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Lagunamoon is a Seattle-based lifestyle brand specializing in essential oils and personal care products based on essential oils. From shampoos and moisturizers to bath bombs and skin care, Lagunamoon prominently highlights the fact that all of its personal care products are made with so-called “therapeutic-grade” essential oils.
Essential oils have been used for thousands of years, but they’ve become more popular in the past decade or so due to their natural properties and therapeutic benefits. This popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed by new brands like Lagunamoon looking to capitalize on the trend.
But are Lagunamoon essential oils worth the hype? Let’s take a deeper dive into the brand to see what it has to offer.
In this review, we’ll focus only on Lagunamoon essential oils across five axes: Product Selection, Pricing, Packaging, Sourcing, Quality & Testing, and Certifications.
Company Values
The best essential oil makers are driven by values over profits. They are driven by a sense of responsibility, not only to the people who use their products and services, but also to our environment. It’s these values that drive the meticulous attention to detail that separates the best essential oil manufacturers from everyone else.
Lagunamoon was founded in 2011 in Seattle, WA. It sells personal care products made with essential oils and all-natural vegan ingredients.
The company proudly claims its products not only nourish your skin but also support your overall wellbeing—body, and mind. Given the numerous health benefits provided by essential oils, the company makes good on this promise by including EOs as an ingredient in nearly all of its products.
That said, we have reason to doubt just how deep Lagunamoon’s commitment to mind and body wellness really is.
Simply visit the company’s website and you’ll be bombarded by splashy images of good-looking people smiling in beautiful locations overlain with overly promotional headlines and calls-to-action.
Compare Lagunamoon’s homepage to that of Aura Cacia or Rocky Mountain Oils, and you’ll quickly notice the difference. Other brands lead their pitch with the promise of a pure product, but Lagunamoon appears to be more focused on driving sales and awareness of its various product lines.
It’s hard to knock them too much for this. After all, Lagunamoon is a business like any other. But upon deeper investigation, we found this detail to be more than a tonal nuance of Lagunamoon’s marketing. Rather, it is more like the of the company’s extremely misleading iceberg of marketing slogans and missing information.
Product Selection
Single-Origin Oils
In all, the company sells 37 single-origin essential oils and 0 blends. We were disappointed and a little surprised by the lack of blends in its product line. Blends are a popular way for brands to differentiate themselves by offering an aroma one can’t get with any other brand.
Blends aside, 37 is still a decent number of oils, which means you’ll be able to find a good variety of single-origins without having to leave the brand. That said, if you are looking for less common oils, like Helichrysum Italicum, Neroli, or Nutmeg – you will have to go elsewhere. Only the most mainstream oils are available.
Lagunamoon is unique in that it sells all of its scents in three sizes:
- Small (10 ml)
- Medium (30 ml)
- Large (150ml)
Other brands sell their oils in small- and medium-sized bottles, reserving larger bottles only for a small subset of their absolute most popular aromas (think Lavender, Eucalyptus, etc.). Even then, most brands’ idea of “large” is 4 fl oz, or 118 ml, over 30 ml less than Lagunamoon’s offering.
Essential Oil Gift Sets
Lagunamoon also sells 9 essential oil gift sets, ranging in size from 3 bottles to 20 bottles, an impressive range compared to other premium oil brands. Most brands bundle 4-8 bottles in a set.
Gift sets from other brands tend to include only sampler-sized bottles (think 5ml), a tactic intended to push you toward buying the full-sized versions of the ones you like.
By comparison, Lagunamoon’s essential oils sets provide an immense variety of full-sized (10 ml) bottles at extremely affordable prices. For example, one could buy 20 10 ml essential oils from Lagunamoon for less than what one would pay to buy a single 15 ml bottle of lavender oil from a brand like Rocky Mountain Oils or Vitruvi.
Lagunamoon’s sets are such a good value, that it’s often through these sets most of its customers first discover the brand.
Product Selection Score: 3 out of 5
Pricing
Lagunamoon’s pricing is probably the most straightforward of any major essential oils maker. While most brands set price points for individual oils based on their relative scarcity and cost of production, Lagunamoon has established affordable, flat price points for all oils at each of its bottle sizes:
- 10ml = $4.99
- 30ml = $7.99
- 150ml = $12.99
For their sizes, each of these price points is well below the cost of other premium brands in the category.
Then, consider the price of sets. Lagunamoon’s Beginner’s Essential Oil Variety Set, for example, includes 20 10ml bottles of essential oils for just $32.99 as of this writing. Each bottle individually costs $4.99, the total value of this set is $99.80, a 67% discount off buying the oils individually.
