--When shopping for an essential oil brand, consider comparing their business model, too. Ask yourself if you can really trust a brand that engages in “multi-level marketing,” which many consider to be nothing more than a polite name for a pyramid scheme. In other words, ask yourself if you want to buy your oils from a company whose business model is to recruit individuals to distribute and sell their oils, individuals who in turn only really earn their money by recruiting more individuals to sell, and on and on it goes?
Multi-level Marketing, also referred to as MLM, happens to be the business model of the two largest essential oil brands. Think of it this way: If the bottom line of these multi-billion-dollar businesses is not in fact to sell a product and be of service to their clients, but rather to get their recruited sellers to recruit even more sellers, then the product itself is almost immaterial. Because whether an MLM company is selling yoga pants, vitamins, skin cream, or essential oils, it’s really all about how many distributors they can recruit, not what the distributors are distributing.
Of course, we want people to earn money with our products, too, but we go the route of attractive and ethical affiliate programs.
If you want to know more about the brands that engage in such practices, consider reading this investigative piece in The New Yorker. Which also reveals that these brands “encouraged consumers to drink certain oils, a position that’s controversial even among alternative-health practitioners.” Peter Holmes, author of Aromatica, “said that, while he is unaware of the practices of specific companies, ‘You hear about completely untrained housewives telling people to ingest up to fifty drops. That is sheer insanity. That is medically dangerous. It’s a crazy situation.’” So is the the fact that one of these brands “pleaded guilty to illegally trafficking in rosewood oil from Peru, which considers rosewood trees a threatened species.”