How Holistic Air Fresheners Improve Your Health

How Holistic Air Fresheners Improve Your Health 

When it comes to creating a healthier, more inviting space, air fresheners are more than just a luxury. They are a tool for enhancing your well-being. You get dual action – a nice room smell and a nice mood at the same time.

As an aromatherapy expert with years of experience, I’ve seen how air fresheners can both help and harm your health, especially when not used properly.

I want to share not only the benefits of using high-quality air fresheners but also how they align with holistic health principles. At JennScents Aromaversity®, we believe in empowering you to know how to use the power of aromatherapy for personal and professional growth.

Let’s dive into the world of air fresheners and their profound impact on your health and environment.

 

 

How Air Fresheners Help Your Health

Scent has been proven to help us connect to memories and emotions – both good and bad. When you smell a pure essential oil, it also helps your body and mind work better.

When you smell synthetic fragrances, often what makes those air fresheners smell the way they do, it can actually congest your body’s fluid systems. This includes your lymphatic and circulatory systems, as they may get more sluggish. Also, the thyroid has a harder time regulating temperature and metabolism.

When you smell the scent from 100% pure essential oils in a room spray or diffuser, it can enhance your body’s body systems, mood, mindset, and energy levels. With each whiff, your mind and body communicate better.

 

 

Why I Changed the Ingredients in My Air Fresheners 23 Years Ago

Having Crohn’s disease and IBS, I also found myself with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. This is a severe allergic response to chemicals that do not agree with your body.

I would get extremely ill, debilitated, and couldn’t function when I smelled certain heavy scented candles, perfume, cologne, air fresheners, and plug-ins. I’m talking severe IBS, nausea, headaches & migraines, PMS, neck pain, and horrible emotional imbalances. I had to be extremely careful which body, skin, and hair products I used, cleaning products, and anything with scent.  I still get this way, which is why I am very careful of the quality air fresheners I use.

This increased sensitivity to scent got me on a mission to find products that I could use without getting sick. Luckily, the essential oils I had been using to calm my IBS were also helping with headaches, mood, and sleep quality. They gave me a healthy alternative for my personal care & household products.

Not only could I enjoy my personal care products again, but they also helped improve my overall health! Essential oils, carrier oils, plant enzymes, and hydrosols became my new best friends. Integrating them into my JennScents holistic aromatherapy products was a natural fit.

 

 

The Benefits of Using Natural Air Fresheners

Using a natural air freshener made with pure essential oils can transform your environment and your mood within minutes. Here’s how:

• Emotional Strength: Essential oil-based air fresheners can lift your mood, reduce anxiety, and provide comfort, all at the same time. Scents like lavender or marjoram can calm nerves, while citrus scents can energize you. You can cater what you smell depending on your needs.
• Mental Clarity: How great would it be to think, focus, and be alert with such ease? Certain aromas like rosemary and lemon stimulate your brain function, improving your concentration and productivity while reducing stress. Smelling in your car while driving can increase your alertness and focus.
• Fresh Environmental: They effectively neutralize unwanted odors from pets, laundry, cooking, bathroom (or other bad smells) without introducing harmful chemicals. Clean air = clear mind.
• Personalized Support: A custom signature scent in your home or workplace can evoke positive associations and create a welcoming atmosphere. Choosing oils based on your needs gives you this personalized nurturing that you can’t get from cookie-cutter DIY recipes. Another great benefit of customized scents, creatively, is that having a scent that people associate with you when they walk into your house or workplace can bring instant comfort and positive thoughts.

 

Remember, the quality of your air fresheners matters for your overall health. Synthetic fragrances often contain harmful chemicals that can irritate your respiratory system, disrupt hormones, and trigger allergies and IBS. Choosing natural options ensures both safety and therapeutic benefits.

Something most people forget to think about is how your “scent” affects those around you, especially children, pets, and those with compromised immunity. If you spray a synthetically scented air freshener, you could be triggering your family and friends’ health challenges and allergies. Particularly if it is a lingering scent. Surrounding yourself with such heavy synthetic fragrances can have negative effects on your health. That‘s why you need well-ventilated air circulation when using air fresheners and room sprays.

Minimal air circulation forces you to breathe in concentrations of their harmful chemicals, triggering or exasperating allergies, asthma, and nasal, respiratory, and central nervous system irritation. For example, some chemicals contained in synthetic fragrances have been linked to disrupting hormones and menses, as well as emitting volatile organic compounds (VOC), known to decrease air quality.  When this happens, you feel less motivated, more fatigued, stressed, and overwhelmed.

At the same time, if you are wearing a natural scent, it can support mental and emotional health by stimulating your mind and brain power while calming your nerves and stress. It will increase motivation, reduce stress and feelings of being overwhelmed.

 

 

How Air Fresheners Work

Air fresheners disperse scent molecules into the air, which enter your olfactory system. In turn, this influences emotions, mood, and cognition and helps you feel relaxed or energized, depending on the chosen aroma. Essential oils also have shorter lingering effects compared to synthetic fragrances due to their natural composition, making it necessary to refresh them periodically throughout the day. Tip: Scent is not supposed to linger.

While you’ll need to re-scent periodically, depending on using an air freshener spray or diffuser, you will still enjoy the therapeutic benefits for hours after smelling it. For example, sniffing lavender 3 times per nostril can produce an entire night’s of sleep.

