Hydrosols

What is Aromatherapy

Aromatherapy is a branch of phytotherapy or plant therapy, just as herbalism, homeopathy, flower remedies, traditional Chinese medicine, and many other treatments are also phytotherapy. Aromatherapy is holistic, concerning itself with the whole of the person and attempting to create balance for the whole of the body.

Aromatherapy [practice has been documented in dome form or another for more than four thousand years but went through a major reassessment and earned its modern name during the first World War. This renaissance has taken aromatherapy into many worlds: the chemical exploration of hard science, the hallowed halls of modern medicine, and the metaphysical realms of spirituality.

Now as we enter the twenty-first century, I believe it is changing again. The aromatherapy of the future will no longer segregate the different avenues of aromatic practice but will allow them to coalesce in one broad modality.

Even now aromatherapy exhibits its own energy, a blend of thoughts and methods in which the total is greater  than the sum of the parts, magic cohabits with chemistry, botany lives with bodywork, and layperson practitioners have as much chance of healing themselves as professionals. It leaves and breathes and grows just as the plants from which it comes.

Aromatherapy, in the truest sense of the word, is the use of 100 per cent natural whole, unadulterated , aromatic essences obtained from specific botanical sources by steam distillation or expression for their benefits of mind, body and spiritual health.

These essences may be pure essential oils, the non-water-soluble, volatile aromatic compounds found in flowers, leaves, branches, seeds, roots, barks, resins and fruits and obtained by gentle distillation. They may also be the expressed oils found in the rinds of citrus fruits like lemon, orange, bergamot, and grapefruit, which are gathered by squeezing the oil from the peel.

Aromatherapy also involves the use of nonvolatile fatty oils (carrier oils) found in avocados, sesame seeds, and exotics such as rosehips and hazelnuts. Last but not least, aromatherapy uses hydrosols, the aromatic waters coproduced during the steam distillation of essential oils. What is most important is that the substances used in the creation and maintenance of health be totally pure and from very specific plants.

What aromatherapy is not is the use of synergistic substances such as perfumes and fragrant oils, nor is it simply the use of "anything that smells".

Aromatherapy products are not made in a plant (factory) but in a plant (living growing , green thing). They are not merely perfumes. The bulk of items marked as aromatherapy on the shelves of pharmacies, department stores, cosmetic suppliers, spas and even health food stores are not true aromatherapy. They may be "smelly" but they are not exclusively natural. Many have never seen a plant  (living, growing, green thing), and some may contain ingredients linked to, or suspected of causing , serious health problems and allergic reactions, yet the label calls them aromatherapy all the same. Given all that's out there, what's a person to do?

The bottom line is that we are in uncharted territory. We are working in a world where no clear differentiation exists between things that are natural and aromatic and things that are synthetic and aromatic, a zone where there is no perceived difference between smells that heal and smells that harm where no law exists.

At the present there are few controls on the creative license used by those who write the labels  and market the products, unless they are medicines. A bottle may say that it contains "only 100 percent essential oil." There are no requirements that other ingredients, such as carrier oils, perfume industry chemicals , or even common alcohol, be listed on the label. You may buy this bottle thinking that what you are getting is the real thing, but the real thing only contributes to a fraction to the price you are paying.

Reference:Hydrosols: Suzanne Catty