RevitaZen+ food supplement dōTERRA | 30 capsules

Grown since antiquity around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East, nigella yields small angular black seeds, long used as a spice. Their oil owes its peppery, faintly bitter smell to thymoquinone. Here it forms the oily base of the formula and gives it its character.

The cultivated artichoke descends from the wild Mediterranean cardoon. It is not the heads that are harvested here but the large serrated leaves of the stem, whose extract concentrates cynarin, a compound of frankly bitter taste. It brings the formula its vegetal note.

Milk thistle grows wild on the dry ground of the Mediterranean rim, recognisable by the white veins that marble its spiny leaves. Its seeds, gathered after the purple flowering, supply silymarin, a set of flavonolignans. It is one of the three plant extracts in the formula.

Harvested at full ripeness, when the skin has turned deep orange. Softer and sweeter than orange, with a floral edge the other citrus fruits do not have. It rounds off the sharpest notes of the blend.

A Mediterranean shrub with needle-like leaves, held sacred by the Greeks, the Romans and the Egyptians. Its 1,8-cineole and camphor give a bright, herbaceous scent, almost resinous. It cuts through the sweetness of the spices and keeps the blend from turning into a dessert.

It is not the flowers that are distilled but the leaves, whose scent comes as a surprise: frankly rose-like, with a green edge. Long used in perfumery in place of rose, which is far costlier. It gives the blend its floral heart.

dōTERRA distils it in Madagascar from fresh, undried rhizomes, which preserves a rounder aromatic profile. The zingiberene it contains brings that recognisable spiced warmth, at once pungent and sweet. It is the ingredient that gives the blend its comforting character.

These are not berries in the botanical sense but tiny fleshy cones, which take two to three years to ripen on the shrub. The very ones that flavour gin and game dishes. Their alpha-pinene gives a woody, peppery note, frankly of the forest.

The leaves are the better-known part in cooking, but it is the seeds that are distilled here. Their linalool gives a soft note, faintly floral and woody, a long way from the sharpness of the leaf. In a blend it acts as a binder: it softens the spices and keeps the whole from turning too biting.