Sweetsation Therapy

What is Aromatherapy?

The term aromatherapy simply means "treatment with scent". It is the use essential oils for the treatment of mind and body. The term essential oil comes from the Latin word "essentia" which means "essence". Essential oils are volatile because they are able "to fly" since they are a liquid that quickly becomes gaseous. "Aroma" refers to the naturally occurring scent of the essential oils. "Therapy" refers to the physical, psychological, and spiritual treatment imparted from essential oils.

What Are Essential Oils

Essential oils are highly concentrated and potent oils extracted from plants, trees, seeds, shrubs, flowers, fruit peels and leaves. Essential oils are found in special secretory glands of living plants. The aromatic oils are formed and stored in organs of a plant as a by-product or because of its metabolism. Each essential oil has its very own blueprint that is totally unique. The combination of the plants exclusive design, the energy of the sun, soil, air and water gives each its own individual perfume and beneficial healing properties contained in the living essential oil of the plant. The same species of plant can produce an essential oil with different chemical components depending on whether it was grown in dry or damp earth, at high or low altitude, or even in hot or cold climates.

According to the International Organization for Standardization, essential oils are a "product made by distillation with either water or steam or by mechanical processing of citrus rinds or by dry distillation of natural materials. Following the distillation, the essential oil is physically separated from the water phase." The term "oil" in reference to essential oils can sometimes be misleading. Essential oils are not actually oily in the vein of vegetable oils that are expressed from nuts and seeds. Essential oils are not oily at all, in fact, most essential oils are actually very light and appear watery. Most essential oils have a low viscosity and only a small handful of them have a high viscosity (i.e. sandalwood).

Worldwide there thousands of essential oils on the market today but only about are 300 commonly used. Essential oils are the most concentrated form of any botanical. It takes an average of about one pound of any given plant to create one drop of essential oil. Some essential oils require much more than a pound of product per drop. It takes about 1.3 lbs or 125 rose buds to produce one drop of rose absolute. Essential oils provide a concentrated dose of nature's vast pharmacological active ingredients in a single drop of oil. One hundred percent pure unadulterated essential oils are distinguished by an extraordinary diversity of substances that only nature could produce.

Back to Articles