Natural Perfumery and Health

While all perfumes are designed to make people feel happy, aromatherapy perfumes seem to offer an additional dimension of emotional healing. These are my impressions of how Natural Indian Attars make me feel.

At the first whiff of Motia Attar, I feel an onrush of bliss and a smile comes to my face. This is Jasmine sambac, or night-blooming Jasmine. It’s very different from the Jasmine grandiflorum more common in the West. It gives me a sense of quiet euphoria, every time.

When I smell Kewda Attar, my mind becomes more sharp and clear. This is one of those attars that doesn’t smell like a Western perfume at all. It’s quite tangy with a bit of a zing to it, over soft, mellow sandalwood.

Gulab Attar, or Attar of Roses… what can I say? A classic, renowned in history, books and poetry. Romantic and feminine, Rose gives support to a woman’s spirit. Before the advent of synthetic fragrances and extenders, putting rose oil in sandalwood was the only way to make the fragrance last. I much prefer it to the modern synthetics.

Champa Attar is made from Michelia champaca, called the “Flower of Paradise”. It’s fragrance is richly sweet and spicy, totally uplifting and joyous.

Mitti Attar is made from baked earth from the banks of the Ganges river. It captures the smell of raindrops striking parched earth after a long drought. What causes that wonderful smell? Soil microbes; million and millions of them. They are the life-force of the earth, the things that convert minerals into forms that plants can absorb as nutrients. They lie dormant when the soil is dry. As soon as they are moistened, they literally begin to breathe.

That incredible fragrance you smell when the rain begins is the smell of Mother Earth breathing! Mitti can restore our connection to the Earth, our source of life. It’s especially useful for people who live in cities and never walk barefoot in the dirt.

Another grounding attar is Gul Hina Attar from the Henna flower, Lawsonia alba. This is a floral that doesn’t smell anything like a Western floral perfume. It is very deep, earthy yet sweet, like bittersweet chocolate. It’s effect on me is to make me feel more grounded, more stable and steady.

It is very difficult for me to describe Kadam Attar. The oil from the Kadam flower is very hard to obtain, making this is the rarest of all the attars I carry. It’s fragrance strikes me as bittersweet, deep and woody, yet containing subtle flights of fancy that defy description. Just when I think I’m getting a grasp of it, I discover something new and it changes again. Imagine a dance of fireflies on a dark night. When I smell Kadam Attar, my mind is absorbed in an entrancing mystery that can never be solved.

Oud Attar is made from the oil of Agarwood. Used for centuries to assist in meditation, encourage a spiritual life and, perhaps not a contradiction, as an aphrodisiac as well. It’s fragrance can be an acquired taste: tart yet sweet, woody and tenacious. Oud addicts will go to great lengths to find their “perfect” oud. Smelling Oud makes me high.

White Lotus Attar is one of the most divine fragrances on earth. When I smell it, I feel myself drawn up through my crown chakra into higher realms of consciousness. I’ve done meditation for many years, but nothing prepared me for the powerful effects of this incredible flower. That it also smells beautiful, similar to Tuberose “The Pearl”, is an added bonus. White Lotus Attar is perfect to wear as perfume for a special occasion, or as a signature scent.

With the cost of sandalwood climbing ever higher and higher, I don’t know how much longer these attars will be made. I encourage you to experience them while you can. Your children may never have the chance.

Natural Indian Attars are an ancient form of perfumery that can have profound emotional benefits for the fortunate ones who wear them.

Most aromatherapy uses steam distilled essential oils. Plant materials are infused with steam to extract the aromatic oils. Steam, being very hot, tends to abuse the delicate top notes in an aromatic fragrance. While the oil can still be useful for aromatherapy, it may not work so well for perfumery.

Natural Attars, on the other hand, are made using a process called hydrodistillation. Hydrodistillation protects the fragile aromatic oils better than does steam distillation.

With attars, freshly picked flowers are placed in copper stills over an open fire, where they are gently simmered in water using low heat and pressure. The aromatic oils rise in the steam, and are collected in a vessel of sandalwood oil. This process is repeated daily for up to two weeks.

Gentle hydrodistillation seems to preserve the living essence of the flower. A real flower that grew with its feet in the mud and its head in the sky, soaking up the sunshine and rain, and offering it’s fragrance as a gift to us. In a natural attar, you not only smell the flower, you feel the land that grew the flower as well.

A nose dulled by synthetic perfumes may not immediately appreciate the subtleties of natural attars. But if you keep smelling them an amazing transformation happens in your brain. Someday, when you least expect it, you will suddenly find yourself craving the scents of those attars that you didn’t much care for at first!

