MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE: Knowing a little more about aromatherapy

THERE IS a clear difference between essential as in essence versus indispensable, much like the discount Armani dress I told my husband he desperately needed.

With that being said, good quality aromatherapy could be considered an essential element that is also crucial to our lives, as its properties are much more far-reaching than I had understood until now. Someone who has lived on the essentials in Spain for more than a decade is Valérie Aucouturier, general director of The Little Green Bottle.

My poor beauty regimen as a teenager included slapping me with Vaseline instead of moisturizer, so I don’t claim to be a world expert on potions, but Valérie’s fun workshop provided me with some great tips and some surprising insights and parallels to the beauty industry. spirits.

If I were still alive, my old science teacher, Mr. Best, would say that ‘Chemistry Lessons’ weren’t really my thing (except when we chemically concocted a creepy lilac eyeshadow in his lab), so I asked Valérie to explain how essential oils work. they actually work in layman’s terms. It turns out that plants are incredibly smart.

“An essential oil is a plant concentrate derived from areas such as leaves, flowers, bark, roots, and husks. By extracting the plant’s own properties, we are effectively transferring the plant’s natural ability to ward off disease into an essential oil for our own health and well-being through aromatherapy.”

So we’re basically hijacking the plant’s ingenious innate self-defense mechanism for our own narcissistic purposes. Great, but with so many brands to choose from, how can you tell the real deal from a fake?

Valérie advises us to always check on the label that it is organic and therefore free of pesticides; to ensure that they are 100% pure so that the extract of the plant is the main ingredient and not diluted and 100% natural with the plant appearing with its full botanical name in Latin instead of a perfume made from it.

The mention of Latin takes me back to the dark days I spent reading translations of Hannibal crossing the Alps or some victor or other carrying off precious loot. After a few years of studying Virgil’s scholarly poems, I began to agree with the scrawled inscription on the inside cover of my antediluvian Latin dictionary: “Latin is a language, as dead as it can be, it killed the b* **dy”. Romans and now it’s killing me. Still, it comes in handy when you’re deciphering tombstones in European churches one afternoon.

During our essential oils workshop I learn that our sense of smell provides the fastest way to absorb the benefits of its properties as it is received by the nerve receptors in our nose that send a stimulating or relaxing message to our entire body. My teachers developed olfactory superpowers and were able to detect a whiff of Marlboro Lights on my schoolgirl breath from 20 meters away, thus thwarting my effusive attempts to become a respectable prefect.

Ironically, after more than a decade in the wine and spirits industry, I’ve honed my own nostril skills. While my liver function has been constantly compromised on the one hand, my nose is very much in tune with the various nuances of peat and terroir from Speyside to Somontano. Much to the annoyance of my teenage son when he has surreptitiously raided the liquor cabinet one night.

I ask about home aromatherapy as it is well documented that essential oils are very useful home remedies. Apparently tea tree oil is a genius for treating minor burns or small cuts and I dabbed it behind my daughter’s ears to ward off the ubiquitous class nits. Helichrysum is supposedly more effective than Arnica for bruises and bumps; eucalyptus radiata for colds and lemon eucalyptus for mosquito bites. I’m very tempted to put the latter to the test, as those vampiric mosquitoes pretty much devour me whole in the summer. Valérie is a big fan of grapefruit oil to combat unwanted odors on her teen’s sneakers! Surely I would have to buy an entire Del Monte estate for my own.

All this talk about citrus makes me hungry and I must confess that I am sometimes tempted, as with soap, to nibble a bit. Valérie confesses that she and her children have a predilection for tangerine essential oil ice cream: “Without sugar, animal gelatin or dyes, it’s a winner and, in addition, the tangerine helps us relax and fall asleep.” I’m tempted to try it out on my neighbor’s teething toddlers, or indeed my own middle-aged sleeplessness, so I can certainly see myself making some late-night forays into the freezer in the dead of summer for soporific late-night nirvana. . .

http://www.thelittlegreenbottle.com/ – if you are looking to inject a bit of Insta Confidence or Ibiza Vibe into your life.

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