Part of the guide: MLM Reviews: The Honest Index
A friend pressed a bottle of lavender into your hand, told you it changed her sleep, her stress, maybe her whole life, and then mentioned you could build an income doing the same. Now you’re typing “young living review” at midnight, trying to sort the real from the rehearsed. Is this the gold standard of essential oils, or a thousand-dollar starter kit with a wellness logo on it? I’ve spent over twenty years in this industry, and I’ve had hundreds of people ask me about Young Living. I’ll give you the honest version, including the part the person who pitched you genuinely doesn’t know.
Let me start with what’s true, because Young Living earns more credit than most of the companies I review.
Young Living is not a fly-by-night operation. It was founded in 1993 by D. Gary Young, ran out of Utah for three decades, grew to operate in more than 100 countries, and at its peak did well over a billion dollars a year. That’s not a scheme that vanishes next quarter. That’s an institution. So the question is not “will it disappear.” The question is the one you actually care about: are the oils worth the price, and can a normal person build a real income here? Those have different answers, and I’m going to give you both.
In this guide
- What Young Living actually is
- The products, looked at honestly
- The Young Living compensation plan, explained plainly
- The honest part most Young Living reviews skip
- So who actually wins with Young Living?
- If you’re going to build Young Living anyway, here’s the real playbook
- The verdict on this Young Living review
- The thing that actually decides whether you make money
What Young Living actually is
Young Living is a multi-level marketing company that sells essential oils, supplements, and personal-care products through independent members rather than stores. Gary Young built it after years chasing alternative medicine, learning distillation from a French lavender grower, and eventually buying farmland to grow and distill the plants himself. He died in 2018. His wife, Mary Young, runs the company as CEO today, and it’s headquartered in Lehi, Utah.
The flagship promise is something Young Living calls “Seed to Seal,” its sourcing and quality standard. The company owns farms, controls distillation, and tests its oils, and it markets that vertical control hard. Here’s the thing. That part is largely real, and it’s the most legitimate differentiator the company has. Most essential-oil brands buy bulk oil from brokers and bottle it. Young Living actually does grow and distill a meaningful share of its own. If purity and provenance matter to you, that’s a genuine point in its favor, and I won’t wave it away.
The products, looked at honestly
The catalog is broad: single oils like lavender, peppermint, and frankincense, proprietary blends, the Thieves cleaning line, NingXia Red (a wolfberry supplement drink the company is known for), and personal-care items. A lot of people genuinely love this stuff. The Thieves cleaner has a real following, and NingXia Red has loyal repeat buyers who’d keep ordering it whether there was a comp plan or not. That matters, and I’ll come back to why.
Now the part the pitch skips. A 15ml bottle of Young Living lavender runs around $30. Frankincense runs $80 to $95. You can buy oils that pass the same purity tests from Plant Therapy, Edens Garden, or NOW for a fraction of that, often a third to a fifth of the price. If you’re weighing the two big oil MLMs head to head, I broke down doTERRA vs Young Living separately. I’m not saying Young Living’s oils are bad. They aren’t. I’m saying you are paying a significant premium, and a good chunk of that premium exists to fund the commissions paid up the line to whoever recruited whoever recruited you. That’s not an insult. It’s just arithmetic, and an educated buyer deserves to see it stated plainly.
One more fact worth getting straight, because the marketing blurs it on purpose. Essential oils are not approved drugs. In September 2014 the FDA sent Young Living a warning letter after its distributors marketed oils as possible treatments for Ebola, cancer, Parkinson’s, and other serious conditions. The company later settled class-action claims over health marketing too. So if anyone tells you a bottle “treats” or “cures” a condition, they are past the evidence and past the law. Oils can smell wonderful, help you relax, and make a room feel like a spa. That’s a real benefit. It is not a medical claim, and the company itself got told so by the federal government.
The Young Living compensation plan, explained plainly
Educated readers want the mechanics, not the hype reel, so here’s the structure as cleanly as I can lay it out.
You join, usually by buying a starter bundle (historically around $200 for the premium version, with smaller entry points available). To earn commissions, you need to hit 100 PV a month. PV is “personal volume,” roughly a point per dollar of qualifying product, so in practice that’s about $100 of product purchased every single month to stay commission-eligible. Hold that number. It’s the hinge of the whole thing.
From there it’s a unilevel plan stacked with bonuses:
- Retail profit of about 24% when a true retail customer buys at full price.
- A fast-start bonus paying 25% on the orders of people you personally enroll for their first few months.
- Unilevel commissions reaching down several levels of your organization once you rank up.
- Generation and rising-star bonuses that pay on the volume of leaders deep in your team.
- Rank advancement climbing from Star and Senior Star through Executive, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Crown Diamond, all the way to Royal Crown Diamond, with each rank gated by larger organizational volume and leg requirements.
If your eyes glazed over, good, because that’s the point. Notice how much of that list pays you for building a team, and how little depends on a customer who just wants a bottle of lavender and never signs up. The 100 PV requirement quietly turns most members into their own best customer. You spend $100 a month to stay qualified to earn, which means you have to sell a meaningful amount just to get back to zero.
