The Journey of a Drop: How UMA's Handcrafted Blends Are Made (with Love)

by Shrankhla Holecek on Apr 14, 2018

We’ve given you a sneak peek into UMA’s essential oil production process, but have you really thought about what it takes to create our highly potent and precious oils?

From growing and harvesting the plants to extracting, formulating, and bottling the oils, it’s no easy feat. Especially considering every step of the process is done entirely on our heirloom family estate in India with painstaking attention to detail and unrivaled expertise.

Spread over a 100-acre meadow, our botanicals are grown on nutrient-rich soil with dedicated caretakers overseeing the entire growth process. They are sure to select only the finest seeds and harvest each plant no more than two times before re-planting.

Dr. Anand Bharadwaj, the leading expert in essential oils across Asia, heads the extraction team and uses industry leading techniques and skilled personal touches to create the most highly impactful essential oils for each of our blends.

From there, our Chief Ayurveda Doctor, Dr. Tiwari, concocts our potent formulas based in centuries of Ayurvedic knowledge. His knack for identifying core triggers for mind-body imbalances ensure you always receive a product that has a targeted, lasting impact.

Our operations wouldn’t be possible without our staff of expert formulators and practitioners, who work tirelessly to bring you the best of the best. Our extractors often cycle through bushels of a crop to select only the finest raw materials, while our formulators are known to have intellectual battles over the percentages of oil in each formulation. And you can guarantee a formula will be thrown away if it is anything short of exceptional.

Each and every product we offer is the pride and joy of our highly devoted team. UMA is the culmination of our expertise, ambition, and love for the art of essential creation, and for the science of wholesome beauty.

Our approach to essential oils is unprecedented, as we strive to make all of our facial oils rich in essential oils and light in carrier oils. We use as little carrier oil as possible to give you the most potent blend of essential oils on the market.

This handcrafted, small-batch, time-tested UMA approach means you always get consistent quality and sourcing, and the purest ingredients: always.

The journey of a single drop of oil can take over 20 years in the case of some of our most precious ingredients. Follow along as we describe what it takes to bring some of our most prized ingredients to life and how they come to be included in our signature oil blends.

Frankincense

Frankincense Essential Oil helps cellular turnover and promotes anti-aging

You may know frankincense as one of the gifts the three wise men brought to Jesus at birth, but what is it actually? This highly precious ingredient is the dried sap of trees in the Boswellia genus, which start producing the resin it takes to create frankincense when they’re 8-10 years old.

Once matured, we cut the bark of the tree and allow its liquid resin to ooze out. When it hits oxygen, it starts to harden, forming small rock-shaped crystals. After 1-2 weeks, we then go back to harvest the resin by chopping the hardened crystals off the branches. The resin is then taken to the distillery to be crushed into powder, put in an oil and bath, and steam-distilled to extract the oil.

Frankincense has long been used in Ayurveda for its anti-inflammatory and antiseptic qualities. It’s also known to be deeply soothing. This powerful oil is prominent in our Absolute Anti-Aging line for its ability to aid cellular turnover, revitalizing the skin and minimizing the appearance of scars and wrinkles.

Rose

Watercolor Digital Painting Of Pink Roses

Consider this: It takes 1,000 rose petals to get a single drop of rose oil. A single drop! And the conditions must be just right in order for these flowers to flourish to their full potential.

Roses require full sun and soil packed with organic matter. We have to ensure they have plenty of room to breathe so the air can circulate freely to keep the leaves dry, preventing pesky fungal diseases from taking over. Regular watering and fertilization are also key to the growth process, along with occasional pruning and spraying. They take 1-2 years to grow before the first harvest.

From there, the roses are handpicked and sun-dried by a team of 100-130 people. The petals are stored in baskets while they await extraction. Roses have a complicated distillation process due to the fragility of the flower, so it requires a lot of technical expertise to get it right. Steam is used to break down the cells of the flower, which release the essence of the plant – otherwise known as the essential oil.

Rose oil is one of our formulators’ favorite oils and can be found in nearly all of our face oils.

Sandalwood

Truly precious, sandalwood essential oil is extracted from the wood of a tree that takes 10-20 years to mature. The environmental conditions required can be quite tricky, and because sandalwood is a parasitic tree, it must be surrounded by other plant species in order to obtain nutrients.

The most highly prized oil comes from the heartwood in the roots of the tree, which takes a team of 50-60 people to harvest. The overall oil quality is dependent upon the quality of the wood, the length of distillation, and the experience of the distiller.

Our expert distillers use steam distillation in a process that takes approximately one month. This process allows heated steam to pass through the powdered wood, releasing the essential oil that’s locked in the cellular structure of the wood. Their skilled handling and personal nuances result in the highest quality sandalwood. No adulteration here.

With its unparalleled moisturizing properties and rich scent, we’ve included sandalwood in a large variety of our products – from our Beauty Boosting Day Face Oil and Anti-Aging Eye Oil to the majority of our wellness oils.

The Journey of a Drop

When all is said and done and the oils have made their way into their intended blends, they’re bottled on site in our gorgeous hand-decaled bottles. Individual artists place the illustrations on each bottle and heat them to seal it, so you can enjoy them long after the oil is gone.

The products are then shipped from India to Beverly Hills, where our fulfillment team prepares them to be sent to you! Each part of the process is done with care and attention to detail, so you can enjoy every last drop that journeyed so far to nourish you.

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