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Ask an HerbalistSep 9, 2026
Why is glycerin added to some of your products?
We love talking about herbs and herbalism, and we especially love answering your questions about those topics. That's why we brought in our team of herbal experts to respond to some of the most common questions and concerns we hear.
Our herbalists have decades of combined experience working with herbs — and the people who take them. They answer your most pressing questions, in our regular column “Ask an Herbalist.”
Why is glycerin added to some of your products?
Besides our alcohol-free line of Kids and adult glycerites, we also use Certified Organic vegetable glycerin in some of our alcohol-based liquid herbal extracts for multiple reasons. Rest assured, we only use Palm-free glycerin to protect wild habitats of plants and animals that call that area home, like orangutans. To learn more about why we use Palm-free glycerin, check out this blog post.
So why do we use glycerin in our alcohol-based extracts at all?
All of our products are made by custom-extracting each herb to pull out as many beneficial plant compounds as possible. This way we can get a wide range of constituents that best represent the whole herb. To create these custom extractions, we use a specific blend of menstruum (the liquid solvent blend), which is made of alcohol, glycerin, and/or water, for every herb. We also use a customized ratio of raw herb to menstruum to make each high-quality and effective extract. Some herbs have compounds that are prone to falling out of solution or separating from the final extraction. This is called "precipitation" and can result in fine particles visible in the extract. For extracts where this can occur, we sometimes add glycerin to the final product to make sure valuable phytochemicals stay dissolved in the extract.
And it's worth noting: glycerin tastes sweet like sugar, but is not a type of sugar. While it is considered a carbohydrate, no effects on blood sugar would be typical or expected.