The honest part most Young Living reviews skip
Now the concern, stated carefully, because words matter and I won’t throw around language I can’t stand behind.
What the income numbers actually show
In December 2019 a proposed class action was filed in California alleging Young Living operated as an unlawful pyramid scheme. The numbers in that complaint are worth quoting, because they came out under legal scrutiny, not from a hater’s blog. The suit alleged that in 2016 the median monthly income for 94% of members was $0, averaging about a dollar a month. By 2018, it claimed nearly 89% of members earned an average of roughly $4 a year, and that over 96% of members lost money once you counted what they spent. That case was voluntarily dismissed with prejudice in November 2023 after the parties settled, with terms undisclosed.
I want to be precise about what that does and doesn’t mean. A dismissal-by-settlement is not a court ruling that the company is a pyramid scheme. I am not aware of any FTC or court finding that Young Living is one, and absent that, I’m not going to slap the word “scam” on it. That’s not me hedging. It’s me being accurate, which is the only thing that makes a review worth reading.
The company’s own income disclosure statements tell a quieter version of the same story. In one recent year the average annual income across all members was around $236. The same disclosures admit that roughly 55% of people who enrolled the prior year made no purchase at all the following year, and that number climbed past 66% for people two years in. Translation: most people join, buy a kit, and drift away. And remember, those income figures don’t subtract a dime of what members spent on product, events, samples, or that recurring 100 PV.
Here’s the test that cuts through all of it, and the regulator handed it to you for free. The FTC’s guidance on MLMs says the line between a legitimate company and an illegal pyramid is whether real product is being sold to real customers outside the business, people buying because they want the thing, not because they want the check. So here’s the one question to ask anyone pitching you Young Living, and watch their face: “How many of your buyers are customers who never signed up as members?” If the honest answer is “almost none,” you already know what you’re looking at, no matter what the brochure calls it.
Tired of comp plans you have to take on faith, and income numbers you only see after you’ve already paid? I’ll show you one where every commission settles on a public contract you can read yourself, in about twelve seconds, before you trust a word I say. Drop your name and I’ll send you the walkthrough.
See a comp plan you can actually verify →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
So who actually wins with Young Living?
Let me be fair, because some people genuinely win here, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
The people who make real money in Young Living are, overwhelmingly, the early movers who built large teams years ago and the natural connectors with big, warm networks and real leadership skill. The Diamonds and Crown Diamonds are real, and a few of them earn very well. That’s true of almost every mature MLM, from Amway on down, and it’s true here. There’s also a quieter, smaller win that gets no applause: the person who buys NingXia Red or the Thieves line, genuinely loves it, reorders it for years, and never wanted a business at all. If you can comfortably afford the products and they make your life better, that’s a perfectly good personal purchase. Just buy them for what they are, not for what the comp plan promises.
The person who tends to lose is the one this review is really for. The capable professional, already earning well, who buys a kit believing the oils will “sell themselves,” signs up for 100 PV a month, and discovers six months later that the only people who’ll pay full retail are other hopefuls they have to recruit. That person didn’t fail because they aren’t smart. They failed because the model was doing exactly what its incentives were built to do, the same recruiting-heavy trap you’ll recognize from the Herbalife opportunity and most others.
If you’re going to build Young Living anyway, here’s the real playbook
Maybe you’ve decided you love the products and you want to build it. Good. I’d rather hand you a real plan than wave you off, so here’s how you’d actually do it instead of spamming your sister-in-law. Seven steps, in order, and this is the part worth saving.
- Become a real customer first, for ninety days. Use the oils and the NingXia daily before you sell a thing. You cannot honestly sell a result you’ve never felt, and your own story is the only marketing a skeptic respects. If after ninety days you wouldn’t reorder at full price with your own money, stop here, because you have your answer.
- Pick your entry on the math, not the excitement. The premium bundle is fine if you’ll genuinely use the contents. Don’t buy a bigger position to “qualify” for a rank you have no team to fill yet. You can always step up later from profit instead of from savings.
- Build a customer list before a member list. Find ten people who will buy a product purely because they want it, with zero interest in the business. Just ten. If you cannot find ten real customers, the FTC’s own test just told you this won’t work as a business, and you learned it for a few phone calls instead of a year of autoship.
- Lead with the honest version. Say “these are high-quality oils at a premium price, they’re great for relaxation and a nice home, and they are not medicine.” Counterintuitive truth: the honest pitch outsells the hype pitch to the exact high-income people you actually want, because they can smell exaggeration, and your honesty makes them trust everything else you say.
- Generate leads with content, not your contact list. Post genuinely useful videos about sleep, stress, a clean home, simple routines, and let strangers come to you. Your warm market is forty people and a Thanksgiving you’ll regret. The internet is unlimited, and it never gets awkward at dinner.
