In my last blog I said “Just smell the roses” but added “Go smell your essential oils!” This is the time of the year (in the Northern hemisphere) when the earth is bursting with flowers and producing lots of plants from which we distill essential oils. The lavender fields are coming alive and beginning to green up, the damask roses are producing fragrant buds, the herbal plants like rosemary, oregano, dill, and thyme are proliferating vibrant leaves and preparing to produce tiny flowers, the helichrysum is putting out their grey leaves and soon will produce yellow flowers, peppermint and spearmint are putting out runners and producing tons of fragrant leaves that will soon have small purple and white flowers, the lemongrass and other fragrant grasses are growing tall and their fragrances are waffling on the spring breezes, the rosy geranium leaves are so fragrant to your touch, and if you are fortunate enough to live in a tropical area where the ylang ylang trees grow, you will experience their overwhelming sweet fragrance in the air. The earth is alive and producing an abundance of glorious and tantalizing smells that are at once uplifting and energizing.
Did you ever wonder why plants smell or why we have a keen sense of smell in which to enjoy them? We call our ability to smell, olfaction. Smell is a chemical sense detected by sensory cells called chemoreceptors. So, when a fragrant molecule stimulates these chemoreceptors in the nose, they pass on electrical impulses to the limbic system in the brain. Interesting! Smell is hot-wired directly to that part of the brain that processes emotions (amygdala) and associative learning (hippocampus)!
We actually know a lot about our sense of smell. Even though human smelling is not nearly as keen as that of many other animals, it is still pretty powerful in that we can distinguish over 10,000 different fragrant chemicals. Scientists have discovered that 3% of all our genes are coded for olfactory receptor types. These receptors are extremely specialized to particular odors and some odors can only be detected because they are picked up by several different receptors. It’s the brain that interprets these “odorant patterns” and stores this information. When you smell a rose for the first time and associate it with the flower called rose, the next time you smell that fragrance without seeing the rose, your brain says “that’s a rose.”
What if you don’t live in an area where you can get to nature to smell the flowers? Not to worry, Young Living has your back. Here are some of my favorite oils to smell that bring me right into nature: rose, geranium, neroli, peppermint, spearmint, ylang ylang, lemongrass, dill, rosemary, thyme, oregano, lavender, eucalyptus, and all the tree oils like pine, spruce, and balsam. And then you have all the citrus oils like lemon, tangerine, orange, and grapefruit. You want a bouquet of flowers in one bottle? Then try Joy™, Harmony™, White Angelica™, or one of the many wonderful blends created by Gary Young.
Want to know more about your sense of smell? You can find my book The Role of Olfaction on Human Psychology in my store. Want to know more about the fragrant essential oils produced by young Living? Then contact me. I am glad to help.
Linda Smith
720-201-9377