for the love of fragrance
a woman’s hands holding a bottle of perfumeI was in a room full of people seated closely together yesterday in a worship service. Upon sitting down I realized that the two women next to me were wearing strong amounts of chemical perfume (yes, I can smell the difference between chemical perfume and essential oils). I moved to farther back in the room, but then those rows filled in around me, too. The door closed, and the service began. Because there was no airflow in the room, the scents wafted over me every few minutes. I used my coping tools to allay the panic. I did not end up with a migraine. But years ago, I would have.
Please, please learn about the problems with chemical perfume. Even if they don't give YOU a headache or other side effects, they damage your hormonal systems. This goes for artifically-fragranced body and hair products, too, laundry detergent and those scented things of various forms you add to your rinse or dry cycle. Home products include scented candles and fragranced plug-ins and sprays. Whether you are sensitive to them or not, they are only adding to the toxic load that your body has to filter out. And for most Westernized people, our detox systems are at this point greatly impaired and assaulted more than ever before. This is a critical cause of disease, especially cancer: stagnation of toxins in the body. When we don't get them OUT, cancer cells, bacteria, yeasts, and viruses come in to attempt to clean us up or help us survive a toxic condition. And last I checked, most humans are terrified of that process and go to great lengths to fight it.
If you or your clothes smell bad, clean up your body (INSIDE and OUTSIDE) so there's no garbage coming out in your sweat for bacteria to need to gobble up (that's where the smell comes from). A little note here for those who stress-sweat. Stress and negative emotions create toxic chemicals in our body, too. I know all too well that you can't just flip a switch to turn off the stress. But who doesn't need more stress-reduction activities in their lives? Cleaning up our thoughts is just as important as cleaning up our bodies.
And FOR THE LOVE please do not give perfume to young girls whose hormonal systems are still developing. If you want to wear some perfume for a fun night out or fun night in, that's your choice. But please don't wear it to places where you will be very close to other people for extended amounts of time, who have no choice but to breathe your endocrine-disrupting scents. Somehow even just an hour spent in nursery at church leaves my baby smelling like perfume (how does that even happen?).
I can't say this without asking that even essential oil users be considerate. Some essential oils are unsafe for small children to breathe. Some essential oils trigger headaches for some people. Even though they are a natural product, they have been concentrated and to a degree their constituents have been isolated, depending on the distillation or extraction process. I love using essential oils safely and appropriately, but please if you are going to use them "neat" or in very high concentrations, think about whether you will be shoulder-to-shoulder with anyone in a closed room for an extended period of time that day.
I hope if you made it this far that you will consider one small step you can take to remove synthetic fragrance from your life, and that you will also realize that I do not harbor hatred or ill-will toward anyone using synthetic fragrances. I just know that we all grew up with incredible messages promoting substances that I've now learned make me personally sick and create a ticking time bomb in others. I hope that in a small way I can spread the word and help someone else enjoy greater health and happiness.
