60: Misadventures with Essential Oils (or 8 Dumb Mistakes I've Made) + Essential Oil Safety Guidelines

For every podcast episode, I create a clean, printable PDF transcript of the episode exclusively for my subscribers over on Patreon. 

Many listeners like to save them in a binder to read later, use as a study guide, or reinforce their understanding of aromatherapy.

If you'd like a copy go to Patreon.com/AromaticWisdom.

___________________________________________________________________

RAW TRANSCRIPT
You're listening to the Aromatic Wisdom podcast episode 60. 

In today's episode, I'm going to get transparent about my failings as a professional aromatherapist. I've been using essential oils for 32 years. I think it's really hard to use something that long without making mistakes, and I have made some doozies. So in today's show, I'm gonna share with you mistakes that I've made using essential oils, then I'm gonna tell you the list of the things that I should have done. What was the correct procedure instead? And then I'm gonna follow-up with a just a list of good safety guidelines that you should always have in your practice. This is a great episode if you're brand new. This is a great episode if you've been using them for decades as I have because we do tend to get relaxed, especially when we know a lot. So enjoy. You're welcome to gasp. You're welcome to giggle. The point is that I don't want you to have to have an embarrassing history of stories like I have.

Liz  [00:01:03]:
You're listening to the Aromatic Wisdom podcast with your host, Liz Fulcher. If you're interested in learning about essential oils, hearing interviews with industry experts, and discovering ways to grow your own aromatherapy business, this is the podcast for you. For more information and show notes, visit the website at aromaticwisdominstitute.com. Now sit back, relax, take a deep breath, and enjoy as Liz shares a dose of aromatic wisdom.

 [00:01:37]:
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Liz Fulcher, your humble host for the Aromatic Wisdom Podcast. I hope you're having a wonderful day. Thank you so much for spending some time with me. Before I get into today's show, I wanna remind you that I'll be doing a webinar on Tuesday, November 15th for the Canadian Federation of Aromatherapists. I'll be talking about hydrosols, and I'm going to share 10 therapeutic benefits you can expect when using hydrosols, and I'm going to talk about how easy it is to make your own with your own little 5 or 10 liter copper still. I'll put a link to that in today's show notes.

 [00:02:22]:
So today's show is one of those foundational podcast episodes, and why it has taken me so long to do this is anyone's guess. But I felt that a an episode on essential oil safety really needed to be part of the catalog of the aromatic wisdom podcast. So you can't work with essential oils for 32 years without having had some disasters, and I have had some, I can tell you. Today, I'm gonna share a few specific times that I was either sloppy or in a hurry or I just wasn't paying attention. So, yes, I could sit here and do a list of, oh, here are all the safety guidelines, but I thought it'd be a lot more fun for you if I just went ahead and shared, you know, those times when I goofed. What I'll do is tell a little story. I'm gonna follow-up with them the safety practice that should have been put in place. I have written all this in a blog post, which you can find in today's show notes in the resources and links section.

Speaker A [00:03:23]:
So I have 8 little stories to share, and I'm gonna actually start with number 8 and work my way down to number 1. So you ready? Get ready to gasp and giggle. Okay. Number 8. A dumb thing I did to my eyes. So it is almost impossible to work with essential oils and not get them on your hands. Whether you're blending, pouring, even just cleaning up, at some point, essential oils will get on your hands. Even if you're wearing latex gloves, you'll still have them on not on your skin, but regardless, they'll be on your hands, whether it's your skin or the latex.

 [00:03:59]:
The point being, once you have essential oil on your hands, be extremely careful where you put your hands. And I was blending with peppermint essential oil, Got a little bit on my fingers, went to rub my eye when I had an itch, and of course, I got a central oil in my eye. A central oil of peppermint is high in menthol, and I can't even tell you the burning sensation in my eye. So what did I do? I took very quickly grabbed some unscented carrier oil. I'm pretty sure it was fractionated coconut oil. Put it on a paper towel, and just rub that across my eye. I would not use water because oil and water don't mix, and and you'll actually just make it worse. If you're in your kitchen, use olive oil or grapeseed oil, whatever you cook with.

[00:04:47]:
Just a vegetable oil, put it on a tissue, wipe it through your eyes. That's what I did, and within no time, it was out of my eyes and I felt much, much better. So what was the safety lesson I learned or remembered in my case? When you're working with essential oils, assume you have them on your hands, and do not touch your mouth, your nose, your eyes, your ears. Now your ears do not contain mucus membranes, but they're very delicate. Do not touch, in particular, the areas of your body that have mucus membranes because they're very sensitive, and essential oil can be irritating. It can burn. In this case, the menthol made it very, very irritating to my eyes. So when you have essential oil on your hands, immediately go and wash them before you touch any part of your face.

