What Aromatherapy Is Not
You’ve heard your friends talking about it. It seems to crop up at unexpected times when shopping at boutiques or health stores. So now you’re asking the question what is aromatherapy? Aromatherapy is not just pleasure for your nose.
What Aromatherapy Is
To really understand aromatherapy, you have to sniff past the smell. While many essential oils have an absolutely wonderful aroma, their benefits aren’t reserved for the nose alone: aromatherapy brings with it the promise of healing, health, soothed nerves, and improved mood. Used correctly in small doses, it can positively enhance the quality of your life.
Aromatherapy is Refreshing and Reinforcing
You’ve experienced aromatherapy in action if you’ve ever felt refreshed by the scent of peppermint in a favorite shampoo or soothed by the smell of lavender on a summer breeze. At the most basic level, essential oils can nudge your mood to a better place, inviting emotions of calm or confidence, for example, depending on the scents deployed.
But aromatherapy can do more than just enhance emotion. For years, aromatherapists have recommended essential oils to alleviate colds, boost brainpower, or brighten complexions. Some essential oils may even be more beneficial to your health than their chemical counterparts!
And this is exactly where essential oils distinguish themselves from the potions you’ll find in the perfume aisle. That “lavender-scented” perfume may smell like a vial of pure lavender essential oil, but the similarities end there. If you burned your finger cooking dinner, for instance, you’d never dream of dousing it in lavender-scented perfume – but dab a little lavender essential oil on the burn, and the soothing effects are immediate.
What is Aromatherapy for Health?
Essential oils, when applied carefully, can banish a number of ailments, including stress, insomnia, emotional problems, and migraines. And a single oil can have dozens of uses. Consider peppermint, for example: it can be used to soothe the digestive system, alleviate headaches, and deter household pests.
These essential oils form the basis of aromatherapy, and there are about three hundred such oils available for our use today. These oils are extracted from trees, flowers, grasses, herbs, fruits, leaves, roots, and shrubs. They are a plant’s lifeblood, and, like our own blood, contain hundreds of beneficial elements in even the tiniest droplet. When we extract essential oils from a plant, we extract its most potent medicinal properties. That’s why it’s a mistake to assume that aromatherapy is just about pretty smells.
Aromatherapy is an Art
Essential oils are so precious because extracting them is an art form. Unlike perfumes, which are fabricated in a lab at low cost, essential oils need to be extracted under very particular conditions. A single ounce of pure rose oil, for example, comes from sixty thousand rose blossoms. And jasmine blossoms, which produce one of the most precious aromatherapy oils on the market, must be picked by hand on the first day they flower – and before the sun destroys the oil forever. Meanwhile, the tree that produces sandalwood essential oil must be at least thirty years old and thirty feet high before we can coax a single drop from it.
That said, the effort invested in procuring these essential oils is a bargain when compared to the endless benefits they provide. Whether you use them as part of an indulgent bath or massage, add them to your beauty concoctions, or simply let their essence waft from a lit candle, you are not only enjoying a pleasant scent. You’re enjoying the spoils of the most comprehensive medicine cabinet on Earth: nature’s!
Join Us in the Pursuit of Understanding “What is Aromatherapy”
So now that you understand more about the question, What is Aromatherapy?, we invite you to join us and keep learning! Aromatherapy and it’s many wonderful benefits is knowledge you can keep gaining and enriching your life with. Don’t stop learning – join our “what is aromatherapy” discovery team today!