370: The CBD Beauty Book w/ Colleen Quinn
Today on our program we dive into the world of cannabis and CBD, but unlike ways we've ever done it before. Today I speak with a world-renowned expert on the topic, Colleen Quinn, who takes on a beautiful perspective of blending the world of CBD and cannabis with essential oils and other herbal tools. We dive into beauty, science, conservation, and more.
Colleen Quinn from LabAroma is an award winning celebrated clinical aromatherapist, cosmetic chemist, author & researcher. Committed to delivering functional therapeutic plant-based products who specialize in cannabis research, formulations and education.
Hi! I’m Sarah!
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Dusting Spray
From: Kelly Morrison
In a glass spray bottle add
Ingredients:
1 cup distilled water
¼ cup white vinegar
2 Tbsp. olive oil
15 drops lemon EO
Direction:
shake to combine, spray on surface to be cleaned, wipe clean with microfiber cloth
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Episode Transcript
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0 (2s): I say, looking on the bright side of life, never killed anybody. Ginny Haun,
1 (8s): Empowerment in Education. Two powerful elements that will help you break free of convention and transform your passion for wellness tool level beyond the status quo, the essential oil revolution where you're given the tools to supersede an ordinary, everyday lifestyle, inspiring speakers, DIY recipes, healthy living tips, and more. You'll discover it all here, so tune in and get ready for a wellness revolution.
0 (38s): Hey there. Welcome to the Essential Oil Revolution. I'm your host, Samantha Lee Wright. I'm so honored to be here with you today. This week's episode, we dive into the world of cannabis and C B D, but unlike ways that we've ever done it before. Today I speak with world renowned expert on the topic, Colleen Quinn, who has a brilliant perspective of blending the world of cannabis and C B D with essential oils, aromatherapy, and other herbal remedies, because as she says, it's just one other plant. Why not get to know it? Paraphrasing a bit, but you'll learn more. In today's interview, we dive into her C B D beauty book, essential Oils that Work Best with Cannabis and C B D, and the part that we can play in conservation for the future of aromatherapy.
0 (1m 31s): That's today on our program. But first, let's pull a recipe out of our D I Y dugout. This is the segment on our show where we read a recipe that has been submitted by one of you, our amazing listeners, and each month we pick a winner out of everyone who's ever submitted a recipe. This month, congratulations goes to our winner, Kayla Miller for her recipe called dusting Spray to make the dusting spray and right on time for spring cleaning, you'll need a glass spray bottle to that bottle. Add one cup of distilled water, a quarter cup white vinegar, two tablespoons of olive oil, and 15 drops lemon essential oil shake to combine, then spray on services to be clean, wipe clean with a microfiber cloth.
0 (2m 22s): Thank you for your recipe, Kayla. We appreciate you. We'll contact you soon to send you your prize of a bottle of Orange Essential Oil and our favorite d I y essential oil ebook. You can enter to win our monthly giveaways simply by emailing us your essential oil recipe. It can be a favorite diffuser blend, a roller bottle blend, or something complicated like your own soap or shampoo. Just email us the details at diy revolution oils podcast.com. CrowdHealth
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1 (6m 21s): Well, I'm here with Colleen Quinn from Lab Aroma. She is an award-winning celebrated clinical aroma therapist, cosmetic chemist, author and researcher. She is committed to delivering functional therapeutic plant-based products who specialize in cannabis research formulations and education.
0 (6m 41s): Colleen, it is an honor to have you here on the show today. How are you?
4 (6m 46s): I am great. I'm so happy to be here, Samantha. Thank you for having me on.
0 (6m 50s): Absolutely. So we, I have to ask where that lovely accent is coming from.
4 (6m 56s): It's Irish, it's Northern Irish, but it's been well teamed over the years. Over 10 years ago, you probably wouldn't have understood me, but I've lived in London and now France, so it's got much slower and I speak with much more clarity. So it's quite mild now, believe it or not.
0 (7m 13s): I love that. Maybe, maybe after a while or one day we'll have to do a podcast where you drink a lot of wine and I want to hear you get real Irish.
4 (7m 21s): Are you? You just have me on with my sisters and then no one will understand the single word. There
0 (7m 26s): You go. So Colleen, we have so much to talk about. You have done so much research and your work revolves around this vast array of, of knowledge around C b D, beauty, cosmetics, all these different things and essential oils of course. So it's hard to know where to start, but I, I think I wanna start with your C b D beauty book. I'm really dying to know more about this, this book that you've written.
4 (7m 57s): So thank you. The CBD beauty book is a great place to start, actually. I remember when I was first asked to do it, I felt like it was an opportunity to pull together some of the, the things that I've spent the last 20 years doing. And you know, in a way it felt really normal to me, but to lots of people that didn't to combine c b D with essential oils in skincare. I think people had sort of seen those areas as decar vandalized to an extent, whereas to me, they, they weren't, you know, cbd b especially at that time, that was in 2019, I was approached to do it. CBD had become, was starting to become super trendy, especially for things like sleep and anxiety.