In the West, we have been taught to appreciate different fragrances than those treasured in the East. Attars don’t smell like French perfumes and this can take some getting used to. They smell like flowers and sandalwood, yes. But they also smell like pure water and fresh air. They smell like raindrops striking parched earth. They smell like a quiet day in the country, walking barefoot along a dirt path, with grassy meadows that glitter under the hot sun.

Watch a housecat longing to go outside. You can remove a cat from nature, but you cannot take the love of nature out of a cat. We, too, are creatures of nature. No matter how far away our lifestyles can take us, our bodies and brains have a longing for things natural and wholesome. In the midst of our hectic lives, Natural Indian Attars can help reconnect us with nature… and ourselves.

I used to take antidepressants. I didn’t come to that decision easily. It was only after years of trying every natural remedy I could find, from homeopathy to herbs, flower remedies to diet, yoga, meditation, psychotherapy and counseling, that I finally resorted to drugs.

For me, Zoloft was a Godsend. It gave me a respite from the stress of chronic depression and anxiety, from constantly feeling like the other shoe was about to drop. I discovered that with my brain chemistry normalized, I was actually a pretty happy, well-adjusted person. After about four years, though, I wanted to get off and see how I did on my own.

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I want to tell you about an herb I really like. Chanca Piedra, or “Stone Crusher.” It comes from South America where it’s used for kidney and gall stones, utinary tract infections, hepatitis, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, among other things. It’s also a natural analgesic (reduces pain).

I take it to help prevent gallstones and gout crystals from forming. It comes in a two ounce bottle and I squirt a few droppers in a glass of water several times a day. It tastes very nice, rather mild and grassy. You can learn more about it here:
Chanca Piedra
And buy it here:
Chanca Piedra at iHerb

Most commercial perfumes and colognes are made from synthetic fragrance compounds. High-end perfumers will use combinations of natural and synthetic ingredients in their compositions.

In recent years, more and more perfumers have gone back to using all natural ingredients again. They are designing perfumes with a combination of essential oils and absolutes, just as previous generations did. These ingredients are far more costly than synthetics, but are far safer and in many ways more beautiful.

An important thing to consider when making or buying any perfume is the carrier oil. All essential oils and absolutes must be diluted before wearing. Undiluted, they can burn the skin. They also smell quite different- even unpleasant – before being diluted. A strong abslute of Rose doesn’t smell much like a Rose until it’s diluted.

Good quality natural perfumes use jojoba oil or fractionated coconut oil as a carrier. These oils do not go rancid. They are very close in makeup to the skin’s own fat composition, so they soak in well and do not cause irritation.

In contrast, cheap perfume oils usually use thick dipropylene glycol, which can be an eye and skin irritant.

With Rose absolute selling for about $250 an ounce, and Rose essential oil (Rose Otto) selling for about $350 an ounce, if you ever see a bottle of thick rose perfume selling for $3.95, you can be sure it’s fake.

Roses are the most universally loved flower in the world. They grow naturally from the Arctic circle to the Equator. There are thousands upon thousands of different varieties of roses, all descending from various species roses.

When it comes to perfumery, a Rose is not just a Rose. Roses have many different fragrances that vary both subtly and dramatically. The roses used for obtaining perfume oil are close to the original species roses. Take, for example, a Damask rose.

Damask roses originated in the Middle East and predate ancient Rome. Kazanlik is a Damask rose used famously for oil production in Kazanlik, Turkey. The Damask scent is the typical “rosy” fragrance that people think of when they smell a deep crimson rose. It is rich and heady, and often has hints of lemony, citrus notes.

Centifolia roses have their origins shrouded in mystery, but probably originated in Europe or Asia Minor. With their full, cabbage-shaped flowers of many petals, they were often painted by the Dutch masters. Like the Damasks their fragrance is also very strong, more purely sweet to my my nose, and less lemony. Pure distilled rose oil, called Rose Maroc, is made from Centifolia roses. Damask and Centifolia oils are the ones most often used in natural perfumes.

Alba roses originated in Europe in the Middle Ages. They tend to be tall and hardy plants with white or pale pink flowers. They have an intense yet delicate scent that is very sweet, with soft, powdery notes. Rarely used in perfumery, the scent is quite beautiful but fleeting.

Musk roses descend from R. Moschata and are often very tall, rambling roses. There is a modern class of shrub rose called the Hybrid Musk but most Hybrid Musks have very little, if any Musk rose in them. The scent of a Musk rose is soft, sweet and honey-like, often with hints of clove. The Musk rose gives its scent from the stamens of the flower rather than the petals. When conditions are right, the scent of a Musk rose can waft across the garden.