Determining how far air fresheners can spread or linger in a room depends on several factors, such as room size, height of ceiling, ventilation system, and scent potency.

Keep in mind, when the air conditioner is on, and vents are near the location where you spray or diffuse your air freshener, it speeds up movement of the air molecules, dispersing the scent throughout the area quicker. Thus, limiting the amount of time a scent will linger. Larger wide-open spaces may allow a scent to linger, depending on the height of the ceilings and if ceiling fans are on.

You may want to have a diffuser in separate rooms to create a stronger scent or a specific mood. For example, a more energizing scent diffusing in the kitchen or home office and a relaxing scent in the bedroom.

For those with visually impaired family members and pets, you may want to create diffuser stations and have a specific scent diffusing in various locations throughout the house and workplace. This helps them distinguish where they are in the house, such as a floral scent in the bedroom, and spicy scent in the kitchen, and a tree scent in the living room.

 

 

Common Types of Air Fresheners and Their Reach

Air fresheners come in various forms, each suited to different needs:

• Ultrasonic Diffusers: Ideal for dispersing essential oils evenly across 250-800 square feet (depending on your diffuser model). They create a sensory experience that fosters creativity and relaxation. When the air conditioner is on, and the vents are near the location where you spray or diffuse your air freshener, it speeds up the movement of the air molecules, dispersing the scent throughout the area quicker. Thus, limiting the amount of time a scent will linger. Larger wide-open spaces may allow a scent to linger, depending on the height of the ceilings and if ceiling fans are on.
• Room Sprays: Quick and effective for smaller areas such as a bathroom or home office. Best when made with emulsified essential oils using a coconut emulsifier, alcohol, or glycerin.
• Smelling & Room Salts: Convenient for continuous scent diffusion but better suited for smaller spaces (100-200 square feet). In an 8oz. jar of Epsom salt, you’ll add 10 total drops of your favorite essential oils or essential oil blend. Leave the lid off while sitting on the counter. After a few hours, you can place the lid on the jar and reuse daily to scent the room for 1 week.
  • Bonus tip: Adding in activated charcoal with the Epsom salt can help neutralize unwanted smells faster.

 

Air Freshener Safety Tips

Not all scents are healthy. Those coming from pure, high-quality essential oils can offer therapeutic benefits and health benefits physically, mentally, and emotionally. Synthetic fragrances can contain harmful chemicals that have detrimental effects on cognition, the nervous system, skin, lungs, digestion, and all body functions. Be mindful of your allergies and health sensitivities.

Even with pure and natural scents, certain safety precautions should be taken into consideration.

1. Keep air fresheners and essential oils out of direct reach of children, pets, and those with cognitive impairments to avoid them spraying in their mouth, eyes, or face.
2. Use caution with overuse of strong camphor scents with asthma.
3. Avoid scents that you have an allergy to.
4. Avoid scents of birch, hyssop, mint, sage, and wintergreen if you are breastfeeding.
5. Be mindful of the scents you use in a plug-in diffuser as these are on kid and pet level.

The National Association for Holistic Aromatherapy provides more complete safety tips and guidelines at NAHA.org.  (sidenote – direct hyperlink to the safety page – https://naha.org/explore-aromatherapy/safety)

 

 

Scent Picking Tips

When you are choosing the right air freshener for you, here are some shopping tips:

• What mood and atmosphere would you like to create?
  • Citrus provides a refreshing and energizing atmosphere.
  • Flower scents help with mood balance and stress relief.
  • Spicy scents like cinnamon and ginger help warm your heart and ignite your inner passion.
  • Tree scents help you feel grounded.
• Do you have any allergies or sensitivities to specific plants and scents? Avoid air fresheners with these ingredients.
• Do you have health challenges? You will want to choose a more natural air freshener.
• Purchasing a diffuser gives you the flexibility of changing out the scent to match your mood, event, or day’s need. It is also an eco-friendly way to make your air freshener.
• For those sensitive to scents, even pure ones, you may want a fragrance-free air freshener that contains gentle ingredients such as plant enzymes, hydrosol silver, baking soda, and bamboo charcoal.
• Price matters as it can be an indicator of quality, but not always. Essential oils will cost more than synthetic fragrances because they are direct derivatives of plants without any fillers, dilution, or chemicals. These precious plants go through a professional distillation process after being properly harvested and tested. Additionally, prices will vary per essential oil as each one requires different amounts of plant material due to their concentration yield upon harvesting and extraction method.  Diffusers have become more affordable due to their rise in popularity and wide selection from various companies.

 

Read more tips, media sources, and interviews with Real Simple Magazine.

 

We share holistic health educational training at JennScents Aromaversity® to empower you with the knowledge you need to take better care of yourself, your family, and those you help. We go beyond teaching you about essential oils. We give you the tools and mentoring to employ the information you learn to become an expert in holistic aromatherapy. Our classes provide:

• Comprehensive training from beginner to advanced levels.
• Hands-on mentorship to develop blending skills.
• Tools to create effective remedies for physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
• A supportive community to help you grow personally and professionally.

Whether you’re looking to enrich your personal life or build a career as an “Aromapreneur™,” our programs are designed to inspire confidence and competence in every step of your journey.

 

Join Us Today! Are you ready to deepen your knowledge of aromatherapy and make a meaningful impact? Visit JennScents Aromaversity® today to explore our courses and access free training materials. Together, let’s unlock the transformative power of essential oils – one scent at a time.