- Only then mention the opportunity, and only to customers who already love the product. A happy repeat customer is the only person who should ever hear your business pitch. That keeps you on the right side of the FTC line automatically, because your team gets built on people who’d buy even if there were no check.
- Track the one number that matters: outside-customer sales. Not sign-ups, not PV, but sales to people who never joined. If that number isn’t growing every month, you don’t have a business, you have an expensive autoship and a recruiting habit.
Now read that list back and count how many of those seven steps Young Living actually does for you. None. The company gave you a product and a comp plan. You have to do the customers, the content, the leads, the trust, the follow-up, and the team. Those are the whole business. And they are the same six things in every company you will ever look at.
The verdict on this Young Living review
Young Living sells genuinely good products, backed by a real farm-and-distillation operation that most competitors can’t match, at prices inflated well above comparable oils to fund the commission structure. It has decades of history, a billion-dollar footprint, and an A+ BBB rating, alongside a 2014 FDA warning, settled health-claim litigation, a dismissed-by-settlement pyramid suit, and income disclosures showing the typical member earns a few hundred dollars a year before expenses, with most earning essentially nothing. It is not, on any documented basis I can find, a “scam” in the legal sense. It is a legitimate, high-cost MLM whose incentives lean toward recruiting and autoship, wrapped around products many people sincerely love. If you want the oils, buy them and enjoy them. If you want the business, go in with both eyes open and build it the honest way above, or don’t go in at all.
But here’s the part that matters more than my verdict on any one company.
The thing that actually decides whether you make money
Whether Young Living works for you has almost nothing to do with Young Living. I’ve watched people get rich and go broke in the same company in the same month. I’ve seen a builder with five thousand people in their organization earning less than someone three rungs below them with a fifth of the team, because one of them had a system and the other had a downline. The variable was never the oil, and it was never the comp plan. It was whether they had a way to generate leads, make sales, build a team, and create real influence, instead of just a product and a hope.
That’s the quiet thing the capable, frustrated reader already suspects. You’re not stuck because you picked the wrong company. You’re stuck because you’ve been handed products and comp plans your whole career and never once handed a system you could actually trust and verify. Leaders use systems. Everyone else buys positions and wonders why the dashboard looks busy while the bank account doesn’t move.
Notice how that lands in your body, because the feeling is the whole point. The builder who can pull up the contract on their phone and show any prospect exactly where every dollar settles carries himself differently than the recruiter quietly praying the upline doesn’t change the rules next quarter. One of them is calm. The other is braced for the email that says the plan moved. You already know which one you’d rather be at the next dinner where someone asks what you actually do for money. That calm isn’t a personality trait. It’s downstream of a system you never have to defend, because anyone can check it for themselves.
So before you commit to a hundred dollars of autoship a month on faith, look at what a system built for trust actually looks like. The one I use pays 100% of every commission on a public smart contract, settled in the same block as the sale, in about twelve seconds. You don’t take my income on faith. You read the contract yourself on a block explorer before you believe a word I say. No skim, no “the plan changed,” no comp you can’t audit. The contract is the truth. That’s the difference between a position and a system, and it’s the whole reason one keeps paying when you step away and the other doesn’t. If you’re new here, start here, and when you want the short list of what I actually use, it’s on my recommended tools and systems page.
You don’t need another starter kit. You need the system underneath it. This is how I generate leads, make sales, and build a team, with every commission settled on a public contract you can verify before you trust me. Enter your name and I’ll send you the walkthrough.
Show me the system I use →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Independent review. We are not affiliated with Young Living and earn nothing if you buy its products or join its program. This is analysis and opinion, not legal or medical advice, and nothing here is a health claim. As with any opportunity, most participants earn little to nothing and no income is guaranteed; Young Living’s own disclosures confirm this. Company facts, pricing, and figures are accurate to the best of our research as of June 2026 and can change, so verify the live pages. Sources: Young Living official income disclosure, Young Living company history (Wikipedia), the 2019 pyramid-scheme class action and its 2023 dismissal, and the FTC on MLMs and pyramid schemes.
See also: the tools and systems I actually recommend, and start here if you’re new.
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The ninety-day become-a-real-customer-first test is the one I’d actually run before touching anything else in this article. Week three is usually where the ‘I’d totally reorder this’ feeling either holds or quietly turns into ‘I’m ordering this because I signed up for autoship, not because I ran out and wanted more.’ That distinction only shows up with time.
Kelsey’s timeline is useful, though it assumes ninety days of product cost is affordable to absorb before knowing whether you even like doing this as a business. That’s a real barrier for anyone testing this on a tight budget, not just a patience problem.
Does the outside-customer-sales number the article recommends tracking include repeat NingXia or Thieves buyers, or only brand-new customers each month?
Ivy’s question points at a real gap: (1) the FTC test wants outside-customer sales, (2) the article never defines whether repeat buyers count the same as new ones, (3) that distinction changes what ‘the number is growing’ actually proves. Repeat buyers prove product quality. New buyers prove the business is finding customers, not just keeping old ones happy.