 [00:05:39]:
Number 7. A dumb thing I did to a massage client. Well, I always ask my massage clients before a session, would you like to have an oil? And if they they almost always say yes. And if they're not familiar with the oil, I will let them smell it so that they can decide if they want it in their massage or not. Well, this particular woman was on the table on her back, and I was just ready to start the session. And I had a thought, oh, I think I'd like to use that blend on her. But I hadn't asked her if she wanted it. So I waited until she was on the table.

 [00:06:14]:
I removed the cap. I tilted the bottle toward her, and I asked her, would you like this oil in your massage? Well, unbeknownst to me because I wasn't careful and didn't look, there was no dropper to plug the opening of the bottle because I had been using these oils for a class I was teaching, and often I'll take the orifice reducers out, the plugs, so that I can dip my little sticks in there. Well, this was one I had done that with. Did not put the plug back. I leaned over, poured the oil right down her nose and throat. She sat up. She was coughing. I was terrified.

 [00:06:51]:
Honestly, I was scared that I had really damaged done some damage. Luckily, it was not a caustic blend. It had Linalool. It had it it had monoterpenils, oils that are not traditionally very irritating. But, nevertheless, having an essential oil poured down your nose and your throat is disconcerting. So god bless her. She had so much grace and compassion for me. But what I did was I got her a glass of milk to drink, and I gave her some crackers to kinda help absorb and just kinda move everything down.

 [00:07:24]:
It probably took her a good 50, 20 minutes to collect herself, and and then she was okay, and I proceeded with the massage. So lesson learned. Always check that your bottle has the orifice reducer inside before you use it. Let's say I was making a blend, and I might have turned it over to add 2 drops, and the whole thing would have poured out. So just make sure that your dropper is in there, and if you buy an essential oil without the dropper in it, I would return it because there always needs to be an orifice reducer in there to count out the number of drops. Number 6. A dumb thing I did to my armpits. Back to massage, I was having a long day of sessions.

[00:08:10]:
And by the afternoon, I thought, I don't know that I smell so fresh. And knowing that lemongrass is a terrific anti it's a terrific deodorizing essential oil. I thought I'll just put some real quick in my armpits. So when my client was getting dressed, I went into the bathroom, washed my hands, put lemongrass on my hands, and a real quick swipe under each armpit, washed my hands again, and as I was walking back to the massage room, which I can tell you is about a 100 feet away from the sink, I started to tingle in my armpits. By the time I sat down 5 minutes into the session, I had to excuse myself. I felt like my armpits were on fire. I got carrier oil, took it with me in the bathroom, wiped the essential oil out from my armpits, but I can tell you and that helped, but I could tell you for the rest of the session, I was very uncomfortable. The lesson that I learned, although or the lesson that I had forgotten that I would like you to learn from, goes back again to being careful with your skin just like the peppermint in my eyes story.

[00:09:17]:
Be really careful when you're using essential oils that are high in aldehydes or phenols. They can be extremely irritating. Never use those without a carrier, and in particular, not in a a delicate area like the armpits where the skin is very thin. So what I should have done, I should have had some all natural deodorant, which I have since put in my, massage room, my my bathroom. But what I also could have done was just taken a squirt of carrier, mix the lemongrass in there, and put that in my armpits, and I guarantee, yeah, it would have felt a little slimy. But once you wipe it off, it wouldn't be slimy. There would be no body odor, and it would smell nice and fresh like lemongrass, and it would probably not burn at all. So that's what I should have done.

 [00:10:09]:
This is another reason we study essential oil chemistry. Lemongrass is high in aldehydes, and once you understand about the aldehydes and how they are so irritating to the skin, you'll be much more careful in the future. Okay. Number 5. Dumb thing I did to my son. When my boy was 5, he wanted to take a bath before bed, so I cleaned the bathtub because it was, I don't know, it was a little dirty, and I just sort of cleaned the bottom real quickly with baking soda and a eucalyptus oil. And, of course, I was in a hurry, but I rinsed it. Everything went down the drain.

 [00:10:46]:
I plugged it, filled the tub. He got in, sat down, and within a minute, stood up quick. Mom, my butt burns. I said, what do you mean your butt burns? And I could see he had 2 little red patches on his cheeks. Well, mama didn't rinse very well, and there was still eucalyptus oil left in the bottom of the bathtub, sort of coating the floor of the bathtub. And this poor child sat down and it and his little delicate 5 year old skin was exposed to eucalyptus essential oil. It wasn't a lot, but for a child, it was enough to make him extremely uncomfortable. I immediately washed his bottom with soap to ease the irritation and the burning, and we actually ended up just doing with him standing there, which didn't seem to bother his feet, and just doing a quick little shower.

