In my years of training and research, every time I have taken a professional course or attended a lecture on essential oils I have been impatient to get to that moment when I can open the bottles and start experiencing them. You might be feeling this right now. Itās like looking at a box of chocolates; you just want to take the lid off and snatch one. I know, the sooner you are surrounded by the intense herbal vapors, the sooner you will breathe a sigh of relief. But before we get there, I need to make sure you know some basics.
As you discovered in the introduction, essential oils are natureās oldest medicine. They are also natureās most concentrated medicine. But what does this mean? What exactly are essential oils? An essential oil is the naturally occurring, volatile, aromatic part that can be extracted from a very few number of plants. Plants store oils either in surface structures, as with herbaceous leaves (like lavender, petitgrain, and rosemary), or in internal structures. Plants that store oils internally store them either in sacs (such as bergamot, lemon, frankincense, and myrrh), between cells in ducts (such as fir, cedar, pine, spruce, juniper, and cypress), or within plant tissue that is unique from other cells in content and size (such as citronella, palmarosa, and patchouli).
Every species has evolved to survive. Essential oils are vital to plants and animals. Plants produce an aromatic liquid to repel predators, attract bees, fight off disease, or adapt to challenges in the plantsā habitat, such as a lack of or too much water. Monkeys rub their necks with citrus fruits to get the immune-boosting effect (or antimicrobial effect) of the essential oil contained in the peel. Essential oils, once extracted, can protect us as well, especially if we donāt harm the integrity of the oil during the extraction method.
Unlike dried herbal teas, or extracts (like vanilla extract or almond extract) and tinctures, both of which are extracted with alcohol, essential oils are obtained through distillation. Distillation is the preferred way that growers āharvestā essential oils from plants because itās the gentlest. It reminds me of the simplest way we can cook vegetables: by steaming, which preserves their nutritional content.
Imagine a valley in the South of France, letās say in Provence, filled with purple fields of lavender. Itās a beautiful time of day, when the fields are most fragrant. Thatās when growers cut the flowering tops off each plant. After collecting this raw plant material, they place the harvest into large vats within their distillery. (Sometimes farmers bring huge trucks right out into the field to distill the harvest there.) Just like we steam vegetables at home, water is placed in the bottom part of the vat below the lavender and is heated to boiling. The steam that results surges up to the top of the vat and passes over the lavender. As the steam hits the lavender flowers, the essential oil is released from the thin walls of the tiny pouches within the petals. The steam continues upward to the top of the pot, where the lid traps the essential-oil-laced steam and sends it through heavily coiled tubes for cooling and then collection in another vat. Since oil doesnāt dissolve in water, the essential oil naturally separates from the cooled liquid and is easily siphoned off into a glass or stainless steel receptacle from which itās poured into the smaller bottles we buy at the store. The aromatic water that remains is called the hydrosol. With only trace amounts of the essential oil, hydrosols are used for skin care, children, and for a quick spritz. Et voilĆ !
Once separated from the plant, aromatic liquids can be as thin as water or as thick as paste. Each essential oil has a fragrance that is characteristic of the plant from which it originates, whether itās sourced from the leaf (basil), the needle (pine), the flower (lavender), the bark (cedarwood), the fruit (lemon), the root (ginger), the seed (coriander), the grass (palmarosa), or the resin (frankincense).
With few exceptions, essential-oil-giving plants are not something you can easily grow in a flower bed at home. Though some plants can be harvested from a natural habitat, most are cultivated by artisanal farmers. Like winemakers, these expert growers have the experience and scientific knowledge necessary to nurture their crop from seedling to harvest to distillation to market. Each grower has a responsibility and a need to make sure their oils meet a standardized test in order to be considered authentic.
Just how concentrated are essential oils? Well, the amount of plant materials growers must distill to produce even small amounts of an essential oil is likely to shock youābecause it takes a huge amount. Thatās why I call them natureās most concentrated medicine! Imagine this: to produce 1 cupā8 ouncesāof lavender essential oil, a grower needs to distill 75 pounds of freshly harvested lavender flowers. Thatās the equivalent of 500 clamshells of washed salad greens!
The most concentrated essential oil of all, Bulgarian rose otto, requires 5 dozen roses for just 1 drop of its semiprecious oil. The following are a few examples of just how much plant matter it takes to make approximately 8 ounces of a few popular essential oils:
ā¢ Eucalyptus: 25 pounds of leaves
ā¢ Rosemary: 250 pounds of leaves
ā¢ Jasmine: 500 pounds of flowers
ā¢ Rose: 1,000 pounds of flowers
Seeing how concentrated essential oils are shows you just how potent these can be as herbal medicine. As youāll learn throughout this chapter, these powerful, naturally occurring remedies excel in their ability to help heal and create wellness on a daily basis.
