Essential Skin Care: An Introduction by Lynda Sorenson

learned has come through the generosity of other Aromatherapists, their experiences and the empirical evidence of collective experience. I fully expect that the writing of this will contribute to my store of knowledge considerably, and admit that this is a large part of the reason I agreed to do it. If the great expert is out there, I admit to being ignorant of who this person is, but would gladly give my eye-teeth to sit at their feet and listen.

Without argument, the most important aspect of using Aromatherapy in skin care treatments is safety, and that is the focus of this first article. As Martin Watt has demonstrated, the subject could fill a book of its own, so for me to cover it here as well as it ought to be covered would be impossible, as I would just have to sit here and type out everything Martin has so ably written already. However I can give some elementary rules of thumb for using Essential oils in skin care safely. Some of these may appear painfully basic, but they always bear repeating.

First would be that one should never use Essential oils neat on the skin outside certain rare, emergency situations. We all have heard the story of Rene-Maurice Gattefosse healing chemical burns to his hands resulting from a laboratory accident by rinsing them with Lavender Essential oil. And as infrequently as we burn ourselves while cooking in the kitchen, it is generally safe to use neat Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) to reduce the pain and inflammation of the burn and speed the healing of the affected skin. However, were you to follow the advice of many of the Aromatherapy novelists, as I did all one summer while first studying Aromatherapy, and use neat Lavender on mosquito bites, you run a great risk of becoming sensitized as I have done to this universally useful oil.

More is not better when using Essential oils. We are usually advised to use a dilution of 2.5% Essential oils in a carrier for a full body massage. Very loosely translated - and this can be influenced by such factors as the viscosity of the oil itself, to the size of the dropper used - this would be 15 drops (gtt.) of Essential oil to every ounce or 30 milliliters of carrier. Please note that this is a generalization only, and that as such it can be misleading. There are exceptions to this rule as to any other, though it is acceptable for most Essential oils. It is my belief that this percentage is based on the idea that a massage is not a daily occurrence, but more likely to be a monthly or bi-monthly treatment. When using Essential oils in skin care on a weekly or bi-weekly treatment basis, I keep the dilution of Essential oil to carrier or base to