Our whole line was formulated with the same intent, so our line of hair products and skin products are universally the same except for the ingredients.

This should shed light on why our products offer superior efficacy relative to market alternatives. Today, there is no shortage of pop-up green wellness companies, 99% of whom use essential oils or other oils as their core ingredients. They do this because these oils do offer value and, in many cases, help with what they are supposed to help.

However, since essential oils are highly volatile and therefore evaporate quickly, and since no two batches of oil are exactly alike, formulating proper and accurate ratios is nearly impossible. This results in products being effective for only short intervals and delivering inconsistent performance.

We solved both of these issues by doing two things—one quite impressive, and one easy and logical.

First, we decided to determine which components in these oils actually worked for what we needed and then isolate those components.

First Study

It’s well known that lavender oil tests as more than a mediocre repellent, particularly against flies. So we broke the oil down and realized that a terpene called linalool is the ingredient in lavender oil responsible for its repellent success. Linalool makes up anywhere from 35% to 50% of lavender oil on a GC-MS test.

So, our horse fly repellent today isn’t made with lavender oil at all. We replaced the lavender with pure linalool, which dramatically increases efficacy.

Second Study

Some repellents work by masking a host’s odor, while others confuse an insect’s receptors. The difference is called spatial repellency. Basically, when certain oils have spatial repellency, it means the bug is repelled before it even gets close to the host, normally by becoming disoriented.

Tea tree oil repels by disorienting insects. That said, it’s not the tea tree oil itself, but rather terpinen-4-ol, which makes up about 30% of tea tree oil, that produces this effect. So our mosquito repellent doesn’t contain tea tree oil—it contains terpinen-4-ol. This isolation of the worthwhile component makes it easier for the skin to tolerate and more effective.

Second Difference: Time

While natural essential oil products are effective in most categories, synthetic chemicals are often able to work for longer periods of time.

We safely and simply bridged this gap by using viscosity to our advantage. Long story short, by using humectants—basically innocuous thickeners like vegetable glycerin—and thicker carriers like castor oil or black castor oil, we were able to slow evaporation times. This allows our products to work longer, whether helping your hair, your skin, or extending the effectiveness of a surface or topical bug spray.

Third and Final Difference: Quality Control & Formula Consistency

By using isolated terpenes, we ensure that the raw percentages we start with are always uniform.

Earlier, we noted that every batch of essential oil is different due to weather, humidity, the facility where it is pressed or distilled, the amount of rainfall where the plant is grown, and countless other uncontrollable variables. Whereas linalool is always linalool, and D-limonene is always D-limonene, meaning our formulas remain consistent every time.

We only source our raw ingredients and oils directly from farms—never from distributors, wholesalers, or trading companies. At least once a year, someone from our leadership team visits these farms, most of them overseas and two domestic, to personally inspect the quality of the plants and observe the entire process from plant to finished oil.

One downside to this approach is that we can’t—and won’t—offer the enormous list of oils that some of our online competitors do. And we’re perfectly fine with that.