What are essential oils and how can they be useful?

I have only heard this in relation to perfume and scents. Soap makers, or perfume makers, buy various essential oils and mix them in different ways to make their own scented products.

That;s big business, by the way. One half liter of an essential oil can go for thousands of dollars, because it is diluted so much to go into the various products.

There are probably other meanings for ‘essential oils’, but this is the one I am familiar with.

It’s baloney. Expensive but pleasant smelling placebo and in the same vein of “homeopathic.”

If you asked me.

The only essential oil I’ve ever bought is clove oil. It smells nice! Supposedly it’s decent at relieving dental pain, but I’ve never tried it for that. I’ve bought it because it works as an anesthetic for fish, and you can overdose them on it to humanely euthanize them. I’ve had to do this for a number of my aquarium fish that have gotten really sick. It does the job.

Essential oils (the real thing) are concentrated distillates, suspended in a carrier oil, of various herbs, flowers, roots and other fauna. Although often used for aromatic purposes, they carry the properties of the original plants from which they were derived. Quality essential oils are a good addition to any photo-pharmacopoeia. So often the naysayers seem to forget that pharmaceuticals were originally derived from plant sources, some drugs today still use plant sources.

Essential oils can be very helpful if you are at all leery of using drugs for everything.

If you want specifics for what oil does this or that, PM me, @janbb.

OMG, first post was meant to read “flora”, not fauna! Autocorrect at its worst…

Crap. And it’s also supposed to read “phyto” pharmacopoeia.

I really need to proof this stuff before hitting “send”. Sorry.

I was wondering what photo pharmacopoeia was!

Cute drug selfies??? ;-)

Different scented oils are supposed to have different benefits for mood and health. Lavender, for example, is supposed to help you relax.

I am just getting into them myself. I had an issue with back pain a while back and a friend of mine mixed up some essential oils for me to apply to my back. It honestly helped ease the back pain.
I recently had a hair loss from a bad reaction to meds I was on. A friend suggested I add a drop of Rosemary to my shampoo. My hair stopped falling out and is now growing back. It’s not a replacement for pharmaceutical meds, but a natural way to address issues that don’t always call for drug intervention.

Essential oils are real physical things (I “love” how some people immediately go into “debunk” mode – LOL). They’re concentrated extracts from plants, used in perfumes and incenses, soaps, consumables – they’re non-artificial flavors & aromas.

They’re the opposite of homeopathic in terms of concentration – some of them will burn your skin.

And yes, sometimes they are used in “aromatherapy” or magic or whatever, and are targeted to certain effects, which can be overstated or misinterpreted or misused (or angrily dismissed as “placebo” if someone feels the urge), but hey, the brain controls what the body does, and takes input from nerves, and strong scents definitely send inputs to the brain. You can undeniably burn your skin, clear your sinuses, stimulate your senses, enjoy intense smells and eradicate unpleasant ones, and experience their sensations, etc. I’m not sure why some people need to angrily dismiss the idea that they can have other effects as well, though their effects can certainly be over-simplified, over-stated or over-sold, and each case may or may not be more or less due to psychosomatic or more mechanical effects.

How much of an investment are they? Which would you say is the most popular?

Some are much more expensive than others, like anything else. I would recommend researching online. The initial outlay seems fairly steep, but if you are making up your own salves and potions you use relatively little, because the oils are so concentrated.

I got an infuser for Christmas with 8 or 10 tiny bottles of oils. I’ve used it while going to sleep a few nights but didn’t notice any benefit.

The oils may just be nice smelling, and not actually distillates of the herbs that they say they are. I don’t think there’s any regulation on this stuff.

Thats the thing, there is no regulation. Mostly it’s just expensive air freshener. Just because it’s “distilled from plants” does not mean it is usefull for anything at all. It depends on what it is. A tiny portion of them may have some perceptable benefit as a salve or aromatherapy but none really justify the cost. My sister used to make and sell this stuff at like 100x markup.

Well, @ARE_you_kidding_me, your cynicism notwithstanding, there are reliable sources, and the use of this stuff for specific purposes works.

Here is some information about the uses, and cautions, regarding essential oils:

http://www.floracopeia.com/education/how-to-use-essential-oils-effectively/

They don’t have any direct medical benefit, but to the extent they can help you relax and lower stress levels, it’s well documented that those changes have measurable medical effects.

“The placebo effect” is a rather good example of how the materialist “skeptical” mindset is (objectively and materially) a problematic philosophy to focus on. It’s very well-documented that thinking one is taking a medicine that will have an effect very often leads to that effect, even when no physical medicine is taken. But the effect is very real and has provided cures that direct medical science had nothing effective for. But the focus on “it’s not real” causes people who are violently “skeptical” to reject far more than the absence of mechanical medicine, and has even caused reverse placebo effects (e.g. where people hear that a medicine they’ve been taking with success is not longer thought to have a clear effect, and they then get much worse).

The brain has a direct impact over almost every body function. Science is nowhere near having anything like a complete understanding of what kinds of inputs will do what to a patient. We don’t know what treatments actually cause what all to happen to us (even in mainstream Western medicine this is far less certain than we’d like to believe). Someone who believes in esoteric cures will probably materially benefit from placebo effects. We also don’t really know what the effects of many other approaches may be.