by Christina Dille

Created on: April 02, 2008

Aromatherapy is quickly becoming the wellness tool of the future. Find out how scent can be used to improve your health and well-being.

What is Aromatherapy?

Aromatherapy can be very simple or extremely complex depending on how deep you choose to dig. You certainly don't need to be a chemist to take advantage of its benefits, but you do need good foundational knowledge and common sense. With the right information and guidance Aromatherapy can be an easy, fun, and effective way to improve your overall wellness quotient. Aromatherapy is simply the use and application of essential oils for therapeutic purposes. Essential oils can be considered the physical manifestation of the spirit of a plant. Not all plants produce the gift of an essential oil to enhance our health and lives. Understanding essential oils is the key to your knowledge of Aromatherapy.

An essential oil is the pure concentrated volatile essence of a botanical that is extracted and used in Aromatherapy, perfumery, and as flavoring for foods. Essential oil is actually a blanket term that includes absolutes, resins, CO2 extracts, and expressed oils. In general an essential oil comes about as the result of steam distillation. Absolutes are solvent extracted and CO2 extracts use gases to separate the oil from plant material. For practical purposes all of these are widely referred to as essential oils. A reputable essential oil supplier will indicate the precise type of extraction on the label of their product.
Essential oils are fragrant, but they should never be confused with fragrance oils. The main difference between the two is that essential oils have natural chemical compounds that create a physiological reaction when applied to the body and inhaled. Fragrance oils do not have these compounds and usually are produced synthetically. High quality fragrance oils may smell great and make you smile, but they don't shift what's happening in your body at any given moment. When we use essential oils we invite balance into our lives by engaging both our physical and spiritual selves.

The practice of Aromatherapy is ancient. Essential oils have been used in healing and perfumery for thousands of years. The word Aromatherapy was coined in the 1930's by a man named Rene Gattefosse. There are a few different versions of Gattefosse's story but the gist of it is this:
Gattefosse belonged to a family of perfumers. One day after being severely burned he plunged his arm into a vat of lavender. He noticed that the

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