The Future of Aromatherapy:
Overview:
Your animated guide will orient you to this page. Please give him a couple of minutes to speak.
We will return to the Ship’s Projection Room for this Futuristic Segment. Please curl up in your most comfortable chair and sip your favourite beverage.
This page has two short videos. Robert will discuss the future of aromatherapy as he sees it. There will also be a Deep Dives and Transformations Summary video to enjoy.
Introduction:
How will the future of aromatherapy evolve? Will it be banned in many places that wish to remain scent-free? Will it be embraced more tenderly as a reminder of nature in our increasingly mechanized world? Will Artificial intelligence bring new ways to use scent? Remember to dream about how it will affect you and your business. See where you think the profession is going. Your answers may influence how you set up and offer your services!
Some ways aromatherapy may be used in the future:
Athletics-
Some athletes claim a daily training regime with essential oils can improve their health and athletic performance.
Airplanes-
Daniele Ryman has created ‘After Flight Regulators’ to combat the effects of jet lag. Air New Zealand and Virgin Atlantic Airways provide their first class and business class passengers with two oil blends, Awake and Asleep, to help attune the body to local time.
Aromatic Films– Air is pumped into theatres to achieve the emotional effects filmmakers desire.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange pumps peppermint into its buildings to invigorate and refresh employees. Businesses are thought to have uniform needs in Japan. i.e. a bank requires staff to be alert and customers to be calm. It uses lemon and la ender to achieve these results.
Shiseido-Kajima (fragrance and construction blend) has sold dozens of environmental fragrance units at $8000.00 each. Their customized systems are $20.000.00 each. An alarm clock with a built-in fan blows a forest scent before awakening the sleeper.
North America–
Placing potpourri in a jewelry store at Christmas encouraged customers to stay longer, but they didn’t buy more. On the other hand, the movement has been to ban scent from environments in North America.
Objectives of Environmental Fragrancing
1) Pleasure
2) Increase Productivity
3) Improve air quality
Problems With Environmental Fragrancing
1) Everybody’s scent preferences are different. What works for you may not work for someone else. People can have allergies and sensitivities to smells.
Scented Diesel in France- Strawberry.
The first scented poster appeared in London, England, in August 1996 and was lemon-scented.
Shoppers in scented shoe stores are likelier to buy shoes and don’t mind paying more.
Gambling casinos are using scent to get people to spend more money. (This is not a good use of this concept.)
Signature Scents are becoming more prevalent in stores. Victoria’s Secret, a lingerie chain, has adopted a potpourri scent for its feminine identity.
The U.S. automobile industry is developing a showroom scent to increase car sales.
Creditors laced payment bills with faintly musky chemical pheromones intended to intimidate customers into paying their bills more quickly.
City officials are trying to find a scent to pump into New York subways to lower aggression in prisons, reduce stress, and into schools to wake people up.
In England, aromatherapy is being set up in hospitals in various ways. Scent has been used in senior centres to relax residents and promote better sleep. Valerie Worwood had part of a hospital ward to practice aromatherapy regarding gynecology. Putting aromatic air through vents in any building is disinfecting and can help heal. This has implications for various jobs, from heating and ventilating people to how furnaces and air conditioners work.
In Japan, Shimizu, a large architectural firm, has been designing new offices and hospitals with an Aroma Generation System whereby liquid fragrances are pumped into working or living quarters through air conditioning ducts.
Aromatherapy vs Aromachology–
Many perfumers, using mainly synthetics, are riding on the popularity of aromatherapy and doing funding for how perfume affects human behaviour. They like to say the effects of both aromatherapy and perfumery are purely psychological. They, of course, have yet to substantiate the superior qualities and advantages of perfumery over aromatherapy. They have coined the term aromachology to define their objectives.
The Fragrance Foundation’s admitted goal is to have aromachology supplant aromatherapy in the consumer’s mind. It has picked up the American Medical Association as its ally. The medical establishment has been fighting to keep alternative therapies out of the health arena.
Both organizations disdain aromatherapy and see an opportunity to dominate newly created markets that capitalize on aromatherapy’s appeal while excluding aromatherapy itself. With good studies done by aromatherapists, our effectiveness will remain high in the eyes of the consumer, who will be hearing about how aromachology and synthetic scents are just as effective for mood-altering properties.
The Future of Aromatherapy Video:
Charles Predicts Future Aromatherapy Trends
Student Project- By Tanya Mackie
“The human nose can distinguish at least 1 trillion different odours, a resolution orders of magnitude beyond the previous estimate of just 10,000 scents, researchers report in Bushdid, C., Magnasco, M. O., Vosshall, L. B. & Keller, A. Science 343, 1370–1372 (2014).
Think of the possibilities when you think of one trillion different odours. One trillion! Yet, aromatherapy uses limiting words like stimulating, calming, relaxing, and grounding to place complex scents. Look at the chart below; it gives you six basic descriptions, and yet these different essential oils are interacting with neurochemical secretions like endorphins, enkephalins, noradrenaline, serotonin and other hormones to affect the hypothalamus, thalamus, pituitary, amygdala, hippocampus, raphe nucleus and locus ceruleus. Aromatherapy affects and impacts your brain and how it regulates the rest of your body and state of being.
