Essential oils have been gaining notoriety for their therapeutic and medicinal actions, becoming more widely recognized than just little bottles of good smelling liquid. For their medicinal use, they can be ingested (in very tiny amounts, and only with supervision from a health professional!), topically applied, or inhaled. It’s the inhaling part that most folks associate with “aromatherapy”, but its important to see beyond the “spa treatment” image of inhalation of essential oils. This method can really provide therapeutic results, not only in terms of mood and energy, but for the immune system and other physiological activity as well. So which diffuser to use for the most health benefits? Here we’ll investigate the most popular styles, and see what each type offers in terms of therapeutic activity.

The Research Is In: Essential Oils Have Proven Health Benefits

Those interested in supporting their family’s health through natural means are being drawn toward using essential oils. People are learning that aromatherapy isn’t just about aroma, its about real medicine that works. Even the simple applications are wonderful: diffusing oils in your home can calm the young and the old, and act as natural antidepressants (both scientifically validated actions). The research abstracts available on PubMed.Gov (and elsewhere around the Internet) also note that essential oils can boost the activity of our immune system. Eucalyptus has been shown to actually make our white blood cells more effective and doing their job. Further, many oils have both indirect and direct antiviral effects — they prevent infection of individual cells the oils have come in contact with, and can inactivate the actual viruses as well. (Their anti-bacterial actions are just as impressive). And diffusing essential oils into your environment can help you and your family enjoy all these benefits.

The Right Diffuser For Aroma-Therapy

One of the wonderful aspects of essential oils is that by simply inhaling the aroma, significant changes occur in our body’s physiology. This is because the olfactory sense is the most closely tied of the five senses to your brain. A scent can change the way your body is functioning without you even thinking about it (one study notes over 100 changes to the patterns of RNA transcription from smelling Linalool, the primary relaxing component in Lavender). Smelling certain oils can lower stress, improve mood, calm children, and improve the quality of sleep. And for this type of therapy, ANY diffuser will do the job. The only consideration that really matters here is how large an area you’d like to diffuse the oil into — would you like to smell it from one end of the house to the other, or just in one room.

Let’s look at the diffuser types, the area they’ll each cover, and a few other useful details if you’re just wanting the wonderful aromatic effects (we’ll get to which one’s are best for more medicinal applications in a moment). The order, from smallest to largest space covered is this: A warming diffuser is good for one small to moderate size room. It plugs in a wall and evaporates the oil from a small pad by heating it gently — it’s completely silent. A fan diffuser, which blows cold air over a pad with oils on it, can cover one large room, and you might here the quiet fan whirring. Then an “ultrasonic nebulizer”, which is essentially a small ultrasonic humidifier adapted to diffuse essential oils. These diffuse in an area from 400 to 700 square feet, and can have electronic accessories like an interval timer (which helps conserve your oils) and cool lighting effects. Finally, there’s the cold-air nebulizers, which make a mist of the pure essential oil without added water. These can cover areas larger than 800 square feet.

All these diffusers are excellent for getting relaxing and uplifting aromas in the air. You’ll find that the more you spend, the more square footage your diffuser will cover. If you’re considering that you’d like to take full advantage of the immune supportive, air cleansing aspects of essential oils, you’ll want to be more conscious of output, and having the ability to really optimize output for your needs.

It is the nebulizing diffusers that allow complete flexibility in terms of essential oil output, and maximizing the concentration of essential oils in your environment. If this is what you are seeking, make sure you find a cold-air nebulizing diffuser, one that uses air rather than water to make the evaporating mist of essential oils. The fancier of these units will have an output control, enabling you to diffuse just a little at a time at the lowest setting, to really creating a visible vapor of essential oil within the nebulizing chamber.

Conserving Your Oils While Gaining The Most Benefit

With any diffuser, its important to note that your nose will stop working before the diffuser does! Really, after a short while of diffusing the same aroma, one’s smell scent becomes accustom to it and you’ll no longer know its there — but someone just walking in the room will be able to detect it. To prevent this, and use as little essential oil as possible for the greatest aromatic effect, its best to run your diffuser only a few minutes every hour. Find the on/off cycle that’s best for you, where you’re smelling the aroma the most and using the least amount of oil. A timer, readily available at hardware stores, can help. Note that this isn’t of concern when using the diffuser for immune function support — running the diffuser all the time is fine. At the same time, essential oils are known for working in very small amounts, so by being a bit conservative, you’ll probably use just the right amount!

The author is a natural health practitioner in Boulder, Colorado. She is a regular user of Synergy Essential Oils and consultant to aromatherapy creations at The Ananda Apothecary.

