Читать книгу Aromatherapy Workbook - Shirley Price - Страница 51

An essential oil is always a complex cocktail of many different naturally occurring components; there are several different kinds of terpenes, alcohols, phenols, ketones, esters and so on in each oil, and these vary from harvest to harvest and plant to plant. The actions of any whole essential oil are difficult to forecast from this complicated make up; I repeat, there is no direct simple relationship between the chemical constituents and the therapeutic qualities (or even the hazards) of an essential oil.

No one in the aromatherapy world understands or knows everything to do with essential oils, so take heart! There is also no way in which a book like this can cover each constituent known of every single oil, but simply by being acquainted with the main constituent families you may be able to see some sort of pattern emerging in relation to therapeutic effects.

There are, nevertheless, some essential oils whose chemical constituents do not seem to conform to their expected pattern and are the ‘black’ (or sometimes perhaps, the ‘white’!) sheep of their family. There are also trace elements which show up on a gas-liquid chromatograph (see chapter 2), but have so far not been identified – these too must surely play an important part in the eventual effect of the final chemical ‘cocktail’.

The above points (plus climate and soil variants) may help to explain why no document or book lists every minor chemical, or even gives the same proportions of the major ones. It would take years to research and would take up many volumes! (Guenther’s well-respected reference work on essential oils comprises six thick volumes, without including any therapeutic effects!)

May I suggest that if you have found this chapter (so far) a bit difficult, yet you wish to understand it, you come back to it later. Read it again up to the isoprene unit, perhaps drawing the molecules as you go along, moving on to each new chemical family only when you fully understand how the previous one was formed.

Perhaps you already knew it all, or have neither the wish nor the need to pursue the intricacies of these simple to use and wonderful liquids! In either case I hope you found it interesting.