When you decide to buy essential oils, it’s imperative to understand what you should buy. Due to the lack of regulation in the essential oils industry, you’ll want to know what to look for, what questions to ask, and why these things are important.
1. Research the Manufacturer
Knowing where the manufacturer is located, and the local laws surrounding the standards of the place, is a good way to ensure that your product is made properly. Does the company use safe practices, pay a fair wage, and use the right techniques for extraction to create a high-quality product?
2. Avoid Therapeutic Grade
Because there is no government oversight for essential oils yet, the term “therapeutic grade” essential oils really doesn’t exist. The term has no legal meaning, so anyone can say it. Some other claims that use words like “grade” or “certified” in their description are potentially misleading.
3. Look for Third Party Testing
Most people in this unregulated industry like to see testing over several months from a third party that does a blind test of the oils to ensure quality. Even if sometimes the testing comes out poor, they take responsibility for it and if the company works to improve it that’s what’s important.
4. Check for Proper Packaging
Essential oils must be contained in dark glass. Most good companies use dark amber glass or blue glass for their essential oils. Note that even in this type of packaging they normally do not last more than a year.
5. Ensure Labels Are Accurate
One way to ensure that the manufacturer knows what they’re doing is with proper labeling. They should use both the Latin names and the country of origin. This can help you know whether you want to use that one or not. The information is vital because you can then look up the growing practices of that country.
6. Understand Their Extraction Method
You also want to know how the company extracts the essential oils. When you’re using oils for a treatment, you want to ensure they use the purest, least potentially contaminating way of creating them.
7. Know How to Sample Essential Oils Best
One thing you need to know when you’re trying to figure out which oils to buy is how to sample them the best way. It depends on the kind of oil and how it was extracted, but most of the time you can just inhale it from the bottle, then drop it on a cotton ball or put a couple drops in a diffuser.
8. Avoid Certain Additives
When you buy pure essential oils, they should not have any additives. It’s okay to buy creams and potions made with essential oils, of course, but that is not the same thing. Once there is an additive such as vegetable oil, it’s no longer really an essential oil and not suitable for treatment.
9. Buy Smaller Quantities
Because essential oils do not last a long time, and because you use so little at a time, always buy it in smaller quantities over larger quantities. The oil you buy will be better quality, and you can be surer of its purity.
Buying the right type of essential oils, and then using them the right way, is the only way you can ensure that treatment with essential oils will work the way they’re supposed to work. Following these tips will help you get it right.
