Essence of Vali - Masters of Essential Oil Blends

We’ve been studying the olfactory system on my aromatherapy course which has really impressed me as a system.  Literally you breath something in and it goes through your nose straight to your brain!  OK, it’s a little more complicated than that but at least explain why inhalation is such a powerful part of aromatherapy.  As human beings we tend to be so reliant on our sight that we really don’t experience the world as fully as we could through the other 4 senses.  I challenge you to walk around with a blind fold for a few hours and listen, touch and smell everything around you.

I was recently sent some samples from Essence of Vali which is a NYC based company that sells 100% natural aromatherapy products.  I rarely get really excited about a product (if you’ve read my previous product reviews I’m usually sceptical or at least balanced in listing out pros and cons of the products that I review.  But I have to say I fell in love with Essence of Vali’s Sleep Bedtime Ritual.  For many years now I’ve found sleep difficult.  It takes me a long time to fall asleep and I wake up frequently throughout the night.  With a drop of the concentrate containing lavender, marjoram, cedarwood and ylang-ylang on my pillow, not only do I fall asleep quickly, but I stay asleep throughout the night.  Plus when I travel and am sleeping in a strange room, the smell reminds me of being in my own bed so I drift off and get the same blissful sleep as if I were at home.

In addition the balance oil has a lovely aroma of lavender, grapefruit peel, clary sage, and geranium.  It can be used in massage or in the bath.  Fragrance for fragrance’s sake (i.e. to go around smelling good rather than for therapeutic reasons) is one of the biggest challenges for any aromatherapist.  It’s extremely hard to compete with synthetic fragrances because they have thousands more unique ingredients to blend with compared to essential oils (although synthetic ingredients are harmful chemicals).  Fact: there are only a few thousand different plants that can produce essential oils and of those only a few hundred are actually made and sold commercially. 

Knowing all of that now you can appreciate what a coup it is that Essence of Vali’s EOV eau de parfum won an award for Best Natural Product at the Extracts show in NYC in 2004!   The fragrance is absolutely divine - a blend of lavender, cedarwood, rosewood, patchouli, palmarosa, geranium, litsea cubeba & clove and I think it will appeal to mainstream noses.  By saying that, I’m not some kind of aromatherapy snob, but I think the challenge sometimes in blending essential oils for fragrance is that for those consumers not familiar with essential oils, they can often be put off the whole fragrance if one of the oils doesn’t agree with them.  It may smell too earthy, too woody, too florally.  Perfums blended purely with essential oils aren’t as complex as the main stream toxic chemical laden equivalents so they don’t always appeal to the same consumer who wears Chanel, Dior, or Lancome.

Anyways, personally I LOVE EOV eau de parfum and if you e-mail Essence of the Vali they will send you a sample free of charge.  I highly encourage you to do this because I think you’ll like it so much you’ll want to buy a bottle.

Update on Monday, May 17, 2010 at 9:58PM by Katherine McKenney

The EOV eau de parfum is legend!  I was out tonight with some girlfriends and one of them kept saying that she loved the scent I was wearing.  I explained that it was EOV eau de parfum a 100% natural aromatherapy fragrance from a shop in the West Village, NYC.  She responded that she kept being distracted (in a good way) by the haunting smell and would definitely be making a stop to the shop the next time in New York.  Brilliant!