Frankincense

It comes out of a wound in a tree

Almost everything else in your kit was a leaf, a flower, a peel or a seed. Frankincense was an injury. A harvester cut through the bark of a Boswellia tree on a limestone ridge in the Horn of Africa, and the tree did what a tree does when it is opened: it pushed resin over the cut to seal it. That resin hardened in the sun for a fortnight and was scraped off by hand.

Boswellia is a small, stubborn tree of the family Burseraceae, growing where almost nothing else bothers to — shallow rock, steep ground, long dry seasons. A tree living like that cannot afford to lose tissue, so it invests heavily in the chemistry that closes a wound fast. That investment is why the species is worth anything to us.

1. 1.The cut. Shallow, through the bark, just deep enough to open the resin ducts. Deeper is not better — a cut into the wood does damage the tree cannot seal.
2. 2.The weep. A milky white liquid runs and then stops — hence the older trade name, olibanum, from the Arabic al-lubān, the milk.
3. 3.The hardening. Two to three weeks on the trunk, until sun and dry air turn the liquid into a glassy lump — a tear.
4. 4.The scrape, tree by tree, then grading by size, colour and bark content. The cut is reopened several times a season.
5. 5.The still. Resin broken up and steam distilled.

The later flows are not the same as the first. The opening cut releases resin that had been sitting in the ducts, carrying bark and dust with it; after that the tree is responding rather than leaking, so second and third flows are paler and cleaner. There is a limit: a tree tapped too often produces less viable seed, and hard-harvested groves stop regenerating. So the practices that matter are unglamorous — a cap on cuts per tree, rest seasons, and an agreement long enough that resting a tree makes economic sense to the person holding the knife. That is Sourcing in one sentence. There is no such thing as a frankincense plantation.

Resin is a generous raw material — roughly five to ten per cent of its weight comes over as oil, against some hundred and fifty pounds of flowering tops for a pound of lavender. It is not quick, though: hard resin is driven for hours, and Distillation covers why run time changes what ends up in the bottle.

Frankincense is also not quite a resin. It is an oleo-gum-resin: a volatile aromatic fraction, a resin fraction of heavy acids, and a water-soluble gum. A still takes one of the three.

Four trees, one English word

Frankincense is not a species. It is a trade name for the resin of several trees in the genus Boswellia, and the oils they give are not interchangeable — they differ in constituent profile, in aroma, and in what is present at all. The oil record names four for doTERRA’s Frankincense: Boswellia carterii, sacra, papyrifera and frereana.

Drawing on several species is deliberate. Each has its own harvest calendar, terrain and communities, and a supply resting on one escarpment in one country is fragile.

What the steam actually carries

Open the oil record and Frankincense gives its constituents by name — boswellic acids, alpha-pinene, limonene, sesquiterpenes — where Lavender carries hard ranges: 25–45% linalyl acetate, 20–47% linalool. Names where the others have numbers, and you can now see why: one range across four species would be a fiction. The record is on Frankincense in the oils library.

A note describes how long a smell lasts, not how much of it there is. The monoterpenes flash off in the first half hour; the heavy fraction stays for hours, and that lingering half is what your nose files the oil under. Smell one drop on the back of your hand, then again an hour later. Two different oils.

One caution about thinking in single constituents at all. Researchers at Roseman University tested doTERRA oils, then could not reproduce what they had seen using the purified constituents at the same concentrations. The Oil Effect is that finding in full.

Why it reaches so many places

Every oil in your kit has a direction it pushes: peppermint cools, oregano purifies, lavender settles. Frankincense has no single direction, and that — rather than any special potency — is why it turns up in more places than any of them.

1. 1.Three routes — aromatic, topical, and internal where your label allows it.
2. 2.No dominant voice. Menthol is 30–50% of peppermint, so peppermint is chemically an argument for one thing. Frankincense is led by no single strongly-characterised constituent — a weakness when you want a specific effect, a strength when you want one that fits anywhere.
3. 3.Small, fat-soluble molecules that cross lipid membranes readily — many places gently rather than one place forcefully.