 [00:11:39]:
So I was very careful after that to make sure that if I used essential oils to clean the the bathtub, which I frequently do, just to make sure I rinsed it really, really well. So the lesson learned is whenever you're using essential oils around children at all, be extremely careful of everything that you're doing, how much you're using, where you're using it, what will be the consequences of using that oil with that child. I truly did not expect something like that to happen, but it made me understand how even a little residual essential oil left in the bottom of the tub could affect his skin. Number 4. Dumb thing I did to my throat. About 10 years ago, I had a really bad sore throat. I sort of thought I might have strep, and I just wanted to kill all the things in a hurry. I really wanted to get rid of the germs.

 [00:12:39]:
I wanted to feel better. I was impatient. I made myself a gargle with water, added 2 drops of oregano essential oil and salt. So normally, my whole life, I have gargled with just salt water when my throat hurts, and it's always been enough. But this time, I was sort of impatient, and I just wanted to get better. I added oregano essential oil, which is very high in phenols. We've talked about those already in this episode. Phenolic essential oils are hot and irritating.  So I gargled, and I nearly lost my breath. My tongue was flaming red. I burned the inside of my cheeks and the roof of my mouth. And this was a chemical burn from the amount of carvacryl that was in the oregano. Never use essential oils high in phenols like oregano on delicate mucous membranes, another reason to study the chemistry of the essential oils. Number 3. A dumb thing my friend did. So my friend Diane and I love to go to the dry sauna at our gym.

 [00:13:48]:
And in the corner of the sauna are these rocks, and she thought it would be beneficial to add essential oil to the dry rocks while she was there. Before I could stop her, she got out a bottle of eucalyptus essential oil, dripped 3 drops of it on the rocks, and flames shot up and she nearly burned the place down. It was terrifying. Lesson learned, essential oils are flammable. Number 2. A dumb thing I did to my son's friend. In my home, I have a workshop in in my basement where I do all my blending and I keep my oils. It's almost like a little kitchen. There was a play area where my sons would watch TV, and they knew to stay completely away from my essential oils. Well, I left a bottle of thyme essential oil, thymus vulgaris, another, essential oil high in phenols. I left it on my blending workbench instead of putting it away. Well, my son and his friend were 8. They went downstairs. They were playing, and apparently, Chad got curious. This is my son's friend. And the next thing I heard was yelling, "Mom!" "Mom!" "Chad hurt his nose." So I came running downstairs. What do you mean you hurt his nose? Well, they were curious. There was a bottle of essential oil out. They wanted to smell it. They opened the cap, and Chad sniffed it, and touched the bottle to his nose. Like the oregano, thyme essential oil is very high in phenols and extremely hot and irritating.


So I had to do the, what I did when I got the peppermint in my eye, I did the same thing with Chad's nose. I put some carrier oil on a paper towel and kinda wiped it, his, you know, over his nose, and it did burn him for a little bit, but he was okay. The lesson learned, never leave essential oils out where kids can get them. They are curious, and that could have been much worse. They could've been who knows? They could've had it spread it on their skin or who knows what. It terrifies me to think what could've happened. I take full responsibility for that, and now well, now they're adults. That's not gonna happen.

 [00:16:09]:
If you've got kids, they are curious. Keep essential oils out of reach. And finally, number 1, probably one of the dumbest things I did to my female lady business. Well, one summer, I spent a lot of time swimming and a lot of time just sitting in a wet bathing suit. And that is a great recipe for women to get a vaginal yeast infection, and that's what happened to me. Well, I learned that tea tree is really good for getting rid of this type of yeast infection if you put it on a tampon. Well, I soaked a tampon with tea tree essential oils. I did not sprinkle it.  I literally took a tampon, Dunked it into a big bottle of tea tree and soaked it. Don't do that. Honestly, it's a great practice, but you only need a couple of drops. Or better yet, take tea tree essential oil, put it in a carrier, and kinda roll the tampon around in the carrier, and that's all you need to do. My husband nearly had to peel me off the ceiling, and I it was painful. Again, you've got essential oils and delicate mucus membranes. They do the 2 don't play well together without a carrier. So that was that lesson learned.

[00:17:29]:
Be extremely careful. Essential oils in delicate areas with mucous membranes. Less is more. There are my 8 stories. I've got more, but I thought that was enough for this episode. Now I'm just gonna run through very quickly essential oil safety guidelines so that you do have, some understanding and clarity about safety. Again, all of this is in that blog post in today's show notes. Essential oils are super concentrated.

 [00:18:00]:
If you if you're brand new to the world of essential oils, before you start using them or experimenting, please get some education. Take a class. You can also go to the NAHA website. That's the National Association of Holistic Aromatherapy, n a ha.org, and there's a safety page that's a good one to read, and I've got the link to that in today's show notes. Number 1. Keep out of the reach of children. Number 2. Keep away from the eyes.

