Jun 6, 2016

Drop by Drop: The Real Price of Essential Oils

I’m a budding entrepreneur. I’m a part time administrative assistant at a local community college. I blog. My husband is disabled. I’m thirty years old and live in a bedroom the size of a closet in my parents’ house.

Let’s face it, I’m not rich. In fact, far from it! I know how to scrimp and save with the best of them. I’m that person you almost ran over in the supermarket parking lot because I stopped in the middle of the road to pick up fallen pennies.

So it’s amusing to me when people talk about my essential oil use like it’s some really expensive drug habit. People just can’t comprehend how I can afford essential oils.

How to afford an obsession with essential oils | Hot Pink Crunch


The secret: quality essential oils aren’t really that expensive.


Unit Pricing For The Win

When you buy a super giant pack of toilet paper from Costco, you probably aren’t thinking, “I spent $28 on a package of toilet paper.” That seems like a lot of money up front just for some toilet paper, right?

But you’re not thinking about it like that! Instead, you’re overjoyed because you only spent a $1 on each roll! You are thinking in terms of price per roll not the overall price per package.

You, my friend, understand the importance of unit prices.

Think about when you’re buying toilet paper, tissues, shampoo, rice, quinoa, olive oil, coconut oil, honey, and corn chips. Don’t you ask yourself, “What is the price per roll/box/ounce/gallon?” We even do this when buying gasoline! We buy the big container of Greek yogurt instead of two little ones because the price per ounce is better.

We look at unit prices when we want to understand the real price of what we are purchasing.

Unit prices tell us the value of the item rather than the overall cost, which can be deceiving. Unit prices help us to understand when we’re getting a good deal and when we’re getting totally ripped off.

In order to understand how much quality essential oils actually cost, and whether they’re really as expensive as people seem to think, we need to look at the unit prices.

Drop by Drop

The unit of an essential oil is a drop.

Consider a real life example. A 15 ml bottle of Peppermint that I buy from Young Living is priced at $21.50. A 15mL bottle usually holds approximately 250 drops. The unit price works out to be about $0.09 a drop.

So you didn’t get a bottle of Peppermint for $21.50. You got 250+ drops of essential oil for $0.09 a drop!
The Real Price of Essential Oils per Drop | Hot Pink Crunch

The Real Price of Essential Oils

Just like you don’t use your whole bottle of shampoo, the whole package of toilet paper, the entire gallon of olive oil, or the full tank of gas all at once, you wouldn’t ever use an entire bottle of essential oil at one time.

Yes, $21.50 seems like a nice chunk of change for a bottle of Peppermint oil until you consider that the bottle is going to last you for months (kind of like that giant pack of toilet paper from Costco). At the very most, I will use one single drop of Peppermint essential oil a day. At the very most!

That’s $0.09 a day for 250 days. Less than a dime a day!

Let’s consider another example. Lavender is also priced at $0.09 a drop. I use two drops of Lavender every night in my diffuser to help me sleep. That’s $0.18 a night for the best rest I’ve ever had in my life.

That doesn’t sound like a expensive drug habit, right?

When you consider essential oils in terms of their unit prices, it really shows you the value of what you’re getting. It shows you the real price. You realize that you are not only getting your money’s worth when you buy a bottle but you are also getting a pretty solid deal too.

If you want Peppermint and Lavender essential oils for less than a dime a day, click here!