This episode started with a rant.
It’s a rant that I didn’t choose to say out loud in the moment, but an important one nonetheless. Lately I’ve been hearing some CRAZY stories about what people are doing with essential oils—and it’s time to stop the madness!
(Or, at least, it’s time for me to speak up.)
The International Organization for Standardization defines an essential oil as, “…a product made by distillation with either water or steam or by mechanical processing of citrus rinds or by dry distillation of natural materials. Following the distillation, the essential oil is physically separated from the water…”
They are the basis of plant scents and are either the end products or by-products of the plant’s metabolic processes. Each plant stores essential oils in different ways, and the process of distillation is a way that humans have devised to separate out these compounds from the other parts of the plant. It is not a ‘natural’ process; isolated essential oils are not found in nature. Essential oils are made available by a technological process. The preferred oils for therapeutic use are extracted without the use of chemical solvents and rely on water or mechanical action alone for their production.
Essential oils play a variety of roles within the plant itself, and understanding those roles can help us to understand how to use them. Some repel leaf-eating insects and microorganisms while others attract pollinators with their seductive scents. Critically, they also serve as chemical messengers for plant communication. Plants don’t have a spoken or written language, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t communicate with one another. Essential oils are part of that communication system, and since plants & many species of animals evolved at the same time, there are many ways that our own chemical messengers (hormones) resemble the molecular structure of plants’ chemical messengers. (For more information about this, I recommend reading Kurt Schnaubelt’s work on Aromatherapy from a chemical & scientific perspective.)
