Aromatherapy Products: Perfect for the Gift Giving Season
All aromatherapy products are perfect for gifts – particularly at this time of year, when colds and sniffles abound and there’s nothing quite like an invigorating warm scent to get the blood racing again. There are, though, some pieces of advice that you should take to heart before shopping for aromatherapy essential oils and related products – to make sure that everyone knows what he or she is getting when he or she undoes that little packet.
So – first, let’s talk about what an aromatherapy essential oil really is. It isn’t the same thing as one of those bottles of herby scent you pick up from your local health or natural store. Those things use aromatherapy oils as a base – finely diluted with (for example) rose water. You must be aware, if you’re buying the aromatherapy essential oils themselves, used as pure oil can be extremely dangerous. Indeed, applying aromatherapy oil to bare skin over prolonged periods of time can actually lead to liver failure. The active ingredients of the oils, which work so well when hugely diluted in domestic use aromatherapy products, can be lethal in concentrated doses.
That’s the basic difference between an essential oil and a prepared product. Prepared aromatherapy product lines are perfectly safe to use with no knowledge of the active ingredients or their proper doses. In general, festive cheer-bringing should be done with pre-prepared products, rather than the aromatherapy essential oils that form their basic active ingredient.
Herbalists and other alternative therapy professionals are likely to find this year’s (and next year’s) crops of certain aromatherapy products, in particular lavender, extremely special. Current crops of lavender are providing very nice oils for basing aromatherapy products – while next year’s forecast is suggesting that British co operative lavender farms could be distilling some of the best aromatherapy essential oils seen in years. In particular, the UK based grower’s co op Norfolk Essential Oils (also known as NE Oils) is looking forward to a crop that experts say should provide a good quantity of high grade oil, which is used in medicinal preparations and holistic treatments.
Since the UK woke up to the benefits of alternative therapies and cures, the art of aromatherapy has moved from a very peripheral apothecary status to centre stage in the accepted crossover land between pharmaceutical medicine (i.e. stuff made in labs) and pharmacological medicine (cures derived from the known properties of certain plants. While no aromatherapy products are, or ever should be, ingested, the acknowledgement that some of the active properties of plants involve beneficial effects gained through smell, speaks directly to the accepted medical knowledge that pharmacopeia, or the knowledge of plants and their properties has a proper place in the world of mainstream human treatment.
Aromatherapy essential oils, in bridging the gap between the accepted and previously non accepted branches of plant related treatment, have given the whole profile of alternative therapies a higher visibility. Which is why, of course, you’ll be seeing plenty of pre-prepared aromatherapy products on those virtual shelves in time for Christmas this year.
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