NOT ALL FRAGRANCES ARE ESSENTIAL OILS
Sometimes it pains me to hear how confusing the world of scent is to so many people, and how many people mistake, through no fault of their own, an imitation for the real thing. We all love things that smell goodāthat much we know. Everythingāyes, everythingāhas an odor. Some odors are immediately recognizable, while some are so subtle we canāt smell them. Some odors donāt ever reach our noses, while others jump out at us immediately. And smell can be subjective; every personās sense of smell is calibrated a little differently.
Things that smell good can elevate our mood, arouse us, or bring us comfort. Essential oils arenāt the only powerful scents in the world. Fresh-cut grass and the salty spray of the ocean are delivered to us through moisture in the air we breathe. The smell of rain comes from water molecules that hit the ground and bounce back up into the air, carrying the scent of wet earth or pavement.
The scent of an essential oil is impossible to duplicate because the oil is so complex structurally that it simply canāt be broken down completely. Natural fragrance oil is more of a gray area, like any product labeled ānatural.ā Some fragrance oils used in natural products are made from isolating the one chemical component of an essential oil that gives off its telltale scent, sometimes called an āisolateā or ānatural.ā
But when you see chemical names like ālimoneneā or āgeraniolā on a product label, you can be sure youāre not buying the whole healing essence of the plant, and these chemical isolates may be extracted or even diluted with toxic chemicals (such as phthalates). (Check out the list on page 40 to see what should be on the label of a pure essential oil.) Most beauty products, home cleaning products, and perfumes are made with ingredients that have been highly processed or synthetically derived. The purpose of using a synthetic substance or a ānaturalā isolate in lieu of the original is to create smells and tastes that are completely consistent from batch to batch and wonāt change over time as the product sits on a shelf. For example, the signature smells of a product like Johnson & Johnsonās baby powder or the distinct taste of a Coca-Cola (which derives its unique flavor exclusively from a heavily processed mixture of lemon, nutmeg, neroli, cinnamon, and coriander essential oils) always stay the same. In contrast, pure, authentic essential oils can change from crop to crop, making these true naturals unstable for mass production.
Iāll discuss more about the differences between synthetic and natural fragrances in chapter 6. But for now, just know that not all plants that produce scent are harvested for use as an essential oil, and not all fragrances have the same efficacy or purity as the essential oils described in this book.
A Natural Prescription
Recently I attended a trade show where a young man spied my sleep remedy. He begged me for a bottle. Before I gave it to him, we discussed how he should use it. The next day, he came back disappointed, claiming, āNothing happened.ā Knowing this was not the whole picture, I asked him to tell me what had happened the night before. I expected to hear the same desperate tale I always doāa story of waiting hours to fall asleep or waking too often and trying to solve lifeās problems with an exhausted mind. But his story was much simpler than that. He had followed my instructions exactly. He went to bed, turned off all the lights, and inhaled my sleep remedy blend from a tissue about ten to fifteen times, breathing deeply. He put the tissue aside and felt nothing at all. He didnāt feel the high or the grogginess that his prescription sleep meds always produced. So he had assumed it wasnāt working.
āBut then what happened?ā I asked.
āThe next thing I knew, it was morning,ā he said. I simply looked back at him and shrugged. He quickly realized the essential oils had put him to sleep and worked wonderfully!
This story is a great example of why we donāt always need invasive solutions to solve a chronic health problem or immediate concern. By learning how to use natureās remedies, improvements can happen without us even noticing.
So many of us rely on prescription drugs to cure allergies and other ailments. We take expensive vitamins and supplements to stay healthy every day. We take medications to help us sleep. We rely on coffee and caffeinated beverages to stay awake. Iāve often thought about how we jump through hoops trying to reduce our daily stress and pain, but what if we all realized there are natural products that are more powerful than herbal teas, are more authentic than vitamins, and have fewer side effects than pharmaceuticals?
Here are a few examples of what essential oils can do:
ā¢ Relieve Aches and Pains
We know how important it is to keep up with a weekly exercise program, yet we do nothing to prevent or heal injuries except mask pain with Advil or Tylenol. Look no further for a natural, non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory pain reliever. Essential oils do this well while also supporting muscle health, body awareness, and flexibility.
ā¢ Alleviate Cold, Flu, and Allergy Symptoms
Many common essential oils are powerful decongestants and expectorants for treating colds and flu and shown to be effective antifungals for allergy sufferers. In addition, many oils are antibacterial and...