The future in aromatherapy lies in profoundly exploring essential oils’ psychological and brain-functional impact on us. We are just at the beginning stages of understanding them, like learning alpha-pinene in Goldenrod, which stops the formation and uptake of mood-changing hormones and, by doing so, relieves stress and anxiety. So, how would that mood change impact PMS?
We often call Lime refreshing and lifting, but there’s a reason for that. Lime essential oil can release trapped emotions in the heart. Lime helps center and balance emotions, promotes well-being, and rejuvenates mental clarity. In understanding how lime works, how would this essential oil work with PTSD?
A marjoram flower essence is considered calming, but more specifically for those experiencing grief, sorrow and vulnerability, particularly from losing a spouse or long-term partner, where roles were established and responsibilities shared. Marjoram brings comfort as it calms and soothes fears of being alone and vulnerable. It restores inner strength and confidence in one’s ability to be self-reliant. So, what would Marjoram’s impact be in grief counselling and circles? Or to a young child who has lost a parent, and what would it do if Marjoram was combined with the perfume of that loved one? Would the scent help process the emotions the child cannot communicate?
Vanilla Oleoresin is often called a lovely scent. It is used to remove harmful toxins both emotionally and physically. How do you think that would benefit someone?
We must develop a more extensive vocabulary and understand how each oil benefits us. For example, we know that rosemary improves memory and cognitive function and is beneficial for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. But what if we took that one step further? If, at the beginning of Alzheimer’s and dementia, we mapped out that individual’s scent pathways to their memories, would combining those scents with Rosemary stave off those conditions, and for how long?
Could there be a scent for every psychological issue out there? What would work for bipolar? Schizophrenia? Can sents be generated for them, or is it more complex to such problems, and is the treatment entirely individualized? And why do I think you should be pondering such thoughts?
Well, WHO released this on October 14, 2019: “One in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. Around 450 million people currently suffer from such conditions, placing mental disorders among the leading causes of ill-health and disability worldwide.”
Mental health is clearly on the rise and needs to be addressed. In Alberta alone, cutbacks have been made in mental health and education for those with special needs, leaving a large number of people struggling on their own to manage and cope. There is a need, and aromatherapy can be a forerunner to improving mental health.
Let’s take it one step further. Can we prevent mental illness with aromatherapy? What if we explored how scent could help high-stress jobs? Let’s start with the highest: the military. Fennel helps process healthy emotions and unprocessed emotions. What if Fennel was in the debriefing room after soldiers returned from a mission so they could emotionally debrief as well? Or were they to be smelling it during their leaves with lime essential oil so they could emotionally process the complex parts of their jobs? What about Lavender in the barracks when they sleep? Lavender helps dispel the “fight or flight” response as it. 
It cuts off the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) and activates the parasympathetic nervous system (when the body is at rest). Then, in the morning, the cafeteria and other areas have peppermint essential oil to breathe in. Peppermint improves focus, concentration, and overall mental clarity and boosts energy. In what ways would it improve their well-being? Would we see less PT D? Could these oils be applied and used for police, firefighters, and ambulance workers?
“Monarda essential oil is mainly used in aromatherapy as it can induce feelings of peace and tranquillity within you, ridding your system of stress, tension and anxiety. Not only that, it also helps to uplift your spirits and puts you in a better mood as it combats depression, self-doubt and bouts of low self-esteem. This thus augments your mental and emotional health as it seeks to provide mental clarity and induces positive feelings of relaxation.” (https://biofinest.com/en/blog/46_monarda-essential-oil.html) What would impact this if this was sprayed in schools, especially junior high and high schools? Would they have better self-esteem and be more balanced and adjusted adults? Could suicide rates be lowered in those populations?
What if we added Monarda with Frankincense for our athletes? Frankincense, as you know, is a grounding aroma. It is helpful for visualizing, improving one’s spiritual connection, centring, and focusing the mind. Many athletes talk about performance anxiety and the internal dialogue that stops them from performing at their best. When they act on that thought, they are at their optimal. How much would they improve by taking essential oils that stop the internal chatter?
We are just at the beginning stages of mapping out and learning the deep complexities of scent and its impact on our body, mind and soul. It activates our primal instincts and soothes us in ways we cannot comprehend. Watch a wailing baby immediately calm once it’s been handed over to its mother. Why? It snuggles in and smells her. Our very first memories are stored in smell. Smell is our most crucial scent, often overlooked and dismissed. But if we were to tap into it and truly explore possibilities, the limit would be to only our imagination. After all, there are one trillion odours out there to be explored.
Deep Dives and Transformation Video for Unit 9,
Here is your Wizard’s Hat. Put it on and Make Some Predictions of Aromatherapy:
When you sniff into the future, what do you think will happen?
Discuss your olfactory future imaginings in the Practical Potions Private Facebook group.
Head to the Practical Potion Downloads for more information.