It’s that time of year again, when the little winged biting creatures make themselves known. Silent or with a buzz, we’re all familiar with the bugs of Summer. With the growing concern of un-natural chemicals being applied to our skin, with the knowledge that the skin absorbs everything that’s put on it, many people are looking to natural alternatives to the common chemicals we find at the hardware and grocery store. Parents in particular are, rightly, concerned for the health of their youngest ones, whose developing physiology is more readily affected by these chemicals. The truth is that DEET is a highly questionable chemical, with many possible dangerous side effects, none of which are worth taking the chance with. Here we’ll look at the ingredients to make both your own healthy topical repellent, and what you can use to repel insects from the space around you.

Pungent natural aromatics have been used throughout the ages to repel biting insects. We’re all very familiar with Citronella, which is in fact an essential oil distilled from a grass. In all the natural mosquito and insect repellent formulas, essential oils are the ingredients that keep the bugs away — the rest is just inert “carrier”, either lotion or liquid. Making your own version of these is as simple as filling a container with your carrier of choice, then measuring your essential oils and mixing the whole thing together. And if you’re one of those folks who really wants to go the “all organic” route, making your own allows you to do it.

In addition to making a topical lotion, aromatherapy offers the ability to diffuse natural insect and mosquito repellents inside your house — something you’d never do with synthetic chemicals. Not something you’d want to be breathing all the time! But aromatherapy diffusers, particularly nebulizing diffusers which allow you to control the concentration of essential oil in the air, can disperse pure, natural, organic aromatics throughout the day or night to keep those critters away.

Ready to make your own formula? First decide whether you’d like a spray or lotion. A spray needs something to “hold” the essential oils in the liquid, otherwise they’ll quickly float to the top ever time they’re mixed. You can use one of the following as your base liquid for a spray: Rubbing alcohol, vodka, or witch hazel are excellent. The general rule of thumb for the concentration is anywhere between 5 and 10% essential oil in the base. So if you’re making 4 ounces of spray, that’s 120 milliliters. Five percent of that is 6 milliliters, which is 120 drops (if you don’t have a measuring pipette). Obviously if you’d like to make a 10% concentration, just double the amount of essential oil — just keep an eye out for any skin irritation.

Which essential oils to use? A few which are often used are Geranium, Citronella, Cedarwood, Lemongrass and Lemon Tea Tree. A small amount of Peppermint is good, but the amount should be kept low if the formula will be used on children under 12. These can be mixed and matched to your liking. Using more than one is recommended, as the aroma’s will synergize, possibly having a more potent effect together than any single oil alone. But on that note, scientific research has it that Catnip essential oil, being made up primarily of nepetelaction, is the single most potent essential oil for repelling mosquitoes — ten times more effective than DEET. It’s a pricier essential oil because of its relatively low production, but you’ll also be able to use less.

The recipes are very simple. Find a four ounce container of your choice. A spray bottle or something with a pump top, depending on your choice of base. Fill this about 9/10ths of the way up with your base, be it lotion, vodka, etc. Here, a measuring pipette is very helpful: four ounces = 120ml, so 5% = 6ml and 10% = 12ml. To help you measure, if you don’t have a measuring device, there are approximately 20 drops per milliliter. For a synergy formula of 10%, use 6ml Geranium, 3ml Citronella, 2ml Lemongrass and 1ml Cedarwood…or just use 6ml Catnip! We’re not quite certain which will work better, because essential oil blends have not been tested. It would be fun to experiment here yourself — you might find a blend that you love the aroma of, and the bugs really detest!

So you’d like to repel insects from your home, office, or other enclosed space? Find yourself a quality, high output aromatherapy diffuser. A nebulizing diffuser — one that does not mix the oils with water — is best, as you can really output a high concentration of essential oils in the air if you find it necessary. Just add the essential oils of your choice into the reservoir and run the unit for several minutes. In this case, you might use just Citronella essential oil, as it is of very low cost. One prominent author talks about leaving tissues with drops of Peppermint essential oil on them on the windowsills (obviously she didn’t have screens in this room!) as a deterrent. So because so many possibilities can work, you might want to experiment here, trying to find the least amount of essential oil necessary for your needs.

Well there it is! One of the simplest, very effective means of “aromatherapy”. By using essential oils this way, you can alleviate your worries of whether or not DEET is harmful to you and your loved ones. Essential oils really a great treasure of natural healing — if you haven’t used them yet, perhaps this can be your launching pad into a whole new world of natural medicine.

The author has made available much information about aromatherapy, such as using lavender and other essential oil.