Why Essential Oil Prices Vary: Yield, Maturity and Rules

Price differences between essential oils start with arithmetic: how many kilograms of plant it takes to make one kilogram of oil. Rose and lavender are both flowers, yet published figures put rose at roughly 25 to 75 times more plant material per kilogram of oil. Yield is only the first factor, and price alone cannot tell you whether a particular bottle is honest.

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Start with the plant material

Two open-access studies give oil content for the two flowers. Kumar and colleagues (2023, Scientific Reports) measured clonal selections of damask rose (Rosa damascena) and reported oil content of 0.030 to 0.045 percent of fresh flower weight. Butnaras, Balmus and Cotelea (2025, Moldova congress proceedings) reported 11.6 to 22.0 kg of oil per tonne of fresh inflorescences across lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) varieties. Turning each into "kilograms of plant per kilogram of oil" is division, and the results are ours:

Plant material needed per kilogram of oil, from two published trials
OilPublished oil contentPlant per kg of oil (our arithmetic)
Rose (clonal selections, fresh flowers)0.030 to 0.045 percentabout 2,200 to 3,300 kg
Lavender (varieties, fresh inflorescences)11.6 to 22.0 kg per tonneabout 45 to 86 kg
Sandalwood (mature heartwood)no readable primary figure foundnot stated
Our amyriswe do not publish a yieldnot stated

Read the table with its limits in mind. These are breeding and variety trials, not market averages, the two crops were measured in different countries under different conditions, and one trial reports flowers while the other reports inflorescences. The size of the gap is the point, not the second digit. Where we could not read a yield for sandalwood heartwood, we left the cell empty rather than quote a figure from a vendor page.

Yield is the first factor, not the last

Years before the first harvest. Celedon and colleagues (2016, The Plant Journal) describe sandalwood oil as extracted from mature heartwood, and note that natural populations of the slow-growing tree are threatened by over-exploitation in places such as southern India. Reasoning from that: a raw material that needs a standing tree to mature before any oil exists cannot respond quickly when demand rises, and the cost of waiting is carried into the price.

Scarcity. In a Tisserand Institute article (Robert Tisserand, undated page, read October 2026), the author says he paid the equivalent of 35 US dollars per kg when he began buying Indian sandalwood oil in the mid-1970s and that today's price is over 100 times higher, which he attributes to the increasing scarcity of the raw material. That is one buyer's account, not a price series, but it names the mechanism.

Rules on trade. Some of the most expensive aromatics are regulated. The CITES-linked Species+ database shows rosewood (Aniba rosaeodora) in Appendix II since 12 June 2013 with an annotation covering "logs, sawn wood, veneer sheets, plywood and extracts." Agarwood (Aquilaria malaccensis) is in Appendix II under a genus listing effective 23 February 2023, covering all parts and derivatives except a short list of exemptions, and palo santo (Bulnesia sarmientoi) has been in Appendix II since 2 January 2017, again with extracts covered. East Indian sandalwood (Santalum album), by contrast, shows no CITES listing in its Species+ record, even though the IUCN rates it Vulnerable (see our guide to sustainable essential oils). Reasoning: permits, documentation and quota limits add time and cost for the listed oils, and nothing comparable applies to the unlisted ones.

The incentive to adulterate. Kucharska and colleagues (2021, Molecules) open with the observation that sandalwood oils are "highly desired but expensive, and hence many counterfeit oils are sold in high street shops." A high price per kilogram is exactly where substitution pays. We take that up in our guide to adulterated essential oils.

Why price is a weak signal of quality, in both directions

The same Kucharska study bought six oils sold as "sandalwood" and tested them by gas chromatography with mass spectrometry. None met the ISO 3518:2002 requirements, especially for alpha-santalol; only one contained the santalols of Santalum album; three had a valerianol, elemol and eudesmol profile indicating Amyris balsamifera oil; two were synthetic mixtures. The authors report that the oils "varied concerning price and source of origin" and conclude that price "is not a suitable criterion, either." So a high price did not guarantee the right oil, and a low price is not proof of a fake.

What arithmetic can do is raise a question. Reasoning from the table: if a bottle labelled rose is priced near a bottle of lavender, the plant-material gap above says something has to give, whether a diluent, a different product type or a different plant. That is a prompt to ask for the batch documents, not a verdict.

Amyris and sandalwood: the price logic

Kucharska and colleagues describe Amyris balsamifera as an oil "with a similar smell" to sandalwood and less expensive. The sourced facts line up with that. Sandalwood oil comes from mature heartwood of a slow-growing tree that the IUCN lists as Vulnerable (Arunkumar, Dhyani and Joshi, 2019, as published through the GBIF record of the Red List). Amyris balsamifera is listed as Least Concern (IUCN SSC Global Tree Specialist Group and BGCI, 2020, in the same dataset). Reasoning from that: nothing in these sources puts amyris in sandalwood's price band, so a seller pricing one as the other has a mismatch to explain. We do not call amyris sandalwood and we will not price or describe it as though it were; the comparison is laid out in amyris vs sandalwood.

What we do and do not know about our own price

We sell one oil, and its price is shown on the product pages. We do not publish a cost build-up, so we will not tell you that our price reflects any particular yield, labor or testing cost, and we hold no yield figure to offer. What we can describe is process: we gather fallen wood and pruning by-product, age it, distil only the heartwood, and send each lot to an independent third-party laboratory, with reports available on request. Whether that makes our price right for you is for you to judge against the documents, not for us to assert.

Using this when you compare bottles

  1. Find the plant part and the species. A heartwood oil and a flower oil sit on different yield curves.
  2. Ask whether the species is on a CITES appendix and whether the seller's paperwork reflects that.
  3. Treat a price far below what the plant-material arithmetic would suggest as a reason to ask questions, and a high price as no assurance at all.
  4. Ask for the lot's test report and read it with the cautions in our guide to choosing essential oils.

We cite no dollar prices for other oils: the only price figure we could read in a dated source was one buyer's recollection, and a vendor's price list is a sales page, not a source.

Price follows yield, years to maturity, scarcity and rules on trade, and it is one weak clue among several about what is in a bottle. The reliable check is the paper that travels with the lot.

Amyris Essential Oil bottle

Amyris Essential Oil

Amyris Essential Oil from our own shop, in sizes from 0.5 oz to bulk.

From $20.99

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Sources & Further Reading