Now the honest part. Nearly all the published work on frankincense and cells is laboratory research: cells in a dish, at a concentration chosen by the experimenter, which is not the same as what happens in a person. A dish has no skin to cross, no liver, no bloodstream. Laboratory work is how a question gets asked, not the answer.

* These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

Aromatic, topical, internal

How to use oils covers the three routes generally. This is frankincense specifically.

"It is gentle, so you need not dilute" is the wrong conclusion. A drop of neat oil covers about a fingertip of skin and is largely gone within minutes; the same drop in half a teaspoon of carrier covers a forearm and stays in contact far longer. Dilution here is about coverage and contact time rather than danger.

Only consume oils whose label states they are for internal use. Labelling differs by country, and the bottle in your hand is the authority.

What this looks like in an ordinary week

Four situations account for almost everything a household does with the bottle — each a different dilution, a different time of day, and a different expectation of how long it takes to notice anything.

A daily drop in water belongs alongside those four, if your label says it is for internal use: one drop in about 120 millilitres, in glass or stainless steel. Pick one and do it for a month before adding a second. Write it down in Protocols.

Five thousand years of the same smell

For most of recorded history frankincense was the most valuable thing a plant produced — traded by weight against precious metals, taxed by the cities on the road it travelled. Petra was built on that tax. Egypt burned it in temple ritual; it was one of the four spices of the Hebrew temple incense; it burns still in Orthodox censers and in the bakhoor of the Gulf. The name is the Old French franc encens, noble incense. Our own record puts the emotional profile briefly: truth and enlightenment, and the courage to stand as yourself. Traditional framing rather than clinical — but this scent has spent fifty centuries in rooms where people were being still, and smell reaches emotion and memory faster than any other sense. Both are real, both work on the same nervous system, and neither has to be dressed up as the other.

What it goes with, and why

Five regular partners, each working for a reason you can read off the profiles.

Two of those carry a caution. Wild Orange and Bergamot are cold pressed from peel, and expressed citrus oils are photosensitising: keep skin you applied them to out of direct sunlight and UV for up to twelve hours. Frankincense is not — but a blend is as photosensitising as its most photosensitising member.

Frankincense also sits inside blends you may already own — one of the four oils in Balance, and in DDR Prime. The range on sale differs by country. Building your own: choose the oil with the job first, then add frankincense at a third to a half of the drops.

Cautions, storage and the honest limits

Frankincense is one of the least troublesome oils in the kit, which is not the same as no rules. Safety is the full treatment.

• ·Keep out of reach of children. If you are pregnant, nursing or under a doctor’s care, consult your physician before use.
• ·Avoid eyes, inner ears and other sensitive areas. If oil reaches an eye, flush it with carrier oil rather than water — water spreads it instead of removing it.
• ·Dilute for children at the lower end of any range — thinner skin and a smaller body change the arithmetic, not just the caution.
• ·Frankincense is not photosensitising. Blends containing expressed citrus oils are, for up to twelve hours after application.
• ·Store it capped, dark and cool. Monoterpene-rich oils oxidise on contact with air, light and warmth, and oxidised monoterpenes sensitise skin more readily than fresh.
• ·If a frankincense has turned sharp and turpentine-like, it has oxidised. Still fine in a diffuser; keep it off faces.
• ·Buy where the chain traces back to a lot number. An adulterated frankincense is not a weaker one — it is a different liquid wearing the label.

What you are doing here is different from professional medical care and does not replace it. If something is severe, sudden, persistent, or you simply do not know what it is, that is a conversation with a practitioner — a well-stocked shelf is not a reason to delay it.

Keep oils away from eyes and inner ears, and out of reach of children. If you are pregnant, nursing, under medical care or taking medication, speak to your healthcare practitioner before use. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

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