These low prices earn Lagunamoon major points in this category, but as you’ll soon see, they also corroborate serious questions we have about the quality and purity of Lagunamoon essential oils.
In forthcoming sections, we’ll address our questions around sourcing and distillation practices, packaging, testing, and quality assurance, all of which support the notion that Lagunamoon essential oils might not be 100% pure or even genuine essential oils at all.
We can’t conclusively confirm this is true of Lagunamoon essential oils. But based on the information we have available to us, we think it’s likely.
Of course, all of this is speculation. For now, we will give Lagunamoon the benefit of the doubt and score its pricing at face value. And at face value, it’s a great deal.
Pricing Score: 5/5
Packaging
We’ve written before that great packaging is simple, informative, and attractive. This is especially true in the world of essential oils where consumer knowledge is low and few regulations exist to protect consumers from misleading advertising.
Lagunamoon’s packaging is a mixed bag.
The company’s essential oil bottles are certainly simple, but they’re not informative. There’s no indication of the name or country of origin for any given bottle, nor is there an ingredients list.
Many of its bottles even fail to include the scientific names of the plants from which they were derived. This is a major red flag. The scientific name is a strong indicator that the bottle’s contents are essential oils and not fragrance oils.
We also found a frustrating lack of consistency of the label design between bottles. Labeling is different on each bottle size, making the brand hard to recognize and the lineup looks a little disorganized.
Most unusual though is the difference in the information presented on the bottles themselves.
10 ml bottles are color-coded based on the type of plant, while 30 ml bottles are all black and feature an image of the plant. 100 ml bottles do not feature the plant at all, and instead simply label the bottle with the color that represents the oil inside.
Only the 30ml bottles include the scientific name of the plant, while none of them provide any information about where the plant was sourced.
The 150 ml bottles are tinted blue rather than dark amber. Dark amber tinting is another important feature to look for when trying to find authentic and high-quality essential oils. Essential oils are highly sensitive to ultraviolet light. Exposure to UV light can cause oils to become oxidized and lose their effectiveness. Amber bottles are the only way of protecting them from this damaging effect.
A blue-tinted bottle is better than a clear bottle, but it’s still objectively less effective than a dark amber bottle. This appears to be a package design decision made at the direct expense of the quality of the product it is the packaging. It is especially head-scratching to use that Lagunamoon would choose this design only for its largest size, the one you would expect to last the longest.
Packaging Score: 2 out of 5
Sourcing
As discussed above, the sourcing of Lagunamoon’s essential oils is another major concern of ours. We have no information about how or where these oils were sourced; all we know for sure is that they are “100% pure and natural” (according to its website).
We don’t doubt this claim in general, but the lack of information on where or how these essential oils were sourced makes it seem more likely than not that their sourcing is less-than-ideal in some way.
Its bottle labels proudly state that its oils are extracted using steam distillation, but there’s no detail as to where the plants were grown. It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that their oils are sourced from monocultures where plants were not harvested at peak potency or could have been damaged by chemicals used to nurture them in a way that is unnatural for this type of plant.
If this were true, its claim that its oils are 100% pure is likely false, as even with steam distillation, you can’t guarantee how pure the oil will be if the plant material has been contaminated by pesticides and other chemicals.
Sourcing Score: 0 out of 5
Quality & Testing
Lagunamoon makes no mention of purity testing or quality assurance on its website. Its FAQ page provides hand-wavy answers to sidestep questions about quality:
Q: OILY AND DO NOT SMELL PURE OR STRONG, IS IT REAL 100% PURE ESSENTIAL OIL?
A: Essential oils can smell different due to many factors including seasons, places of origin, sunshine duration and collection methods.
Q: OILS SMELLED VERY ARTIFICIAL WHY？
A: Our essential oils are pure and do not contain fillers and synthetic fragrances. Pure essential oils can smell different to people sometimes as it has top note, heart note and base note.
We find answers like this particularly suspicious given the fact that the industry has already adopted GC/MS testing as standard practice for analyzing the purity of essential oils. Lagunamoon has not adopted this standard, and it is unclear whether its oils are ever analyzed for purity.
Indeed, online reviews from Lagunamoon customers indicate that their oils do not always smell as expected, leading to questions around whether the company is making false claims about its products’ purity.
Testing & Quality Score: 0 out of 5
Certifications
Lagunamoon claims on its website that it has 3 certifications:
- USDA Certified Organic
- GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices)
- Vegan Society
The USDA Certified Organic certification only applies to its products labeled “organic.” As of this writing, exactly 0 of Lagunamoon’s essential oils are labeled as organic. Instead, the company describes its oils as “Premium Grade,” a designation that is more marketing than anything else. Lagunamoon’s other certifications appear equally dubious.
