If you are familiar with the basic essential oils, you know that most of them are pretty easy to find and can be easily incorporated into most budgets. However, you might be wondering why some of the more obscure essential oils are so rare, expensive and hard to get your hands on. Such rarity depends on a variety of factors.
Consider the following potential reasons why some essential oils are so hard to find.
Resources are Scarce
The naturally low supply of some essential oils is often attributed to the scarcity of the resources needed to make those essential oils.
For example, the renowned Young Living Essential Oils distributor has an essential oil known as corsican helichrysum, which is made from a specific strand of helichrysum flower that is rare and found only in the Mediterranean.
Since a lot of those flowers are required to make just one bottle, not many of those bottles can be made at once, and as consumers often want them for their beauty routines for their acne treating properties, there is a high demand for them. If you are searching for corsican helichrysum essential oil, you will need to be fast and you will need to be ready to pay over a hundred dollars for one small bottle.
Some Ingredients cannot Be Harvested or Imported
As is with a lot of other products, there are some times where an essential oil cannot be made available in one place or another due to restricted products or banned ingredients. If you were to try and go to another country and bring back a bottle or two of coveted essential oils to your home country and there are banned ingredients in those oils, you might find yourself being questioned by customs upon arriving home.
While you may not ever be able to complete your essential oil collection, it is better than being detained for having something that you should not. Another reason some products cannot be shipped internationally is because they require an ingredient that is endangered and has been discontinued. If you were to try to harvest such an ingredient, you might get into serious trouble.
While it is understandable to want to know what properties that essential oil has, it is more important to protect whatever plants are endangered. Remember that there is always a reason for an oil to be discontinued, and if production is ever to get back on track, the plants that make up those oils must be cultivated safely and fruitfully before it can happen.
They Take a Long Time to Make
While essential oils are relatively easy to make for the most part, some of them are not due to some reason or another. If a manufacturer is working with a rare plant, they need to take extra care in the extraction process. After all, they are most likely working within strict boundaries and restrictions, and they may only have one batch of the plant to work with and no ability to get any more until the next delivery.
When there is only one shot at getting something right, everything is required to slow down for the sake of being as meticulous as possible to ensure the best chance of success.
Making essential oils also takes some special equipment in official manufacturing setups, and like all equipment, that equipment is bound to break down at some point. Any equipment breakdown automatically causes a delay in production, and the extent of that delay is determined by how long the equipment takes to repair.
There are also other things that can cause delays, such as inclement weather, packaging issues such as damaged bottles and label creation, and communication issues with everyone from shipping providers to retail outlets and individual customers.
Essential oils are a wonder the world over, but there is a lot that goes into making them that you do not see, as well as a lot of complications that can arise during the manufacturing process.
Keep these reasons in mind and if you are looking for rare essential oils, remember to have patience. You might be able to get your hands on them, and if you do, make sure to use them sparingly and responsibly, for that may be your last bottle.