 [00:18:41]:
If oils accidentally touch the eyes, add a couple drops of vegetable oil to Kleenex, swipe over the eye. The essential oil will grab onto the vegetable oil and be removed from your eye. Do not use water. Number 3, do not use essential oils undiluted on the skin. Number 4, when an allergic reaction is a possibility, do a patch test 24 hours prior to use. Number 5, extra precautions should be taken in pregnancy, especially in the first trimester. If you really want to use aromatherapy during your pregnancy, contact a fully qualified aromatherapist. Number 6, do not take essential oils internally without the guidance of a physician or, again, a trained aromatherapist.

 [00:19:28]:
Certain essential oils, specifically camphor, eucalyptus, and peppermint should be avoided while taking homeopathic remedies because these oils will actually counteract the the effects. So it's not dangerous, but it'll render the homeopathic remedy, useless. Number let's see. 8. When using essential oils in the bath, swirl the water well to disperse the oils, add vegetable oil to help to to help break up the essential oil in the water. So it's not just floating on top that when you get in, it it, bumps up against your skin. It can be very irritating. I'll even use a glass of milk or full cream.  It's it's that fat that you want. Don't use essential oils before going out in the sun as many, especially most citrus oils are phototoxic. I have a whole. I have another episode about that. I've got a blog post. Number 10. You can become sensitized to an oil that you use over and over, especially if it's it's undiluted. Change the oils you use and try new ones.

 [00:20:39]:
That's basically the safety information that I'd like to give you for this episode. Hopefully, that was helpful, maybe a little humorous. I would love to know if you have any stories that you'd like to share with me, in which case, you can, let's see. You can write to me. If you go to aromatic wisdom podcast dotcom, you'll see a contact page. You'll also see a little bitty microphone in the bottom right hand corner where you can leave me a voicemail if you wanna tell me a story. I would love that. Okay.

 [00:21:13]:
After all this, let's do one more little fun thing before we say goodbye. How about a little bit of smelling my life? If you're new to the podcast, smell my life is where I share some way in which I've used essential oils in my real life recently, and this time, I've got a cat story. So I have 3 cats. One of them is Luther, and Luther has we don't know why, but he chews at his feet. And I noticed recently I wish, wish, wish I had taken a before picture. I don't know why. I don't remember these things in time. But he had been chewing up his 2 front paws till there were just holes where there should be fur, And I was really afraid he was gonna get an infection, so I started using German chamomile hydrosol and just drenching.  He hated it. And James would have to hold him, but I would drench his front paws. And then and then I'd let him go, and he'd he'd run away like he was shot out of a cannon. But every time I catch him, I do this maybe 3 times a day, and I would just continue to, I had a little squirt bottle. Just pour his front paws with German chamomile, completely saturate them, and then let him go. I know I knew that the German chamomile hydrosol would not hurt him if he licked his paws. I've been doing that for 3 days, and without really even paying much attention to how healed they are today, he was sitting up in our cat tree. So he's right at eye level, and his paws were right there.

[00:22:48]:
I said, oh my god. They look so much better. There's more fur. They just look healthier. I really regret not having taken before and after pictures, but I have a feeling I'll have another chance because this guy just chews at his feet. If you have any sort of an animal, I mean, a house pet, a barnyard animal, Hydrosols are just so great for wound care for our little furry friends. And finally, if you will please indulge me, I'd like to read to you a really wonderful podcast review that came in this week. This review was left by J. Kelly and I don't know if J. Kelly is a male or female, so I'll just use they.

 [00:23:40]:
Here's the review:

I love this podcast. I love the Aromatic Wisdom podcast. In each episode, I learn something new about essential oils and aromatherapy. Liz's education and experience in the aromatherapy field make for rich content delivered in a way that's personalized and easy to understand. Listening to her makes me feel like I'm hanging out with a friend. Oh, that warms my heart. I especially love the smell my life segment.

The episodes are short enough to listen to on my commute to work, but I often listen again so I can go back and take notes. Whether you are a newbie or a seasoned aromatherapist, this podcast will have something for you. I floated on air for about 2 days, Jay Kelly. Thank you so so much for that review. It warms my heart. It makes me feel heard. I know it's not about me, but to an extent it is. I mean, you know, it's it's my life.

[00:24:39]:
It's my world. It's my podcast. So things like that mean a lot to me. And the other thing is that when you leave a review, it does help other people find the show. So if you go to aromatic wisdom podcast.com, at the top of the navigation manual menu, you will see the word reviews, and you can leave a review there. So if you do that, you'll make my day. That, my dear friends, is a wrap for episode number 60 on essential oil safety, the mistakes that I've made. Don't you dare do them yourselves.

 [00:25:15]:
Share with me if you have any you'd like to share. I will be happy to talk about them in the next episode or the next podcast. I won't use your name, I promise. 

Until next time, my friends. 

Be happy. Be well.