Lagunamoon is an American company with headquarters in Seattle. That said, its GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) certification was bestowed by Pfeiffer Consulting, a European standards organization. In describing its GMP certification, the company describes the “robust set of current GMP standards” laid out by the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Pfeiffer consulting’s specializes in EU GMP certifications.
While there are many similarities between the EU and the US FDA’s GMP certification requirements, the EU’s system is notoriously less holistic than that of the FDA. Given the breadth of products Lagunamoon produces, it would be easy for it to be certified without an EU representative having actually reviewed its essential oil products specifically.
For this reason, we have a hard time believing claims that the company’s essential oils meet the requirements laid out in the FDA’s GMP guidelines.
Lagunamoon’s Vegan certification via the Vegan Society is another one of questionable merit. The Vegan Society is another EU-based nonprofit that labels European products with a “Vegan Trademark” after some review of its business processes.
Since “vegan practices” do not differ between countries, Lagunamoon’s European vegan designation raises fewer questions for us than its GMP claim. Still, it’s misleading. None of the company’s essential oils bear the Vegan Trademark bestowed by the Vegan Society.
For this reason, Lagunamoon can’t claim any of these certifications apply to its line of essential oils. This kind of deception is consistent with the business practices of other ethically dubious players in the essential oils space.
Certifications Score: 0 out of 5
FAQs
Here are some of the most commonly asked questions we’ve received about Lagunamoon essential oils:
- How good are Lagunamoon essential oils?
- In our firsthand trials, Lagunamoon’s scents are really all across the board. Peppermint, a very popular scent, was off-puttingly medicinal. We also tried their Jasmine, and it was surprisingly heavy with an earthy undertone we found unpleasant to the senses.
At the same time, we found the company’s grapefruit a delightful and refreshing change from the heavy, perfumey smell of some other brands.
What are some of Lagunamoon’s best essential oils?
Looking at Lagunamoon’s best sellers, its most popular essential oils are:
- Lavender Essential Oil
- Frankincense Essential Oil
- Sandalwood Essential Oil
- Peppermint Essential Oil
- Tea Tree Essential Oil
Of course, everyone will have her own definition of “best.” If you’re new to essential oils, we recommend selecting a mix of scents to get a feel for what you like.
Can you use Lagunamoon essential oils?
Yes, you can use Lagunamoon essential oils. For topical use, we strongly recommend diluting them with carrier oils like coconut or jojoba oil. Essential oils are highly concentrated, so we never recommend topical use without the aid of carrier oil.
Massage is a popular topical use case for essential oils. Here, too, we recommend the use of carrier oils to first dilute the highly concentrated substance so that it does not irritate the skin.
Lke all essential oils, Lagunamoon essential oils should never be ingested orally. Essential oils are highly concentrated substances. Ingestion of any quantity can be very dangerous.
Aromatherapy is the main use case Lagunamoon promotes for its essential oils. We recommend using them in a diffuser to bring about their benefits. Fresh scents like peppermint, eucalyptus, and lavender can help balance the air in a room or offer relief during seasonal changes.
How long do Lagunamoon essential oils last?
If you’re using your oils sparingly, they should be good for about one year. If you find yourself enjoying aromatherapy daily, it’s a good idea to replace them after six months. This is because each time you open a bottle, you expose the oil within to air, which can break down the concentration of essential oils.
Are Lagunamoon essential oils organic?
No. The company does sell USDA Certified Organic products, but none of its essential oils are among them.
Conclusion
Write a conclusion paragraph for this review, summarizing our overall opinion of Lagunamoon’s essential oils based on the individual analyses of its business practices.
Lagunamoon’s essential oils are problematic for a few reasons. For one, the company does not provide GC/MS testing to verify its products’ purity. Additionally, Lagunamoon has no certifications that apply specifically to its line of essential oils and instead relies on less rigorous European standards organizations in order to make dubious claims about their quality. We’ve also seen an inordinately high number of customer complaints consistently claiming that the company’s aromas do not match the scent promised.
The only category where Lagunamoon “wins” in our book is pricing. Especially when you consider the value of its very generous EO sets, Lagunamoon’s prices are comparatively low.
In the end, we’re left with a company that produces an average-quality line of oils at very cheap prices and has no certifications to back them up. In other words, Lagunamoon is pretty much your run-of-the-mill MLM essential oil distributor.
