Essential Oils: the Scam of the Century

The gals are back with Snake Oil Salesmen part II, and this time Brooke decided to take the theme a little literally. It’s a three-part whirlwind of fraud and false claims and really nice-smelling liquids. That’s right - Brooke’ talking about essential oil salesmen.

Or, rather, one particular essential oil salesman. While the “cure-all-essential-oils” movement is fairly widespread, there is one company in particular that hits oh so many of the corporate deadly sins. That company is the homegrown nightmare known as Young Living.

Wait, Essential Oils are Fake?

Not exactly. Essential oils are fine and a perfectly acceptable use of your money - as long as you know what it is you’re buying. First and foremost, essential oils are just oil compounds extracted from plants. Nothing fancy about it. The plants are distilled with steam or water, or they’re mechanically pressed, the resulting oil extract is combined with a carrier oil (coconut oil, jojoba oil, whatever), and you’ve got yourself an essential oil.

Its simplicity doesn’t necessarily make it useless, though. In fact, quite the opposite! Essential oils have over 20,000 years of loosely-recorded history and have an excellent track record with Aromatherapy to alleviate anxiety, headaches, stimulate memory, etc. There’s also a fair amount of scientific basis for using plants and plant extracts to treat minor ailments. After all, just about all synthetic drugs are based on compounds found in nature, so it’s not too much of a stretch to think a small dose of those compounds would have genuine effects on the body. They also have some pretty sweet domestic uses as mild pest repellants, cosmetic ingredients, etc.

But I cannot stress this enough: essential oils cannot cure anything. There is, quite literally, zero evidence that essential oils are effective treatments of any diseases and therefore cannot be sold as medication. The studies exist - them oils just aren’t going to cure your cold, or cancer, or anything else. Period. Sure, menthol will make your sinuses clear some congestion, but they won’t make your bronchitis go away.

Also, please don’t ingest essential oils or use them in households with pets. They can be harmful to skin in high enough concentrations, so eating them is a huge no-no. Also, even small amounts can be deadly to cats and cause acute renal failure. Don’t do it. Please.

Ok, I Think I See Where This Is Going

Oh, do you, smarty pants? Well, whatever Capitalism-based theory you have about why Young Living sucks, you’re probably only half right. You see, Young Living is a special kind of evil known as a Multi-Level Marketing company.

You may have heard of an MLM in reference to something like Mary Kay, Herbalife, Cookie Lee, PartyLite, the list goes on and on. Basically, these “businesses” are what discerning folks would call a pyramid scheme. They create a product, then take on people as “members” who sell that product on their own time for free, and give a pitiful commission for every sale they and people in their network get. 

To break it down, if you sign up for an MLM, you become a seller. You host parties or hold classes or appeal to whatever social media following you have, and you try to sell your company’s product. The company, in return, doesn’t have to pay you. Instead, they incentivize gathering more people from your personal network of friends, family, and coworkers to work as sellers under you. The more people you have working under you, the more money you can hypothetically make. The con here is that a) MLMs are designed to thrive on their “employees’” failures and b) you’ll lose all your friends. 

MLMs make most of their money from unsuccessful sellers injecting their own money into the company for the shot at making back their cost. It’s a scam. And it also forces you, the seller, to scam everyone you know if you want to make any money. The whole selling point is that you can make good money selling this product - which is a lie - so you have to lie to your friends to get them to start selling. It’s a cycle of bullshit!

Is Young Living Really That Bad?

Worse. The episode goes into the exact numbers and details, but I’ll break it down for you. Young Living has 10 levels of seller ranging from Distributor to Royal Crown Diamond (barf). At the lowest level, you can expect to make an annual salary as low as $0 and as high as $1,022 with an average yearly salary of a whopping $4. 

Holy Christ.

Even on the high end, I make more than the yearly high in two weeks. By about double. Oh, and did I mention that the Distributor level makes up roughly 89% of all Young Living sellers? So the majority of these folks aren’t making anywhere remotely near a living wage, but are constantly being sold this line of financial independence and “abundance.”

Even worse, sellers can’t actually make any commissions until they spend $100 of their own money on product, so the vast majority of average sellers are far outpaying what they make. 

Sounds Terrible - Why Do People Stay?

What an excellent question. Before you judge people who get involved in these scams too harshly, it’s important to know how exactly businesses like Young Living conduct themselves.

From the mouth of someone with firsthand experience (Genetically Modified Skeptic, thank you so much), Young Living is a cult. It has all the makings of cult brainwashing. Large group events where speakers tout their own success (without, of course, discussing the nuance to said success). They function as an echo chamber for pseudoscience, creating an environment where they denounce Big Pharma and the government and insist that they, the multi-billion dollar underdogs, are the real heroes. They talk about DNA alignment and chakras and frequencies, but have no real definitions of those terms when pressed for answers. 

They also fully and boldly blame their sellers for any failure to sell their products. After all, essential oils are magic and infallible, aren’t they? So it must be that the sellers aren’t motivated enough, aren’t applying themselves, aren’t spending enough money, etc. 

