I was six years old when I learned that medicine could smell like the earth.
Annette was my grandmother's best friend — a gardener and herbalist, the kind of person who knew which root helped a cough and which bark calmed inflammation, not from a book but from a lifetime of watching plants grow. We made cassia oil together at her house. I remember the warmth of it, the way the oil pulled the scent from the plant, and something quieter that settled in me even then: this is what healing smells like.
Annette passed a long time ago now. But I still think of her whenever I open a bottle of essential oil — the way she'd hold it up to the light, tell me to smell it first, explain what the plant was trying to do.
My mother was the same way. Our medicine cabinet wasn't amber bottles and pill organizers — it was jars, tinctures, homemade things. We took ginseng shots. We had royal jelly on toast every morning. It wasn't alternative. It wasn't wellness. It was just what we did.
And it never stopped being that way for me.
By sixteen I was working at The Body Shop, and I didn't just stock shelves — I absorbed everything. I got to meet Anita Roddick, and what she'd built hit me in a way I still feel: a company that treated ingredient transparency like a moral position, not a marketing angle. She cracked something open in me that never closed. My hunger for knowing what was actually in products — and why it mattered — started there.
Then I went to esthetics school. And that's where I got disappointed.
Not in the training. In the products. Synthetics everywhere. Ingredients that worked against the skin I was trying to help. And a whole industry of people who couldn't understand why I'd push back on formulations, argue for plant medicine, question what we were taught to sell. I butted heads constantly — not because I was difficult, but because nothing I actually believed in lined up with what the industry was handing us.
So I went further.
I trained with Brea at the College of Holistic Studies — aromatherapy, herbalism, advanced holistic therapies. And I studied under Ma Cherry, learning an Ayurvedic approach to skincare the way it was actually meant to be practiced. I also spent years as an educator for professional skincare brands — not because I needed a paycheck, but because I wanted to go deeper. Every line I worked with taught me something different about botanicals, extraction methods, and what plants can actually do when you formulate them with intention. Most of those brands integrated essential oils and plant actives into their lines because the science supported it.
I became spa director at St. Regis and built that spa into an organic Ayurvedic destination — every product, every treatment, every ingredient aligned with what I'd been building toward since childhood.
Almost three decades later, I'm still that esthetician. The butting heads has gotten quieter. The conviction hasn't changed.
The field itself has the same story.
Aromatherapy didn't start in a wellness boutique or a diffuser advertisement. It started in hospitals, pharmacies, and temples — in the hands of physicians who had no word for holistic because medicine was still rooted in the natural world by default.
The Egyptians used frankincense and myrrh for wound care by 4500 BCE. The Chinese were combining aromatic plants with acupuncture and herbal formulas by 2700 BCE. Hippocrates — the father of modern medicine — prescribed aromatic herbs for digestive and respiratory complaints. The word itself was coined in 1937 by French chemist René-Maurice Gattefossé, who documented clinical healing with lavender oil in a pharmaceutical laboratory after burning his hand in an accident.
This is not new. This is not fringe. This is one of the oldest continuously documented forms of medicine on earth.
The thing that got it pushed out wasn't science. It was commerce.
When synthetic pharmaceuticals became dominant in the mid-20th century, plant medicine was reframed as alternative — which became a polite word for unproven. But it wasn't proven wrong. It was made inconvenient. And for decades, the people who kept practicing it didn't do so because they were believers. They did it because it worked, and they remembered that it worked, and their clients remembered too.
They kept going because it worked. And it kept working.
But here's what the history can't tell you — and what I've learned over three decades of working with these plants every single day.
Essential oils don't just work on the skin. They work on the heart space. On the nervous system. On memory and emotion in ways that are harder to measure but impossible to ignore once you've felt them.
You know that smell that immediately calms you? Or the one that brings up something you didn't expect to feel? That's not psychology. That's chemistry. The olfactory system is directly connected to the limbic system — the part of your brain that processes emotion, memory, and instinct. When you smell something, you're not just detecting a scent. You're receiving information that your body already knows how to interpret.
And here's the part I find most extraordinary: most people have a love-or-hate relationship with certain aromas. You either feel drawn to an oil or you instinctively resist it. Here's what I've come to understand after years of watching this play out with clients — the ones who resist an oil often need it most. The body knows what it's asking for, even when the mind isn't ready to hear it. The aversion is sometimes the signal.
That's not mystical thinking. That's pattern recognition across thousands of clients and one very long career.
The skepticism is new. The medicine is old. And I'm still here because the people who came before me — Annette, my mother, Anita — didn't wait for permission to trust what worked.
Neither should you.
