I am a Young Living Independent Distributor. However, this is an honest review of my personal experience with Young Living. If you <3 a brand other than Young Living—cool! This is just my personal experience with Young Living.
If you choose to make a purchase through one of these links, I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. My full disclosure isn’t that interesting, but you can find it here.
Young Living Essential Oils: Are They Gluten-Free?
My sister-in-law was the first person to tell me about essential oils. I’d never really thought anything about them before (honestly, I might not have even known they’d existed!) She began to tell me about what she’d ordered from Young Living and how to use it. I quickly became excited to see what this ‘oil thing’ was all about and if it would be beneficial to my family’s gluten-free lifestyle.
My first question about Young Living was: Are they a gluten-free company? After a couple conversations with United States customer service, I learned the following: All essential oils singles, essential oil blends, and essential oil roll-ons in the US are gluten-free. Whoo hoo!
Next I was curious how to use them in a way that would be beneficial to my health. My sister-in-law gave me a couple great resources.
The first was the Essential Oils Pocket Reference. This reference book contains everything from information about each oil and oil blends, as well as how to use them. Plus, you can search the book by issue to see what oil is recommended for use.
Check out the Essential Oil Pocket Reference here for more information.
The second resource I used is the book Gentle Babies: Essential Oils and Natural Remedies for Pregnancy, Childbirth, Infants and Young Children. This book contains a bunch of information specifically on how to use Essential Oils safely during pregnancy and on children. It’s really great if you want natural remedies for your home.
Check out Gentle Babies here for more information.
I asked a couple more questions about oils and learned a some things about Young Living’s quality and production that made me order Young Living’s oils right away.
Keep reading to learn more about Young Living’s commitment to quality.
Quality
Unlike the aroma-grade or fragrance-grade oils you can buy at the store, Young Living’s pure essential oils only contain the essential oils. While grocery store oils are cheaper, they usually contain artificial fillers or synthetics. This is not the case with Young Living’s oils (this is also why Young Living’s oils do not have expiration dates—pure essential oils do not expire)!
This makes Young Living’s oils safer than other oils whether you are applying oils topically, diffusing them in the air, or ingesting them (keep reading to learn about Young Living’s Vitality line). You can also apply essential oils to specifically created jewelry to incorporate the oils into your daily routine!
If an oil needs to be diluted (due to it being too thick or something like that), Young Living will dilute it with coconut or another natural oil. In this case, the oil will clearly be labeled as such in the ingredients.
One other bonus of choosing Young Living is that their Vitality line of essential oils are FDA approved for ingestion. I haven’t seen any other pure essential oils that are cleared by the FDA.
Lastly, Young Living has a greater selection of pure essential oils than any other oil company! They currently have around 200 essential oil singles, blends, and roll-ons—all gluten-free!
Keep reading to learn about Young Living’s Seed to Seal commitment.
Are you ready to do gluten-free living totally STRESS-FREE? Get FREE instant access to my online library of free printables designed to make your gluten-free lifestyle totally easy!
Seed to Seal
Young Living is the only essential oils company which controls the production process from the time the plant is a seed, to when the bottle is sealed and sold (get it? seed to seal!). This means that the company controls every. single. part. of. production.
Young Living’s oils are sourced from their own farms, partner farms, or farms that meet Young Living’s strict standards by becoming Seed to Seal Certified. This means that the suppliers adhere to Young Living’s principles and guidelines. They even undergo audits to ensure it! Young Living also works with third-party experts who evaluate their process to ensure that all products used meet standards for ethical sourcing.
In addition, Young Living is so transparent about their process that anyone can actually go visit Young Living’s farms and help harvest or distill oils.
What about their Other Products?
Young Living provides other products including skin care, cosmetics, vitamins, and cleaning supplies. While I believe the products are excellent quality (and personally use a lot of them), these are not all gluten-free. Furthermore, Young Living does not have a standing list of which of these products are and are not gluten-free. This honestly is one of the things that does disappoint me about Young Living. So, what do you do?