Essentially, Young Living has an incredibly effective system for creating an Us vs. Them mentality in their sellers. It also doesn’t hurt that the sellers lose all their outside friends, so their fellow sellers become their only social outlets. 

Damn, So They’re a Cult and They Scam People Out of Money - Could It Possibly Get Worse?

You bet it could! Turns out, this episode was ripe for a plot twist. The founder of Young Living, Donald Gary Young, is a legitimate pathological liar and scam artist. I am not exaggerating. For a full image of the breadth of his crimes, I highly encourage you listen to the episode. Not only will it be more comprehensive, you’ll also get the added bonus of listening to Olivia and Brooke melt down. 

In a nutshell, Donal Gary Young has been pulling medical scams for the entirety of his adult life. He claims in his biography that he was crippled by a logging accident in his 20s, but there is no medical, eyewitness, or news media evidence that the accident ever occurred. Now, I’m not saying Donald Gary Young is a liar. I’m just saying that healing from a fully crippling spinal injury by drinking lemon water (this is legitimately what he claims) is a little bit impossible. That’s all. No legally binding statements here.

After he magically healed from his paralysis, he became super interested in alternative medicine and enrolled in the American Institute for Physioregenerology. He lied about graduating, but he actually dropped out and defaulted on $2,000 of loans. Cool!

In order, Donald Gary Young opened fake clinics in Spokane, Washington, Tijuana, Mexico, Chula Vista, California, and Ecuador. He was arrested multiple times for practicing medicine without a license. In Spokane, his clinic offered birthing services despite his zero training in that area, and he actually ended up killing his own infant daughter by trying to deliver her in a Whirlpool bath and holding her underwater for over an hour. In Tijuana, he ran a clinic that claimed to be able to put cancer into remission for $6,000 and to cure it completely for $10,000. He also said he could detect cancer with a blood test. An LA Times reporter reached out to him to test his blood for cancer, which Young claimed had all the signs of liver failure and late-stage cancer. When the reporter revealed that the blood was from a healthy house cat, Young still didn’t give up and claimed that the cat must have leukemia. It didn’t. 

After he started Young Living Research Center, he began treating illnesses like Lupus and cancer with essential oils. He also employed a pediatrician who had legitimately killed a patient with Dissociative Personality Disorder who claimed she had been injected with cancer by a witch. He overdosed her on Demerol. But that’s a whole other thing.
In his personal life, Young was eventually fired from his own company for his multiple arrests, after which he tried to break into the headquarters with an axe. He also used said axe to threaten his wife and children, who all got restraining orders against him after the incident. 

In 2014, he was issued a warning by the FDA which essentially calls out that his website and sellers were alleging that essential oils can cure a whole host of diseases including Ebola, Parkinson’s disease, autism, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, insomnia, heart disease, and PTSD. Which is, you know, illegal. Also, in 2015 his oils were found to have extremely high levels of lead in them. After the findings were published, he stepped down and put his wife in charge of the company. What a class act.

Man, that’s… a lot

You bet it is, pal. 

Olivia and Brooke are pretty consistently terrified by the moral corruption of late stage Capitalism, so that’s pretty played out. But what this trend of giant corporations playing on the fear of the masses does is so much more insidious than a simple money-grab. 

Here’s a breakdown: a giant company tells you, an outsider and self-professed underdog, that your suspicions about Big Pharma and the government are correct. It’s objectively true that those entities are corrupt in some fashion or another, so you believe the exaggerations about that corruption without any questions. The giant company then tells you that only they know the truth, and that they’re on YOUR side. They gain your trust and stroke your ego until you’ll believe just about anything they say. Then, through aforementioned cult brainwashing techniques, the company systematically alienates you from people who aren’t in their inner circle.

If someone tries to cite science to you, you won’t listen because you’ve been groomed to mistrust anything scientific. Arguing with you won’t work, because your beliefs are inherently tied to your social life, your personal life, your career, etc. In a nutshell, this massive company is manipulating people into believing pseudoscience and scorning doctors simply because they want to make more money.

People who look to essential oils to cure their cancer are scared. They don’t want to feel more sick doing a rigorous chemotherapy regimen. They don’t want to face the idea that they don’t understand what’s happening to their bodies. It’s a horrifying ordeal - so no wonder it’s so appealing to think that it could just be spirited away with a magic potion? Young Living is breeding a mentality that avoids doctors and medicine, avoids science, avoids fact for the sake of their bottom line. They don’t care about their sellers or consumers. They don’t care about health. They don’t care about you.

We plead with anyone involved with this company to evaluate what they’re doing to you. Don’t be complicit in your own manipulation. Essential oils and alternative medicine is a multi-billion dollar industry that makes its profit on misguiding the public and spreading misinformation. Do your research. Understand what plant oils can and cannot do. You owe it to yourself to take care of your body. 

We love ya. Use essential oils responsibly and for what they’re meant to do: make your bath bombs smell good.