Hang on to your hat friend, we’re getting sciency! (But just a little – don’t worry!)
Essential oils are truly fascinating – they are a way to harness the incredible power of nature! Essential oils are the aromatic compounds naturally found in shrubs, flowers, roots, leaves, stems and other parts of plants.
The power of an essential oil lies in its individual constituents and the synergy between those constituents – the individual compounds and pieces of the plant’s innate systems.
Some examples of aromatic constituents of essential oils include terpenes, monoterpenes, and phenols. These are just chemistry words to describe the physical structure of each constituent. What’s important here is that essential oils have a predominantly ring-like structure that is lipid-soluble.
This is hugely important because it allows essential oils to penetrate cell membranes and travel easily throughout the blood and tissues. Each cell in the body is surrounded by a lipid membrane, which is good because we don’t want to allow just anything inside the cell. However, it can be difficult to reach problem areas, and a lot of money goes towards creating solutions to this. Oils are the perfect design! Small, ringed structure, and lipid-soluble.
Studies over the last decades found that rosemary may enhance alertness + combat candida, orange + lemon demonstrate tumor-suppressing effects, and thyme can wash bacteria from produce. Studies like this are plentiful on PubMed!
There is also the smell-emotion connection to consider! This connection starts in the limbic system, often referred to as the “emotional brain”. This portion of the brain contains the hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus and thalamus. It handles emotional response, anger, fear, libido, hormone function, behavior, motivation, long and short-term memory, sleep patterns, reproduction, and… sense of smell. Because of this our emotions can affect SO MANY things in our lives.
When you breathe in an essential oil, molecules enter the limbic system and elicit an emotional response. The exact details of how smells impact emotions are difficult to define BUT we do know that smell absolutely DOES elicit an emotional response.
The best part? We can use ALL these things to our advantage and curate a toolbox of natural solutions for all of our needs!