Vibrational Essential Oils
Most companies that sell essential oils are aiming to bring you a beautiful aroma. Young Living is dedicated to something far beyond aroma. Essential oils are made up of a complex “Fingerprint” of compounds. Where the majority of producers extract the main aromatic compounds and end up with a partial fingerprint (ie. a pretty smell), Young Living’s focus is to capture the entire essential oil fingerprint.
This is the magic ingredient that gives Young Living essential oils the ultimate potency, frequency and innate intelligence, so you will experience results from every drop.
However, achieving this level of quality (the full fingerprint of the oil) is time consuming and costly, which is why virtually every other supplier will find short-cuts.
In France, Lavender is typically cooked for 45 minutes in a standard sized cooker to extract the essential oil. However, Young Living discovered that they needed to cook Lavender for 90 minutes in this sized cooker in order to capture the full fingerprint of constituents.
That means you can buy beautiful French Lavender oil from other suppliers which is indeed organic and has been carefully tended, but it still won’t match the quality of Young Living’s Lavender oil. It will probably smell very similar, maybe even identical, because virtually all the aromatic compounds will be released in that first 45 minutes….
Cypress oil is typically cooked for 2 and a quarter hours. However, Young Living discovered that if you cook Cypress oil for 24 hours, 18 key active constituents will be released in the final 20 minutes of cooking. If you cook for 23.5 hours, you miss out on these constituents. So Young Living cooks their Cypress oil for 24 hours, in order to capture this complete fingerprint.
Because a large part of the cooking cost is in the running of the boiler which makes the steam for the cooker, there is a large difference in the cost of cooking for 2.5 hours versus 24 hours, and even in the cost of cooking for 90 minutes versus 45 minutes. Those companies using shorter cooking times are going to be getting through a lot more batches of plants for the same cooking cost that Young Living puts into one batch!
Most companies use pressure to drive up the temperature in the cooker. This cooks the plant material faster, and thus extracts the oil faster. But the issue with the high temperatures is that they destroy many of the fragile constituents in the essential oil. You’ll still get the primary aromatic molecules, so the oil will probably still smell similar…but you’ve missed out on the extraordinary diversity of molecules that is what makes the essential oil in the plant such a MAGIC substance! In other words, you’ve ended up with a partial fingerprint, and thus an unbalanced set of molecules that can do more harm than good.
Young Living always cook their plants at the lowest possible temperature needed to still effectively extract the essential oil. I liken it to raw food cooking. Would you prefer to eat vegetables that have had the “crap” boiled out of them, so all the goodness is lost, or would you prefer delicately blanched vegetables that retain their flavor and life force? I’m sure you know by now which one I would go for!
So next time you are comparing prices between Young Living oils and any other brand, know that you are comparing apples with oranges….it’s like comparing a Lamborghini to a Hyundai!
There is one other point of interest here, and that’s the shape of the distiller lid. Gary Young, the founder of Young Living, was traveling the world researching the art of distillation. He came across an ancient distiller in a museum, and noticed that its lid was conical, whereas the modern distillers all had rounded lids.
There was also a difference in where the pipe was located on the cooker (this is the pipe which carries the steam and essential oils out of the cooker and into the condenser). Modern distillers had this pipe at the top of the cooker, and not on the lid. This allowed them to more easily open and close the lid without having to dismantle the pipe connection each time.
Gary Young is a true genius, and he began thinking, “I wonder why the Ancient people used the conical shape? I wonder if the location of the pipe makes a difference?” So Gary built a distiller to match the specifications of the ancient distillers, and he climbed in once the steam had been turned on (a very brave thing to do!).
What he observed was that the conical lids and the position of the pipe at the very top of that cone made a significant difference. The steam circulated with ease, spiraling up the cone, and out the top. In contrast, the modern distillers had their steam trapped for longer in the cooker….meaning the essential oils were getting “overcooked” by lingering in the hot cooker for longer.
Since that discovery, Gary has transitioned all of his cookers over to the ancient specifications, albeit using the top quality stainless steel in order to avoid any potential contamination of the oils from the metal of the cooking pot.
However, the excellence that Young Living brings to the cooking process is only one small aspect of what sets their oils apart from other brands.
Click here to learn about their passion for plants.