Bramwell - Fragrance Your Home: The Essential Guide to Enhancing Your Living Space with Natural Scent

It is hugely enjoyable and satisfying to make your own scented products, both in the creative process and when using them. You have full control over the materials you use and many of the tools you need are probably already in your kitchen.

Divided into Living Spaces, Bedroom, Kitchen + Dining and Bathroom you will be guided through the home with a series of practical projects and tips to give each space a different aroma and feeling, with a separate, focussed chapter on candle making. Each project is aromatic, therapeutic and decorative and can be modified to suit the layout of your home and your personal preferences. The aim is to help you build an essential oil home fragrance kit and inspire you to handcraft beautiful fragrant projects in tune with the seasons, from what is readily available in the home, outside in nature or in your local stores. By using essential oils, herbs, flowers and other household ingredients, you will be able to scent your home naturally without the need for synthetic or artificial fragrances.

You dont need to invest in a lot of essential oils to get started. Together with seasonal plants and botanicals, many of the fragrances are centred around the use of seven core . With each project using between one to four oils and the same oils used throughout the book, you can begin with as little as one or two oils to try out the projects. Essential oils can even be omitted from some projects or you can substitute them with ones you prefer or have at home already.

All the projects are relatively straightforward, some are quick and simple and some may take a few days or weeks to fully take on their aromas. When creating scent with essential oils, they need a little time to meld together and for the scent to mature, so you might have to leave the blends or projects for a few days before you can use them. This is useful to consider when planning projects, especially if making as a gift for a special occasion.

Where projects use dried botanicals, flower petals, buds and herbs, you can them yourself, storing them in jars ready for use, or alternatively they can be purchased.

Nature is abundant with fragrant materials, so not all the projects require the use of essential oils and can be made with plants and foliage gathered from the garden or outdoors. Ive kept these projects simple, using examples of what is growing in my garden please use what is available to you, whats in season or growing in your garden. If something isnt available, dont be afraid to leave it out or use an alternative.

I hope that the projects will inspire you to think about different aromas when you are out and about and how natural materials have the potential to become part of your homes unique scent. Pick scented flowers, grasses and herbs and collect fallen botanicals, watch where you are walking and you never know what treasures you will find, from fallen leaves and petals to pine cones and berries.

The natural world contains many beautiful aromas the fresh, green scent of aromatic herbs, the sweet floral perfume of rose blooms, the vibrant, citrus scent of an orange. The aromas we experience are the plants essence their essential oils, the highly concentrated organic compounds stored in their leaves, flowers, rind, seeds or other parts, that give plants and flowers their scent. Plants produce these essential oils to attract pollinators and to protect themselves from environmental conditions and pests.

Early alchemists of the sixteenth century understood that the protective properties of plants also extended to people and that their essence could be extracted by distillation and used for healing. The great healer and alchemist Paracelsus (14931541) wrote that the main role of alchemy was not to transform base metals into gold as traditionally known, but to create healing medicines from plant extracts, which he named quinta essentia, the fifth essence or the result of five successive distillations, i.e. quintessence or essential oil.

The concept of aromatherapy is a centuries-old practice, based on the belief that essential oils have an intrinsic ability to influence mood, health and cognitive function, with the potential to reduce stress, increase focus, enhance memory and calm our minds. It has long been believed by alchemists and aromatherapists that essential oils are the life force and spiritual embodiment of nature a plants soul, similar to the human spirit, and thats why they work in harmony with our body and mind.

Throughout history aromatic materials, plant oils and botanicals have been used in religious ceremonies, to protect and ward off disease, for spiritual healing and to cleanse and mask bad smells. The Ancient Egyptians are credited with the earliest recorded use of natural fragrance dating back to around 3000 BC.

It was believed that natural incense made of aromatics including myrrh, cinnamon and juniper were used as a means of connecting with gods or spiritual deities and burning incense was practised daily to maintain a balance between body and soul. Around the same time, the practice of using infused aromatic oils as a mood enhancer and incense made from aromatic flowers and mandarin oranges to cleanse rooms is thought to have originated from Ancient China. In Ancient Greece, mint leaves were scattered on floors for their refreshing and uplifting scent.

Up until the birth of modern scent in the late nineteenth century, all fragrance was made from natural sources, then scientists discovered how to create synthetic fragrance materials in the laboratory, which could be standardized and mass-produced. With their cheap prices and ease of availability, soon nearly all fragrances were being made synthetically with only a small concentration of natural plant oils and very little or no therapeutic properties.

Today, many home fragrance products use synthetic scents. Often labelled with the generic term parfum on ingredient lists to cover a complex mixture of hundreds of chemicals, this makes it difficult to know exactly what is in synthetic fragrance. A synthetic fragrance may have no natural ingredients in it at all, formulated entirely with chemicals or made with a combination of chemical and natural ingredients making the line between natural and synthetic a blurry one. Fragrances derived from chemicals can also be harmful to health and the environment, containing petroleum-derived ingredients that can have damaging long-term effects.

Nature provides all we need to fragrance our homes and the use of essential oils and fragrant botanicals (i.e. plants, herbs and spices) not only creates a beautifully aromatic home but a deeply therapeutic one too. However, its important to consider that the use of natural fragrance is not without problems.

With a growing concern of lack of transparency in fragrance products and more people becoming aware of the positive benefits of using natural scent, this can put a strain on the essential oil and natural materials industry. This usually means that demand for some materials is often higher than supply. When plants and trees become vulnerable or endangered, there is a greater risk of extinction from over-harvesting and also corrupt practices, such as misrepresentation of botanical species and adulteration (the addition of cheaper essential oils or mixing them with semi-synthetic compounds).