The Science of Scent: Aromatherapy with Holly Brandenberger

Holly Brandenberger is a registered nurse and aromatherapist based just outside of Seattle, Washington. Having grown up on a Christmas tree farm that her parents still run, Holly always remembers ‘being intrigued by how the scent of different smells affects’ us. She recalls often escaping to walk around the farm, inhaling the scent of spruce and feeling very calm and grounded. When Holly became a nurse, she really enjoyed connecting with the patients. ‘I was that nurse who really got to know my patients’, she says, enjoying the process of finding ways to help her patients when they weren’t feeling their best. Working in multiple departments, Holly spent considerable time in trauma and burn units, where she came across the use of aromatherapy for the first time. As an area full of stress, anxiety and pain, Holly’s ‘desire to learn more about how stress affects us’ grew. After Holly moved to Seattle with her husband, she found a love of ‘making soap, identifying the different scents for a batch and how they made [her] feel’. It wasn’t until having her children, though, that she delved deeper into the world of aromatherapy, wanting to learn what she could do to help her children when they were unwell. Along with her clinical background, digging deeper into aromatherapy was essential to the building of Holly’s now thriving business, Science of Essentials. The foundation of the business was in noticing the ‘lack of an educational platform that shared the science’ of scent. Aiming to share the science behind this holistic practice with an evidence-based approach, Holly wants Science of Essentials to ‘engage, inspire and empower’, providing a reason to ‘stop and smell, allowing yourself to be more present’. So, how can our sense of smell influence our emotions so much? Holly explains that it is the only sense connected to our breath – ‘which is what makes it so unique’, she says – and as scent is always around us, we are always going to be massively influenced by it. It is believed that around 70% of our daily emotions are defined by scent. The olfactory system, responsible for our sense of smell, is uniquely connected to the limbic system – the part of the brain involved in emotion and memory. This close link helps explain why scent can evoke such vivid emotional responses. As Holly explains: ‘Scents are able to produce an emotionally visual trigger’. Sometimes we will catch a scent of something as an adult and be transported back to our childhood. Holly says this is due to the fact that ‘most scent memories occur before the age of 10 years old’, so scents (and using them in aromatherapy) can help us feel a great many number of ways, if only we know how to work with scents and what benefits can be accessed through this sensory pathway. Holly shares that the easiest way to get started with your aromatherapeutic journey is to ‘just start smelling’. Go into a shop, find some essential oil testers and see what you are drawn to. ‘We tend to overcomplicate aromatherapy, but it is so beneficial, even just through inhalation’. Hold the bottle a few inches below your nose, or place a few drops on a cotton ball to keep nearby. One of the amazing aspects of this holistic avenue is that no equipment is needed aside from the oil. Essential oils can be costly, but you can be very frugal to make them ‘last years’, according to Holly. ‘Once you get more comfortable and confident with the oils, diffusing can be a fun and safe option, but remember it’s not supposed to be stressful’. It really can just be opening a bottle and having a smell. ‘People know what they like’, says Holly, so start with scents that you love and progress from there. As we discuss Holly’s clinical background and her work with aromatherapy, I ask if there is a place for these two approaches to health to merge together. ‘There is a deep, deep need to merge both the clinical methods and holistic healing practices, especially today’, Holly says. She states that in the US, medical settings are already embracing holistic approaches more and more as a way to support patient health as a complementary therapy. ‘One isn’t better than the other. There is a time and a place for Western medicine, but both work best when used together’. In her upcoming book Aroma Alchemy, Holly shares ‘an accumulation of all my work in one book’. She wants readers to feel ‘inspired, empowered and confident in using essential oils daily’. In the book, which comes out in October, you’ll find sections on mind, body and home, with different recipes for each to support whole body health. Also included is a fantastic essential oil directory which takes a deep dive into each oil, and which blend well together. Holly shares that one thing to be mindful of is that the ‘essential oil industry is not regulated – not all oils are created equal’. When shopping around for your oils, you want to focus on finding pure essential oils, as this ‘has a huge effect on how they affect the mind and body, with more adverse affects happening with synthetic oils’. Finding pure oils can be challenging, but Holly has a few pointers on what to look out for:

• Find a brand that aligns with your own values.
• Look for bottles that display the Latin plant name on the label. You want to be able to identify exactly which plant species the oil is derived from.
• If the word ‘fragrance’ is used, this often provides a hint that that oil may be a synthetic scent. Look out for the word ‘organic’ instead.
• Price point is also a good indicator of quality. If very cheap, a product may not be a true essential oil – the production process is not easy or quick enough to make a low price point with a profit. The same goes for if all essential oils from the same brand have the same price point. Some oils are much more expensive to produce, so variable price points across a range are to be expected for good quality oils.

So, if you’ve tried aromatherapy before and found that it didn’t work for you (‘you just haven't found the right scents for you!’) or are completely new to the world of aromatherapy, Holly’s work aims to ‘fill the void of science’ behind the practice and provides a multitude of ideas on how to integrate aromatherapy into your everyday life for better body and mind health.