Buying Shilajit — five questions to ask before you spend a rupee
Every journal I have written on this site orbits the same core problem: the Shilajit market has more brands than the average buyer can evaluate, and the difference between a genuinely good jar and a genuinely bad one is invisible from the outside. Colour, smell, dissolution — none of these separate the two reliably.
What does separate them is what a brand can tell you when you ask. Ask these five questions before you spend the money. The good brands will answer them within minutes. The rest will not, and that will be the answer you needed.
1. Where is the source rock, and at what altitude?
The single most important variable in Shilajit safety and quality is the source. Rock from high-altitude Ladakh, or the higher reaches of the Nepali Himalayas, tends to be cleaner in geology and lower in heavy metals than rock from lower ranges or from parts of the Pamirs.
A brand that answers vaguely — "Himalayan," "sourced from the mountains," "from ancient rocks" — is not answering. A brand that names a specific region, a specific altitude band, and can tell you when the harvest happens is telling you they know their source.
Ours is from Ladakh, above sixteen thousand feet, harvested in a short window between May and September. That is the level of specificity you should be getting.
2. What is the fulvic acid percentage — and which method was it measured against?
Fulvic acid content is the single most useful number on a Shilajit label. It is also the number most commonly played with in marketing.
Two questions inside this one. What is the percentage? And more importantly — is that percentage measured against the whole resin, or against the active humic fraction?
A raw Shilajit measured on whole resin will typically read 15 to 20 percent. A well-purified resin measured on the active fraction will read 70 to 80 percent. The same jar, wildly different numbers, depending on which method the lab used. Any brand that gives you a number without telling you the method is either uninformed or hiding something.
Ours is above 70 percent, measured on the active fraction, tested at Eurofins.
3. Do they third-party test every batch for heavy metals and microbial safety?
Not one hero batch cited forever in marketing. Every batch.
The metal profile of raw resin varies harvest to harvest. Microbial risk is a per-batch concern too — a facility that maintained clean conditions three years ago may not be doing so today. Continuous testing at an accredited third-party lab — SGS, Eurofins, Intertek, or a certified Indian equivalent — is the only way to know what is inside the specific jar you are about to open.
If the brand can only produce one certificate, dated two years ago, that tells you what they are doing continuously. Which is not testing.
4. Will they send you the report for the specific jar you bought?
Every jar should carry a batch number. Every batch number should trace back to a specific harvest and a specific dated lab report. Ask the brand to send you the certificate for your batch. A brand with nothing to hide can do this in a few minutes — the reports are indexed by batch, and finding yours is trivial.
A brand that goes vague, sends you a generic PDF that clearly serves as marketing collateral rather than a signed lab report, or promises to send it "soon" — that is your answer.
5. Do they let you try before you fully commit?
The final question is a soft one, but it is honest. A brand that genuinely trusts its own product is willing to let you try it before you pay the full price. Some do this with a real refund policy on a first order. We do it with the half-pay offer — pay half now, take the jar home, and pay the second half only when you have felt it working.
The specific mechanism matters less than what it signals. A brand willing to put its money where its mouth is has confidence in what is in the jar. A brand that expects the full amount upfront, non-refundable, with no such offer, is a brand transferring the risk of the product not working from itself to you.
What the five questions add up to
If a brand can answer all five clearly — source region and altitude, fulvic acid method and percentage, per-batch third-party testing, batch-specific report on request, and some form of try-before-you-commit — you are almost certainly looking at a jar worth spending money on.
If they can answer three or four, be cautious. If they can answer two or fewer, walk away and buy somewhere else.
This is what I would ask if I did not run this business. It is what I still ask when I taste a competitor's jar and want to understand what I am looking at. It's a five-minute exercise. Do it before you spend.
