I hate coming up with titles for blog posts. It gives me the same sense of anxiety as giving an email a subject line – like I don’t know yet! There are several subjects! And I don’t want to confuse anyone by which subject I pick for the subject line, as that may not be the primary, or even secondary, topic. Or, I get too prescriptive. Like today I really wanted to just write a bit about my six-month obsession with essential oils, so I typed the title ‘Essential Oils’, but then I thought I sounded a bit like someone who was an authority on essential oils. And I’m not. Also, pre-disclosure, I don’t believe essential oils have any medical benefits whatsoever. I think they smell really good, and I prefer using diffusers to candles (I used to burn candles allll the time but I did have a large fear of burning down my apartment building). So that’s why I didn’t stick with my original proscriptive title, in case somehow someone was reading this to learn about the medicinal benefits of essential oils?
Anyway, time to move on from that internal reflection. Generally I just wanted to share how much I love essential oils. They just smell so good! I have two diffusers going most of the time, one in our office and one at home. I have heard some hilarious stories of essential oil non-believers like myself having the apparently beneficial effects of oils forced upon them to their devastation. The worst transgression I heard was someone sneaking some drops of peppermint essential oil into an unsuspecting innocent’s latte when he had a cold. An untainted latte would probably have had a better impact on a cure than the oil, in my personal opinion. But I’m happy to accept that when I have horrible allergies, the cleansing smell of eucalyptus makes me happy. And I have grapefruit oil diffusing at home 100% of the time, which counteracts the horrible smell of dead animal that my adorable puppy leaves everywhere he goes (I watched him devour the skeleton of a dead cat the other day, and I haven’t forgiven him for it yet. I don’t even like cats).
I have read a lot of useful uses for essential oils, like putting drops in your dryer (to make your clothes smell pleasant) and in home-made cleaning products (which I’m not virtuous enough to have made yet, but I do enjoy thinking about what a great person I would be if I used them). All of the uses really come back, in my mind, to smelling nice. Diffusers are also wonderful for people who live in cold wintery climates (like myself, who would’ve thought!) and can’t open the windows but desperately want to get rid of that stuffy smell.
My mum also bought me a beautiful necklace that had a little stone you can tip essential oils onto and carry the ‘benefits’ (ie of smelling nice) around with you. In a tragic turn of events I lost the little stone in the first five minutes of wearing it, but those first four minutes were really nice to carry around the refreshing scent of grapefruit! Luckily the necklace is gorgeous so it works just fine without essential oils. However, I am kind of tempted to treat myself to a diffuser bracelet to sniff at random intervals, but I’ll probably just lose it and may just stick to diffusing.
Anyway, let me know if you think I’m sacrilegious for my firm non-belief in any benefits beyond scent for essential oils. But I’m sure you do agree that they smell just great, and are much less stressful than having an open flame at home.
And that’s my musings for today.