What Are Essential Oils??

Basically, essential oils are the substances in plants that help the plant stay healthy. In a plant they do things like repel pests, fight disease, and keep the plant functioning at it’s best. It’s the life blood of the plant, and we can compare essential oils to our own blood. Our blood is made up of all sorts of things…red blood cells, white blood cells, proteins, and way more than that. Essential oils have constituents too. Monoterpenes, sesquiterpenes, esters, phenols, just to name a few.

The constituents in essential oils are what give them their therapeutic function. Different constituents function differently, which is why something like Lemon is often used for cleaning or removing labels off of bottles…among other things, because it’s high in monoterpenes, and something like Frankincense (high in sesquiterpenes) may be used for skin support or emotional support. The different levels of constituents in the oils is important, because that’s what makes them “work” more than just smell good. So, you can have essential oils that smell good, but have no actual constituents because of how they were distilled.

This is one of the reasons I ended up with Young Living, because they distill all their oils themselves and have been doing that for almost 30 years. Without the constituents, you just end up with a nice smelling product, but not necessarily one that is therapeutic grade. Or, they may have some constituents, but not a peak level, so they don’t give you the breadth of action that you might expect.

How Do They Work?

To understand how the oils work, let’s talk for a minute about how they’re extracted from the plant. Most essential oils are steam distilled. This means that the plant material is put into a large container, and steam is pumped into the plant material making a vapor that contains both the water vapor (steam), and the very small essential oil molecules. That vapor moves through a tube into a collection devise where the water and oil naturally separate

But, think about how small and light the molecules need to be in order to travel with the steam. Even after all the oil molecules join back together, they’re still very, very small…between 300-500 amu (atomic mass units)…so, so, so tiny that a drop of essential oil has 40 million trillion molecules. So, when we use essential oil, the molecules are so small that they can permeate our skin and enter our blood stream, and provide support to various systems within our body.

Anything that we smell…food cooking, a skunk as we drive by, or essential oils, are all very small molecules of that odorant. However, the constituents within essential oils make them very powerful, so we’re not just smelling something nice, we’re smelling something that also contains various benefits based on the constituent levels within that oil.

That’s one reason why it’s very important to know where the oils come from that we use. I could grow a lavender plant and extract the essential oil myself, but I don’t have the mechanisms to test for the constituents to know if I distilled it long enough, and I don’t have the soil testing tools to see if the soil where the plants are grown contain any residual pesticides. Because Young Living owns their own farms, and they’ve been doing this for so long, they can say with certainty that their soil is organic, they compost the leftover plant material and use it on the farms, and use their oils in the cultivation process for pest and weed management. So, those tiny molecules we’re breathing when we take a whiff of oil are really just what we expect in terms of the constituents.