Oily Matters: Young Living
Bronwyn Rideout (April 18, 2022)
Trigger warnings: Mentions of Suicide and infant death
Country of Origin: Lehi, Utah, United States
Year Founded:1993
Founded by: Donald Gary Young and Mary Young
Year MLM established in New Zealand: March 3rd, 2018
Generally sells: Essential oils, diffusers, and home products. Moving into ingestible products
“Cult” products: Thieves oil
Is there a buy-in?: Unlike Mary Kay, Young Living does not allow you to avoid buying products by having an online storefront. Starter Bundles in New Zealand range from $53 NZD to $469 NZD.
Name for workforce: The leadership ladder goes: Brand partner, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Crown Diamond, and Royal Crown Diamond. Brand partner is the term used to describe a member or distributor.
Compensation Plan?: Australia/NZ. Recruitment is incentivised through Fast Start Bonuses and Starter Bundle Bonus. The former is a 25% bonus, up to $280 NZD on each order made by a new brand partner for their first three months of enrolment. The latter is a one-time cash bonus of $35 NZD when a new brand partner buys a starter bundle in the same month they enrol.
Income Disclosure Statement?: International Disclosure Statement
Has a reputation for: The dubious qualifications and actions of its founder Gary Young; consultants putting non-food grade products into food and making dubious health claims themselves; the less hip competitor to doTERRA International.
Should you be worried?: This is an active MLM in New Zealand with a stronger spiritual bent than most with a long history of dodgy medical claims and distributors using oils inappropriately. Depending on who you are asking, you may also lose your soul to Satan.
The Background
The early life of Donald Gary Young (or Gary as he was known as), was an interesting one by many accounts and his inclination towards alternative medicines and lifestyle was evident early on. In many ways, it also overshadows the shenanigans of the company he helped create.
Gary was the 2nd oldest of 6 in Mormon household that lived in poverty in Idaho. When he was 18, he tried homesteading in British Columbia, Canada, building a horse ranch and logging business. Gary's foray into essential oils began after a devastating workplace injury that left him paralyzed in a wheelchair in February 1973. As legend has it, the injuries and prognosis were devastating with Young making several suicide attempts, including starving himself on a diet of only water and lemon juice. When he regained sensation in his lower body, he started researching and using essential oils to manage his pain and within 13 years of the accident, Gary successfully ran a marathon. It was here that a distrust of traditional medicine was truly sown.
But….according to evidence found by Business Insider following Young's death in 2018, the truth was greatly exaggerated: Gary was hospitalised for 5 months from February to June 1973 and then was in a wheelchair from June to October of that same year. Gary then commenced a correspondence course in nutrition and herbology. By November he was on crutches and in December 1973, he was an independent logging trucker between Seattle and Alaska until 1979 when another accident (details of which are unknown) led him to sell his equipment and go back to school.
An unaccredited school of course. First, he enrolled at the Burroughs Vita-Flex Institute. The curriculum of this school was based around the teachings of Stanley Burroughs, who is best known for his marketing of the Master Clense, aka the lemon detox diet, in the 40s and 70s. Burroughs included 2 other arms in his natural healing toolbox including colour therapy and a variation of reflexology called Vita Flex, which is still practiced today. Gary then moved onto another unaccredited school, Donsbach Nutrition University, which was founded by an unlicensed chiropractor. He was a poor student and did not complete his studies here. There appears to have been a quarter of a semester spent at a legitimate community college taking pre-med courses before allegedly earning a doctorate degree in naturopathy from another unaccredited, mal-order diploma mill called Bernadean University (The Quackwatch website on this school is glorious for its list of infamous alumni and is worth a read on its own merit).
Young opened a clinic that offered an array of unlicensed medical services, including childbirth.
Young believed that waterbirth could immunised babies against various illnesses. His first wife, Donna Jean, had four successful waterbirths with Young's involvement while the youngest, Rachel, died in a whirlpool bath at a health club Young owned in September 1982 then in 1983, another baby under his supervision had remained underwater for an hour. While Rachel's death was deemed a cardiac arrest and Young wasn't charged, it did trigger local and state police investigation due to those deaths and his claims that he could cure cancer with herbs. He claimed to have access to a special lab in Salt Lake City that would determine body deterioration, organ malfunction, and compatibility for food and food supplements from both hair and blood samples; Gary would supply customers with an insulin syringe to collect the blood themselves, then he would forward the specimen onto this lab. He was put on probation for a year and ordered not to practice medicine in the state of Washington nor to violate similar laws in other states.
Young kept on the alternative medicine path. In 1983, while still on probation, he opened a health company that sold vitamins, extracts, and colonic tips alongside the works of his hero, Stanley Burroughs. He also opened a clinic in Mexico that treated cancer, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, lupus, and others with quack therapies like blood-crystallisation tests and IV or intramuscular injection of vitamins and minerals. The law did catch up with Young eventually and he was the subject of multiple complaints and lawsuits in the late 1980s.
The beginnings of an MLM
Young was supposedly introduced to Oils in 1983 by a sister of a client at the Mexico clinic and founded what would become Young Living by 1988. First called Young Life International, the MLM structure was there from the very start to sell products called Colon Aid and Liver Tone. In 1993, Young met his third wife Mary. Mary also had previous experience with another MLM company, called Sunrider and brought many of her colleagues (as well as the start-up funds) to make Young Living what it is today.
