Aromatherapy is a field of alternative medicine that’s been around for thousands of years despite an almost total lack of evidence proving its effectiveness. According to Mayo Clinic, there are studies suggesting that aromatherapy may benefit people suffering from a variety of issues including anxiety, depression, insomnia, arthritis and more. The problem with conducting a clinical study on the effectiveness of aromatherapy is that there’s almost no way to create a placebo version of something that’s supposed to benefit you by smelling it.
While there’s no conclusive evidence proving the effectiveness of aromatherapy, though, that fact hasn’t stopped millions of people around the world from trying it anyway. Whether you find aromatherapy helpful for relieving a specific condition or not, there’s no doubt that it’ll make your home smell better. It’ll also probably leave you feeling more relaxed – and who can’t use a few moments of relaxation these days? Although you can try aromatherapy by doing something as simple as buying an essential oil warmer or a reed diffuser, there are also some exciting new technological developments that could make your first experience with aromatherapy even better. These are the new aromatherapy technologies that you never knew existed.
Dry Herb Vaporizers
When people use aromatherapy techniques, the most common way is by heating an essential oil to the point at which it vaporizes and travels through the air. That’s usually done by placing a candle under a ramekin that holds the essential oil. Since essential oils are volatile, they vaporize at relatively low temperatures and escape into the environment easily. As the oil circulates throughout your environment, you inhale it and enjoy its beneficial properties.
Heating an essential oil in a warmer is certainly a good way to practice aromatherapy – while making your home smell great at the same time – but it’s not the most efficient way of doing things if you really want to maximize the potential benefits. Wouldn’t it be better if you could just inhale those beneficial compounds directly? As a matter of fact, you can do exactly that with a dry herb vaporizer from a company like Lux Vapes.
When you use a dry herb vaporizer, you can load it with any aromatherapy compound that you like. One of the most popular options, for example, is lavender flowers. Simply pack the vaporizer’s chamber with the compound of your choice and turn the device on. The chamber becomes warm enough to vaporize the beneficial compounds in the herbs, and you can inhale those compounds directly by puffing on the vaporizer’s mouthpiece. If you find a particular herb or flower beneficial for aromatherapy purposes, you may find the compounds in that herb infinitely more helpful if you can inhale them directly rather than allowing them to escape into the air.
Ultrasonic Aromatherapy Diffusers
One of the properties of essential oils that can make aromatherapy difficult is the fact that they’re so volatile. That’s why the results with traditional essential oil warmers can sometimes be so mixed. When you’re just burning a candle under a ramekin of essential oil, you don’t have fine control over the temperature the oil reaches. The heat from the candle might be perfect for vaporizing a particular type of oil – but with another type of oil, you may find that the heat from the candle simply burns the oil’s beneficial compounds without providing any real benefit.
If your experiments with aromatherapy have produced mixed results – or if you can already tell that there must be a better way to disperse essential oils throughout your home than by burning a candle under them – an ultrasonic aromatherapy diffuser is the product that you need. Instead of turning the essential oil to a heated vapor, an ultrasonic diffuser uses rapid vibrations to break the oil into extremely small droplets that are light enough to be carried through the air. Compared to a traditional candle-based essential oil warmer, an ultrasonic diffuser does a much better job of introducing beneficial essential oils into your environment without damaging those compounds with heat.
Home Essential Oil Extraction
If you end up taking a strong interest in aromatherapy, one of the things you’ll learn very quickly is that essential oils can be very expensive. It takes a lot of plant material to get a little essential oil, and the companies that perform the extraction want to earn money for their efforts. If you look at the essential oil section in your local health food store, you’ll see that you’d have to pay a small fortune if you wanted to try everything that’s available. Wouldn’t it be great if you could make your own essential oils instead? You’d save some money and have a lot of fun in the process.
As it turns out, essential oil extraction in the home is not just something that’s merely possible; it’s actually surprisingly affordable with the variety of home distillation kits now on the market. It’s even possible to harvest essential oils without a home distillation kit by steeping a plant in high-proof alcohol for several days, straining out the solids and freezing the mixture. The oils and plant solids will form clumps that you can easily remove from the mixture since the alcohol will not freeze. With vapor distillation, though, you can get a result that’s even purer and more potent – and the equipment necessary to distill essential oils at home is surprisingly affordable.
So, what can you do with essential oils that you distill at home? The list is actually quite enormous, and it extends far beyond aromatherapy. Insects dislike many essential oils, so you can make your own non-toxic pesticides and insect repellants. You can add pleasing fragrances to home-made soaps, lotions, shampoos and massage oils. Essential oils are also the basis of perfumery, and you’re probably well aware of how much high-end designer perfumes can cost. You could make your own perfumes at a fraction of the retail price – and if you know a thing or two about marketing, you could even end up forming your own business. Few things are more fun than a hobby that pays for itself!