11 March 2022 Does aromatherapy solely involve oils? How can we use aromatherapy in our daily life while we are not an aromatherapist?
We often say aromatherapy is the use of essential oils.
In fact, it comprises of:
Essential oils
Hydrosols
Carrier oils
Daily use of herbs / spices for cooking
To utilise the plant much holistically, we should not just administer aromatherapy with hydrophobic essential oils. Understanding of the chemical composition of the plant in this case would be very important, as different chemical components would dissolve in different solutes. The water soluble compounds have their therapeutic properties also.
Thus, hydrophilic compounds might be required. For example, researchers often use ethanol as a solute for extracting both hydrophobic and hydrophilic plant chemicals and apply the ethanol extract to the experimental animals.
With the above reasons, I don’t just teach the use of essential oils, but also integrate the concept of aromatherapy into our daily living.
Like, when we prepare curry or Chinese marinated sauce, we usually sauté many different herbs or spices in oil and then add water into it; or when we boil Chinese soup, we sometimes add mandarin peel into the pot. FYI, there are also essential oil at the peel of mandarin! That’s why there are spices and mandarin essential oils for sale.
Now you can see that there are many plants, of course with essential oils born inside them, are surrounding us.
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