaporise and make its way up through the condenser). Without steam, we call that “flash distillation”.

That’s going to require a very high temperature to achieve that flash point.

This pic on the right is me with Nicolas Landel. I first met Nicolas’s parents in 2004. His father Jean-Noel Landel was a close friend of Gary Young, and I met him when I went to visit Young Living’s farm in Provence, France. Jean-Noel was the farm manager at the time, and I was one of the first distributors ever to go there.

Since Jean-Noel retired, Nicolas has followed in his father’s footsteps, and is now Young Living’s Regional Director of Farms in Europe and Africa.

He says, “I love doing cooking classes, because I’m French. Have you ever fried anything? Let’s take a pan and pour vegetable oil into it. Then turn on the heat. You’ll reach a temperature of 180°C, because that’s the temperature needed to fry food. You might expect to see bubbles or smoke. But you don’t, because the boiling point of vegetable oil is usually much higher than 180°C (more like 300°C), so you normally see nothing when you have that oil just heating in a pan.

It’s only when you introduce food into your pot that you start to see bubbles, and smoke, and the frying begins to happen. That’s because food contains water, so when you introduce your food into the frypan, you’ve just introduced water, which has a boiling point of 100°C.

That water in the food vaporises during the frying process, so it goes from a liquid to a steam because it’s passed its boiling point of 100°C. But as it does this, something unusual happens. Any liquid that is in contact with the oil will vaporise, no matter the boiling point of that liquid. So the vegetable oil that you have in your pan will vaporise with the water, even though it normally wouldn’t vaporise until it’s at 300°C.

So let’s now look at essential oils. By introducing water into the plant matter (in the form of steam), that steam will come in contact with the essential oil, and cause the essential oil to vaporise at 100°C – much lower temperature than its normal flash point (which could be even as high as vegetable oil at 300°C).

So even though we could evaporate the essential oil from the plant without steam, that would mean we’d need to heat the plant matter to much higher than 100°C, and even as high as 300°C, and this high heat would damage a lot of the volatile molecules that are present in the essential oil.

So by introducing steam into the process, we are able to extract the essential oil at a much lower temperature (around 100°C), and preserve all those fragile heat-sensitive molecules.

That’s what gives us a “whole” oil – one that’s retained the full fingerprint of compounds that are present in the essential oil of the plant. And of course when we retain that full fingerprint, we’re going to have a much more effective essential oil than if we’ve destroyed many of those compounds…because each compound has a unique action in the plant, and in our body. We don’t want to be destroying them.

Cold pressing is another way to extract an essential oil from a plant. We use that with citrus oils, because there is so much citrus oil in the rind of the fruit, that cold pressing becomes a viable alternative to steam distillation. But for most of our oils, there’s such a small amount of essential oil present in the plant matter, that steam distillation becomes the more effective way to extract as much of the essential oil as possible from the plant matter, ie. steam distillation gives us a better yield for most plants.

For example, with Helichrysum, if we have 1000 kg of plant matter, we’ll get 1 litre of essential oil. That’s a very, very small amount, and cold pressing the plant matter just isn’t going to extract enough essential oil.

So this is why we use steam. That steam penetrates the small pockets inside the plant matter where the essential oil is held. And because steam occupies 1,000 times the space that water does, the steam enters

those tiny pockets, expands them and breaks them open, and it releases the essential oil (much better than physically trying to press that plant to release its oil, which is what cold pressing is). And we can do all of this at around 100°C, because that’s the boiling point of water, so we can vaporise the essential oil far lower than its own flash point.

Pressure is also important. When you’re steam distilling, you want your pressure at zero or virtually zero. Higher pressure, just like higher temperature, will damage those fragile constituents.

The Timing of Distillation

This whole process of steam distillation is not an instant thing. It’s not like the steam goes into the cooker and “bam”, we have the essential oil. It takes a certain amount of time for the steam to release the essential oil from the plant.

At the beginning of the distillation, it’s mostly the lighter molecules in the essential oil that are released. So during the first half of the distillation, usually we’ll extract roughly 70 to 80% of the essential oil compounds (depending on the plant and the equipment).

In the second half of distillation, that’s when the remaining 20 to 30% comes out.

The main expense during distillation is the cost of running the boiler. We use diesel boilers, and they use a lot of energy. So it’s natural that a manufacturer would consider stopping at the half-way point, and just doing what we call a “half distillation”. They already have say 80% of the molecules, and it’s going to take the same amount of time again to extract that last 20%. For many manufacturers it’s not worth the cost of doing that.

But the challenge with this is that it’s during that second half of distillation that many of the heavier constituents are released.

When we want to produce a top quality essential oil, we need to extract ALL of the volatile molecules from the plant (ie. its full fingerprint), not leaving behind any set of molecules. That’s when we’re going to have the greatest potency and efficacy from the essential oil, which is what we want, right?

If we were just missing 20% of the volume of the essential oil, it might not be too bad and we could just do a half distillation. But if we’re missing the heavier constituents that make this essential oil whole, then you have something that is unbalanced and incomplete. And at Young Living we don’t want that, because that essential oil isn’t going to give us the results we expect because it’s missing a whole set of ingredients.  

