My sister in law's cat had been sick and getting worse for a long time. She loves shit like essential oils or any fad health thing that is affordable. After spending a bunch of money at the vet with no good results her vet started in on environmental factors. She lives in a van and drives around the U.S. In a van you are going to soak 24 hours a day in what ever you put in your environment. Anyway, she laid off the oils and the cat got better. I can think of more than one person I suspect is fucking themselves up on essential oils, eating em bathing in em. Not a dab behind the ear and stuff but going through large quantities a month. I don't trust that the chemical used to refine them are safe or in the quantities advertised or even that some of these oils should be consumed in significate quantities. Mostly I think it's an easy way to avoid the hard work of changing your habits, diet, getting some exercise or living a self examined life.
c'mon, man. I know it bugs you sciencey-types to acknowledge just how much of our common language relates to alchemy but FFS "essential" referred to expressed and extracted plant oils THREE HUNDRED YEARS before the modern science of marketing was founded.Meaning "ingredient which gives something its particular character" is from c. 1600, especially of distilled oils from plants (1650s), hence "fragrance, perfume" (17c.). In 19c. U.S., essence-peddler could mean "medical salesman" and "skunk."
LOL that's because "extraction" dates to the dawn of modern chemistry, where it was used as a "sciency" version of distillation. Your natural instinct is to prefer the thing that's less synthetic and beat-up. Essences are generally made through boiling; extracts are generally made through chemical cracking. Your knee-jerk reaction is to embrace the very linguistic preferences the Golden Age of Science rebelled against. The purification step of extraction is exactly what was hailed in the creation of the miracle polymers of the 1900s, and exactly why a vanilla bean soaked in Southern Comfort yields better vanilla "extract" than sulfiting sawdust. Don't get me wrong, huffing something until it gives you bronchitis is fucking stupid. But so is automatically hating something because the hippies like it, which is all "skepticism" is.
I don't hate essential oils. I used to wear some in high school and retain a softspot for them, actually. I've recently been burning frankincense when I paint, which is probably a bad idea. I just think essential oils have a great name for marketing purposes.
That's fine. We're here on a nothing post about a nothing study with nothing conclusions about the nonexistent perils of "EORS" and everyone's shitting all over those poor benighted idiots who insist on overmedicating themselves but since they're doing it with hippiebalm we mock them in the name of science and cast aspersions on their "marketing" while you're here flagellating yourself in the name of Michael Shermer or some shit for daring to enjoy frankencense. It's a bad idea why, exactly? We have a whole bunch more history of art created via olive oil lamps than we do of art created via Ottlite. "medication overuse headache" is not just a statistically significant search term, not just a recognized acronym, it's an ICD-10 code. Yet why discuss that, it's boring. Let's spice it up by tying it into essential oils so that we can laugh and point at the hippies.