In the Business Insider article, Young's business style is described as chaotic and cult-like, with bizarre demands that ran counter to the efforts of his administrative team to make Young Living a viable and above board operation.
Young Living Financials
Young Living's selling workforce numbers at 6 million globally, contributing to $1.5 billion dollars in annual sales. As per the 2019 international income disclosure statement, approximately 90% will make an annual income of $0 to $1,461 with 50% of all members who enrolled in 2018 not making a purchase in 2019. 66% of 2017 enrolees did not purchase anything in 2019 either. Of course, the potential annual income does not include one's expenses such as shipping, travel, and advertising.
When using the New Zealand website, you cannot sort products by price but for what they are, the products can be costly. A look a the price list for single bottles indicates that the cheapest product is a 15 ml bottle of Lemon with a wholesale price of $19.75 and retail of $26.00 while a 5ml bottle of Rose oil has a wholesale price of $350.20 and a retail of 460.80
A 5ml single bottle of Lavender Essential Oil from Young Living will cost $55.60 NZD with GST but excluding shipping costs. If one becomes a Member, the cost does drop to $42.36 but the likelihood of recruitment attempts is likely to go up as well. When I tried to walk through buying an oil single to see how much shipping would increase the price, I was greeted with a form asking me to agree to the terms and conditions of becoming a Young Living member.
I never found out how much shipping would kick my ass but the mark-up of the product is eye-watering compared to other products on the market. 25ml bottle of Lavender Oil from Thursday Plantation is sold in pharmacies and supermarkets for an average price of $14. Rose Oil can also be purchased online as a significant discount between the $20 and $40 price points in NZ.
Young Living Health Claims
Gary Young died in 2018. While it was claimed by Mary Young that his death was due to a series of strokes, his son from his first marriage revealed that Gary died from Cancer. It seems the truth would have been bad for business. Nevertheless, pandemic anxiety has only embolden many in Young Living's workforce to push their health claims to the extreme.
A 2017 New Yorker essay speculated that the rise in popularity in essential oils is in part of modern interest in the holistic-wellness movement with its attraction grounded less in indulgence and more in anxiety about the current healthcare system. Claims to a purer, older form of knowledge, with a smattering of biblical references here and there, appeal to a sense of self-sufficiency instead of the confusing and daunting jargon of scientific and medical research.
If you thought Gary Young was ridiculous, then can one be surprised when his followers go a bit ham with the same claims and beliefs? There was a lot of noise when US media outlets Salon and CNBC found claims made by distributors that touted Thieves oil (a blend of clove, lemon, cinnamon, eucalyptus, and rosemary) as effective protection against the coronavirus while others make vague claims about products supporting the immune system. In 2014, distributors in the US were also warned by the FDA (Food and Drug administration) against claiming their products treated or cured Ebola.
If you are interested in seeing some of the health claims or learn more about Young Living with commentary, I recommend the following YouTube channels:\
Savannah Marie: Young Living is crumbling! Is This The End?
Savannah Marie: Exposed: The Dark Side of Young Living Essential Oils and Part 2
CC Suarez: Joining Young Living? Watch this first!
Hannah Alonzo: Young Living Deep Dive
Illuninaughtii: Part 1 and Part 2
Netflix documentary (Un)well
Young Living and the Spiritual Side
Young had parted ways with the Mormon church of his youth but still incorporated spirituality by commercialising it, such as this Oils of the Ancient Scripture pack which sells for almost $300 USD.
Young also saw spirituality as a way to evade FDA oversight and encouraged members to promote the spiritual applications of their oils.
The heavy reliance on the bible and spirituality may have backfired on Young Living. Followers of the NZ Skeptics twitter account may recall a BuzzFeed.News article from February which reported on a sudden exodus of sellers from the popular MLM. Free copies of a book titled My Word Made Flesh by Robert Tennyson Stevens and Marcella Vonn Harting (a Young Living distributor who moonlights as a motivational speaker) were sent to high-ranking sellers with an endorsement by CEO Mary Young.
Some sellers became incensed because, well… because of Satan. Specifically, claims that the company was distributing demonic propaganda through a new age self-help book. One former seller, Melissa Truitt shared her claims via a roller coaster of an instagram reel in which she states that the book encouraged readers to conduct a séance with oils, reciting mantras which she interpreted as suggestive of supplanting Jesus or, eve, that the reader is a little God. Christian Twitter and Instagram were alight with a flurry of hearts, god bless yous, and more than a few snarky variations of “I already knew Young Living was into the occult”.
The company has tried to do damage control by claiming that Young's forward was written before most of the book was finished and that co-author Vonn Harting had sent it out to her own downline without approval or knowledge from the company.
In New Zealand
Young Living just doesn't have the heft or visibility in NZ that doTERRA, its main competitor, does. Activity on the Young Living AUNZ Twitter and Facebook pages is sedate and the Instagram is not drawing the number of likes one would anticipate from a supposed “6 Million” member company. Language used so far leans away from explicit health claims and more towards self-care such as “relaxing”, “unwind”, and “balance” although and investigation into claims regarding the efficacy of the Thieves hand-sanitising wipes could be humorous (more so that it is less the oils that kill germs and more the denatured alcohol).
As we crest through the current wave of Covid-19, skeptics should still be vigilant about health claims. If any MLM is making misleading claims, report them to the Commerce Commission