Is Your Helichrysum Real or Fake?

Are You Buying Counterfeit Helichrysum Oil?

Helichrysum is known for its restorative properties. It provides excellent support to the skin, liver, nervous systems and numerous other applications.* It is also extremely expensive to produce.

As with anything valuable and scarce, the opportunity to produce counterfeits and pass them off as the real thing (or at least to stretch supply) is a temptation too great to resist.

A few months ago, David Stewart, PhD, wrote an article called, "How Do You Know Your Helichrysum Is Good?" that has become quite popular. It's about what happens to helichrysum in today's marketplace. I'm going to do a synopsis of the article here.

There are many ways to cheat and produce an oil that looks and smells like the original. Here are the usual methods:

• Diluting – real oil is mixed with colorless, odorless substances to thin out and "stretch" the supply.
• Extracting oil from similar plant species – oils from inexpensive plants that are easy to grow and distill and extracted, then manipulating to imitate the fragrance or taste of the expensive oil by either deleting certain compounds or adding synthetic compounds.
• Cutting costs of distillation – distilling at high temperatures and high pressures is quick and cheap. It may save time, labor and fuel, but these practices produces inferior oils.
• Extracting the oil by using petrochemical solvents – these chemical solvents leave toxic traces in the finished oil.

The average nose can't tell the difference. These shortcuts and deceptions can even fool the AFNOR standards. However, the oil is left without the full range of compounds necessary to have healing properties. It is basically useless.

Imitation helichrysm can easily be synthesized to smell exactly like the real oil at a fraction of the cost of natural helichrysum – but without any of its therapeutic qualities.

Worse yet, is when synthetic helichrysm is passed off as the highest quality. Unfortunately, this happens more often than people realize. Years ago, Young Living received a huge shipment of helichrysum (a year's supply). When Gary Young, founder of Young Living smelled it, he immediately knew that the main ingredient of real helichrysm, neryl acetate, was missing.

Further gas chromatograph analysis by the Young Living Testing Laboratory head chemist, Dr. Sue Chow, proved he was correct.

The shipment was rejected and returned to the supplier. This meant that Young Living went without helichrysum for over a year. But they would rather go without than market a fake oil.

But the wholesaler didn't suffer. The sad news is that that returned shipment of helichrysum was resold to another company who put it on the market as therapeutic-grade helichrysum. That means this entire shipment of a year's supply of helichrysum was sold to unsuspecting consumers as therapeutic-grade!

Did this company know exactly what they were selling and simply not care? Did they lack the technical expertise to detect a manipulated, synthetic oil? Did they settle for the word of their unscrupulous wholesaler and not bother to check?

We'll never know the answers to these questions. But chances of your having a nose that is acutely trained to detect false oil are slim. Chances of your having advanced laboratory equipment to analyze it (and knowing how to use it) are also slim. And today, chances of buying true theraputic-grade off the selves is equally slim.

Young Living Essential Oils has the expertise and the integrity to provide you with pure therapeutic-grade oil every time. When you buy Young Living Therapeutic Grade helichrysum (or any of their other oils), you know they are pure and truly therapeutic-grade. Why take the chance with any other brand?

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* This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Item No. 3563, 5 ml – Helichrysum Essential Oil