Tea roses are often confused with the modern, ubiquitous Hybrid tea but they are a distinctly different class. They are tender in cold climates but can be giants in climates that don’t experience winters. Compared to the lush opulence of the Damasks and Centifolias, a Tea’s scent is dry, astringent, sometimes with fruity notes but almost always containing hints of camphor and tobacco. It is a complex scent, and one which, once you acquire a taste for it, can be very addictive.

The next time you walk through a rose garden, take time to stop and really smell the roses. Discover all the various and wonderful perfumes that have come down to us from the centuries. No other flower is as generous with her gifts as the Rose.

True Castile Soap is always 100% Olive Oil with no other oils. It cleans gently without stripping the natural oils from the skin. It’s softer than other bar soaps and has a low lather, because it’s other oils such as coconut and palm kernel oil that give soaps their hardness and high lather. The higher the lather, the more drying the soap. Olive Oil Castile Soap is the most moisturizing of all soaps.

Olive Oil is a natural humectant, meaning it attracts moisture from the air. If you leave a bar of Castille Soap out in your soapdish, you may find it has collected small beads of water on it’s surface. That is moisture that it pulled out of the air. When you bathe with Castile Soap, it passes this moisture-attracting quality to your skin. Your skin will remain naturally moisturized throughout the day, without the need to apply lotions after bathing.

Olive Oil Castile soap is the safest and gentlest baby soap you can use. Read the labels on most so-called baby-soaps, and you’ll find they contain petrochemicals and artificial fragrances. Whatever goes on the skin is absorbed into the bloodstream. Your baby doesn’t need that!

Castile Soap is the soap most likely to be well-tolerated by people with severe allergies. It’s excellent for those undergoing the stress of Chemo and Radiation therapies, as it soothes burned and irritated skin which often comes as a side-effect, and has no fragrance that could prove irritating.

Beyond all that, Castille Soap simply feels like no other soap. Originally created for a Queen, it deserves a place in every home.

In previous posts I mentioned using Boswellia and Traction to heal ruptured disks in my back. The third natural method I used was Prolotherapy. Prolotherapy stands for “proliferative therapy”.

When ligaments get torn or stretched, the joints become unstable and move around. This causes wear-and-tear and osteoarthritis. Prolotherapy is a non-surgical way to make the body build new, stronger ligaments. This strengthens and stabilize the joints, making the pain go away naturally.

When I was a teenager I tore all the ligaments across my back-ribs, lumbar and sacroiliac region. They never healed and I had chronic back pain. Eventually I developed bone spurs and degenerated disks. About five years ago my L5-S1 disk slipped out when I bent forward to comb my hair. Four months later it burst.

That was the worst pain I have ever experienced. I lost most of the strength and the feeling in my left leg and foot and needed a walker to walk. Later that summer my doctor in Albuquerque recommended prolotherapy. It worked like magic!

For twenty-five years before prolotherapy I had no strength in my back because I didn’t have any ligaments. I couldn’t bend forward without propping my hands on my knees for support. A few weeks after prolotherapy, I could bend forward at the hips with no support.

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There are a lot of ways both healthful and fun to scent your home, car and office.

Did you know that air fresheners and room deodorizers are poisonous? They fill your home with neurotoxic, cancer-causing chemicals. They make your indoor air more polluted than the outdoor air. They can cause headaches, depression and asthma attacks. Why spend your hard earned money just to make yourself sick?

Are you upset about our country’s dependence on foreign oil? Mad at the thought of drilling in the arctic wilderness? Then stop buying unnecessary plastic products filled with petrochemical fragrances!

For the home and office, you can use aromatherapy diffusers with natural essential oils. There are two kinds of aromatherapy diffusers: Active and Passive. Active diffusers plug into an electrical outlet and generate heat to warm the oil, so that it wafts into the air. Some diffusers create a mist of fine aromatic droplets. Some diffusers have fans, others don’t. Active diffusers can range in price from a few dollars to several hundred.

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Today Abraham Cherrix, the young man who has Hodgkin’s disease, was given legal permission by the Virginia Circuit Court to pursue alternative cancer treatments. You may recall that this teenager was ordered by a lower court to submit himself to a hospital for high-dose chemotherapy. His parents faced losing custody of their child to Social Services, who believed they knew what was best for him.

Last August, Abraham learned he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and was treated with a three-month course of chemotherapy. It didn’t work. By February he was told that the cancer was still there, and that he needed another, stronger course of chemo.

The odds of chemo curing him were very poor. Abraham had reacted so badly to the chemo, gotten so sick from it, that he refused to go back for more. He and his family decided to use Hoxsey Formula from a clinic in Mexico. He also went on a sugar-free, anti-fungal diet. (This, by the way, is a large part of the cancer protocol I used to cure myself of breast cancer eight years ago.)

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