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In case you haven’t noticed, wellness is trending big time. Self-care, natural beauty and fitness took over newsstands, our Instagram feeds and maybe even the world in 2017, with no signs of slowing down in 2018. More and more businesses are hopping on the bandwagon, offering natural products with fewer chemicals and more pronounceable ingredients. Staying true to one’s roots is the newest fad to hit the fragrance world and we’re all for it.
Whether their usual signature scent is a decadent designer spritz or a more affordable Warm Vanilla Sugar body mist, customers now want to not only smell good, but feel good as well.
With the wellness trend has come a newly heightened awareness of the potential mind and body benefits of scents. Along with a communal sway towards more natural products, this has led to a boom in the use of essential oils. Regular perfumes and their unpronounceable ingredients are being put on the back burner in favour of the essences of simple herbs and flowers you might find in your own garden. Essential oils are the perfect multitasker, smelling divine with the addition of some health benefits.
The aromatherapy and essential oil industry was valued at $7.5 billion dollars last year, while the celebrity scent market share of the fragrance industry fell by 8 percent.
As the new year begins, we’re looking for healthy, more natural alternatives to start off on a clean slate. Adding essential oils to your daily routine is a great step in the right direction and can help you tackle 2018 more grounded, renewed and energized than ever before.
Essential oils are highly concentrated yet natural forms of scent and can trigger psychological and physiological changes when inhaled. This is similar to the effect of any overload of the senses, such as the loud music or dim lights commonly seen in clothing stores. By surrounding yourself with a certain scent, such as through a diffused essential oil, you’re more likely to reap the benefits Instead of exposing yourself to the chemicals of a daily spritz of air freshener in your room or the anxiety inducing “did I blow out my candle before I left the house?”, consider what you’re actually breathing in and opt for a natural alternative.
Various essential oils are linked to specific benefits. Here are a few of our favourites:
Calming: Lavender, Rose, Ylang Ylang, Mandarin oil
Energy & Focus: Orange, Cinnamon, Clove, Tea tree oil
Memory Boosting: Sage oil
Stress Relief: Lemon oil, Bergamot, Peppermint, Lavender
Tension and Headache Reduction: Peppermint, Eucalyptus, Rosemary
Essential oils can either be sold as potent individual scents or unique mixes. Companies like Saje and DeoTerra create proprietary blends, which are combinations of various essential oils. These can either be just for the yumminess of the combined scents or be specifically created as remedies to various health issues like colds, digestion issues and pain relief.
As always, do your research when looking into natural products! Not everything with the key buzz word “aromatherapy” is based with natural ingredients or essential oils.
How to Use Essential Oils:
One way to use essential oils is to apply them directly to your skin instead of using an an eau de parfum roller. This way, the oils are absorbed into your skin instead of just sitting on top, meaning that the scent often lasts longer than your average eau de toilette. This makes them a great natural alternative to perfume.
Another way to use them is to apply them to hot water, such as a bath. The heat will release scented steam allowing you to reap the benefits of the oils. Create an at home spa experience and make your own facial steam by adding a few drops of oil to a bowl of steaming water. Hold your face over the bowl and drape a towel over your head to hold in the steam. Five minutes of pure bliss will leave your face bright and pores open, increasing the effectiveness of any skincare products used after.
Ultrasonic diffusers are the best way to disperse essential oils into the air and is our favourite way to use them. When using a diffuser, a small disk vibrates inside to produce water vapor combined with a few drops of essential oil that both freshens the air and removes dust particles by clinging to them and weighing them down to the ground. Even if the closest rainforest is thousands of miles away, you can still feel like there is one right in your workspace!