It’s like trying to make a cake, but deciding to only have flour and water, and skip all the other ingredients (ie. no eggs, no sweetener, etc.). It just won’t taste like a cake.

So distillation takes a certain amount of time, and it’s different for every plant. That means we have to always determine how long it will take to extract all of the essential oil from that plant. And how do you know that you’ve got all of the constituents out of the plant? Is there a secret to this?

How long should you distil for?

t’s not really difficult to answer this. What we do is to look at the separator. Remember I said the essential oil and steam runs through a condenser which cools it down? That turns it from steam into liquid again, and from there it enters a the glass separator (as shown here on the right).

The water and the essential oil have a different weight, so the essential oil either sits on top of the water or vice versa, depending on the plant. For most plants the essential oil sits on top of the water. From here, we can siphon off the essential oil.  

The reason for the separator being glass is that we can see the essential oil bubbling into it.

So if I was working with a new plant, one I’d never distilled before, I would start distilling and every 10 minutes I’d siphon off my essential oil from the separator. I’ll keep doing this until there’s no more oil coming out of the condenser and into the separator. That could take 1 hour or it could take 5 or 6 hours, or even longer. It all depends on the plant.

Once I don’t see any more oil coming out, I’m still going to distill for a bit longer, just to be sure. And I’m going to record everything that came out.

After I’ve distilled this plant a few times, I will have a baseline for how long a full distillation takes. Even so, my base line will change. If that plant is a little wet that day, or there’s a bit more humidity in the air, or I don’t send as much steam at the beginning of this distillation, the base line may be altered.

So every single time I distil, I’m going to distill for longer than I think I need, just to see if there’s still oil coming out. And with every batch I will double check the timing it takes to extract all of that plant’s essential oil, so the baseline keeps refining the more data we have.  

Next, I’m going take that oil, and I’m going do an analysis of it just to be sure that all of the constituents have been extracted. I need to do this every time I distil, to ensure we have that full fingerprint.

One of the core principles of Young Living’s Seed to Seal process is that we have to extract all of the volatile molecules from the plant, in other words we always do a full distillation, and never a partial one. We don’t cut corners.

That’s why you could buy a different brand of essential oils, and it may be fair trade organic. But there’s no one auditing your distillation process to see how long you should distil for, and at what temperature and pressure. So without a proper essential oil standard, you just don’t know what you are buying.

That’s the whole reason why Young Living created the Seed to Seal standard.

A bit about Helichrysum

Helichrysum oil comes from the Helichrysum italicum plant, also known as the everlasting daisy, or “immortelle”. The latin roots of the name mean “golden sun”, which reflects the beautiful golden colour of the flowers.

What I have always loved about touching a Helichrysum plant is that I can run my hands through the leaves and flowers, and my hand smells of Helichrysum oil. So even though the yield is low, the experience of the plant itself is sensational.

After you plant a Helichrysum seedling, a year from now you’ll have the first flowers appear and the first harvest. And that will be about 30% of the amount of flowers it will have when it’s fully grown.

The year after that, you’ll get 50% of the amount of flowers of a fully grown plant. By the third year, you have a fully matured plant that will give you the first full harvest. So that takes 3 years, and that plant will stay in the field for 10 years. But after 10 years, we want to rotate the crop with a cover crop just to keep the mineral content up in the soil, and to ensure we keep the soil healthy.

And that’s just for Helichrysum. Every plant is different, so some of our plants are annual, and are replanted every year. Some are trees, and we just harvest the branches so they can live for much longer.

During the harvest we cut the flowers and the stem for Helichrysum, the same that we do for Lavender. In Helichrysum, 50% of the oil is in the flowers, and 50% is in the stem. With Lavender, about 90% of the oil is in the flowers and only about 10% of the oil is in the stem.

You might think it would make sense with Lavender to just harvest the flowers, rather than the stem.

That would mean we take a lot less from the plant (less plant matter), which means we could fit a lot more flowers into the distillation chamber. That would potentially reduce costs. But before we did that, we studied the plant. And we found that the stem contains some different constituents to the flowers, which is why we want to have both the stem and the flowers in order to have that complete essential oil fingerprint.

As for Helichrysum, it’s very, very low in yield – much lower than Lavender. If you have a hectare of Helichrysum plants, that will give you about 5 tons of plants, which will give

you about 5 kg of Helichrysum oil from that entire field. That’s not much. In comparison, a hectare of Lavender will give you also 5 tons of plant matter, but you’ll get 25 to 30 kg of oil from that.

So if you wonder why Helichrysum costs so much more than Lavender oil, it’s because (compared to Lavender) it takes the same amount of time and energy to plant it, the same amount of time and energy to harvest it, the same cost of distillation, but you’ll have 5 times less essential oil than you do for Lavender.

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If you already have your own wholesale account with Young Living, you can order through the shopping cart on your virtual office, or via phone or live chat with your local Young Living office.

If you already have your own wholesale account with Young Living, you can order through the shopping cart on your virtual

office, or via phone or live chat with your local Young Living office. You will need their member number when you place your first order.

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