芳 香 種 子

🌱 芳 香 種 子 🌱

🌻 專業單元二20A ～ Joanne 同學 🌻

At last, I spent few hours to clean up all of the essential oils (EO) and give the room a fresh air. I am SHOCKED on how many empty bottles of EOs I had consumed in the past 3-4 years (150 bottles). The more I studied aromatherapy the more I discovered and surprised with the synthetic compounds found in several large and small essential oil companies. The worse things are these companies never provide proper training on uses of EOs and not even mention the shelf life and how they should be stored properly. Are essential oils just a snake venom in a fancy bottle?

It’s become so popular to use essential oils and not just because of the way they are being used (or in many cases, overused), or that they are being sold widely by people whose only training is from the companies that stand for profit directly off “mass consumption of these oils”. This comes with huge impact to the production and our environment. Essentials oils were once a small market product and only available through proper trained aromatherapists and medicine person. With the mass production scale, we are now seeing in oils, many are being grown as mono-crops requiring heavy usage of pesticides, mass harvesting and in some cases irresponsible harvesting. This can be endangering both plant species and sharp increase the prices. It’s also the company responsible to perform third party testing to ensure there is no contamination and adulteration of the EOs from their suppliers.

“Therapeutic Grade” is a marketing label that means absolutely nothing. It sounds legitimate, but it is a marketing term that I am guilty of having used myself in the past when talking about oils. I thought it meant something. There isn’t therapeutic standard for essential oils so the name and any concept associated with it is virtually meaningless. It’s a self-regulated claim like many other healthy terms.

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to enrich my aromatherapy knowledge through two Aromatherapists with many years of practical experience: Dorcus (Yu) – EIR Academy (Hong Kong branch of German Aromacampus) and Maria (Hoch) – Founder of German Aromacampus. They taught me the importance to use the botanical name for essential oils when studying their benefits and even at time of ordering my own Essential oils. The botanical name tells the genres and species of the plant and the information about the variety, cultivar, chemotype and hybrid when needed. This is to ensure you are getting and using what you are expecting. They also taught me how an oil is distilled and what part of the plant is being used is important to the quality of EO as some distillers may use more abundant and cheaper parts.

They also taught me to trust my nose when I smell oils alongside each other, the nose often knows which EO has synthetic oil component when next to a pure oil and the difference is fairly obvious. The more practiced I do, the easier it becomes for my nose to tell me everything I need to know.

Last but not least, they taught me “LESS is MORE” when applying EO on my body which is totally contradicted my knowledge learned from the leaders of the big EO brand.

No matter I’m using the oils purely for personal use or sharing my knowledge, unbiased aromatherapy training from a certified and experienced aromatherapist and herbalist is invaluable.

相片 ： Joanne Yue