If there is a Young Living Product outside of their oils that you want to try, take a look at the ingredients list! Many of their products clearly state WHEAT or BARLEY on their label. So, obviously, for those of us that are gluten-free, that’s a no-go!
When it comes to nutrition products, the ones that contain gluten or ingredients derived from wheat, barley, etc. do state “contains gluten.” Some other food and nutrition products actually state “gluten-free” (such as the gluten-free pancake mix!), so these products do meet FDA gluten-free standards for labeling.
If I’m thinking about trying a new product, and the product does not obviously contain gluten, I always contact customer service to double check. Young Living’s Customer Service is AWESOME! Contact them by phone at 1-800-371-3515, email at productsupport@youngliving.com, or even the Live Chat feature on their website. Yes, this is an extra step, but I’ve always found them to be so helpful!
One of the product lines that I regularly order from Young Living is their Savvy Minerals line. As of the time of this post, the whole Savvy Minerals line is gluten-free with the exception of the lipstick (actually, the lipstick might be, but they warned me that gluten considerations for the lipstick are under review). Honestly, it’s difficult to find gluten-free make up, and I LOVE this make-up! And it’s totally comparable to boutique make-up.
How do you Buy Young Living?
Currently, the only place to buy Young Living is through an independent distributor (like me) on the Young Living Website. Yes, if you google it you’ll find Young Living products for sale on Amazon. But Young Living does not supply them there! (Translation: there is no way to authenticate that what’s in the bottle is Young Living’s product—be warned!)
Want to know more about individual oils and how to order them? Check out this post to learn more.
Hopefully this information is helpful! If you have any lingering questions about Young Living, feel free to contact me directly at thehelpfulgf {at} gmail {dot} com.
I love Young Living Oils! Haven’t tried their Savvy makeup yet though, time to give a try!
I love Savvy makeup–try it and let me know if you love it too!
Young Living is the best! Great read!!!
I just found out the phyto plus is NOT gluten free. I have not researched others. But this info is incorrect!
Hi Rhonda,
I contacting Young Living again about their manufacturing of their essential oils and was again reassured that all oils & blends do not come from gluten-derived ingredients. I replied and asked specifically in regard to the Progessence Phyto Plus you mentioned in this comment and received the following response: Progessence Plus Serum does not contain gluten derived ingredients.
However, as a reminder, the massage oils (such as V6) do contain “wheat germ.”
Progessence phyto plus also states it contains wheat germ therefore must also contain gluten….
Hi Rhonda–
Thanks for commenting. I went on the website to look at the ingredients again to see if the formulation has changed since I first researched Progessence. The ingredients (in the US formulation at least–I can’t vouch for the product in other countries as stated earlier in this post as manufacturing processes may vary across borders) are:
“Copaifera officinalis resin oil, Boswellia carterii oil, Cedrus atlantica bark oil, Caprylic/capric triglyceride, Citrus aurantium bergamia peel oil (Furocoumarin-free), Mentha piperita oil, Tocopherol, Vitex agnus castus extract, Dioscorea villosa root extract, Eugenia caryophyllus bud oil. May contain: Benzyl benzoate, Citral, Citronellol, Eugenol, Farnesol, Geraniol, Isoeugenol, Limonene, Linalool”
None of those things are wheat based–and wheat germ is definitely NOT an ingredient (wheat germ is common V6 and other skin care items offered by Young Living–but not in this item)
I also just contacted YL again and they assured me that Progessence Phyto Plus is formulated gluten-free.
Thanks 🙂
Pre-diagnosis of celiac, I was given a tube of Thieves toothpaste and loved it. Do you know if it is celiac safe?
The last time I contacted Young Living it was safe. However, Young Living will not commit to always sourcing ingredients from the same source/always using the same manufacturing for products other than their essential oils. Therefore, you might want to email customer service asking directly about Theives toothpaste. They usually respond quickly!