4 (8m 37s): Yeah, it was like
0 (8m 38s): Thing for sure. Yeah.
4 (8m 40s): And in skincare to an extent, and there was brands being like an entire, like entire brands being built across, especially the UK and all across America and Canada where they were building an entire brand on cbd and a lot of that, that was built on isolate CBD isolate, not the whole plant because of legal implications, right. The
0 (9m 0s): Thc
4 (9m 1s): Of course, and one part of me was very much excited about this, but the other deal, the cosmetic chemist to me was like, well, CBD isolate is an amazing anti-inflammatory and antioxidant compound, but it is a compound. It is not a whole plant, it is not even a family of compounds. It is one compound. So to bring that into the room, to give you context of what I mean, within the aromatherapy world, that's like us building not just brands, but an industry on lol. It's like us identifying lol as being incredibly therapeutic and like, you know, Samantha, the, the size of that market and the, just the rapid growth that that world took took on from like 2017 right up until we're 21 was
0 (9m 46s): Yeah, I'm, I'm familiar, but let's give our listeners a little more context around that because I think this is a really important point that I know where you're going and I, and I love it. So let's give a little more context around like yeah, what happened to the lenal industry?
4 (9m 58s): So the CBD industry, you mean?
0 (10m 1s): Well, yeah, but you were also talking about like in, if you were to take Olol as an isolate of like orange or the citrus essential oils and you were to extract that, which we do, we extract Lin Law as this one isolate compound and we put it in as an industry, put it in all sorts of cleaners and chemicals and then, and supplements and things. And I, you know, it's great. That's great. Lyola is great. I love that it can be naturally derived, but it is not the same as, you know, the entire essential oil of lemon or orange or the entire plant. It's, it's just a totally different ballgame.
0 (10m 42s): You can't call that essential oils or aromatherapy, in my opinion. No,
4 (10m 47s): Absolutely not. And I think the big difference is, and little law's a great example, and the, the big difference is it's, yes, it's extracted in a synthetically modified and it goes into lots of cleaning products and lots of even cosmetics and soups and things. But we have, as a world and as a, as an industry, we haven't built brands around it. We built an entire industry around CBD as anol isolate in skincare. So the, the movement was so big that it, it became called the Green Rush or the Green Train, and that relates to both cannabis and cbd and this, this mad frantic growth that just spiraled upwards.
4 (11m 28s): And there was an insane amount of money invested and pumped into the, the growth of this plant, which, you know, plateaued into a lot for a lot of people. It just, the bottom fell out of it and five years in investors that have put so much money into the cannabis plant and CBD just didn't see the reality of their investment and continue for most of them continue to not see it. I think for me at the time I was very, very aware that as much as CBD is an incredible compound and remains to be an incredible compound, she's gonna be another ingredient in our kit as a Romano therapist, herbalist and cosmetic chemist. She is not going to remove the benefits of our essential oils or cannabis itself or our other massive, extensive toolbox of plants and herbs that we have to use in skincare and in wellness care.
4 (12m 18s): So when I was asked to write the CBD beauty book, I said, yes, I'd love to because I wanna, I wanna, for 2 million reasons, I wanted to pull that world together. I wanted to pull the world of essential oils, aromatherapy and CBD together. But I, I, I work and teach aromatherapists every day. It's what I do. I work with them and I teach them. And at that point in 2019, the aromatherapy world hadn't stepped up or hadn't seen that it was their place to, you know, own CBD and own cannabis. They had very much left it over there with the big corporate world. And my argument to that was, it's one plant and not only is it one plant, when we have an apostle area of thousands of plants at our fingertips, it is one compound.
4 (13m 7s): So if we have to learn about one compound, that's easy for us because we know hundreds of thousands of compounds and we know our functional groups and we've had to learn all of this vast organic chemistry in order to be able to do what we do today. So in my eyes, it is very simple for us to, you know, step up, understand c b d, understand cannabis and understand the terpenes and the cannabinoids in the cannabis plant. And we already know half of that. The terpenes are our day-to-day lives in the aromatherapy world. So actually we only really need to know and learn about cannabinoids. So for me, it made complete sense that the aromatherapy and plant world, you know, got really comfortable with cbd Yeah.
4 (13m 48s): And cannabis. But I, I wasn't seeing that in my, you know, my lives every week that I was doing and even an email communication with students. And when I talk to students on our podcast, they weren't seeing it as their plant. And I wanted to make them feel empowered so that they not only understood it, but knew how to bring it into their current existing world of aromatherapy formulations.
0 (14m 10s): Yeah, I think that's a fabulous perspective. And I, I'd say my personal experience might have been a little different. I think that was possibly because of my introduction to the essential oil world was really pretty narrow. It was through the lens of one company, young Living, which I love dearly, I always will. And they were really early adopters into that embrace of C B D, not as a, oh, here's like a a a way we can grow vertically, let's add this whole other stack of products into our product line called cbd. And now everything's all about how CBD can cure everything, right? They were really pretty early on in combining that world of C B D and aromatherapy and essential oils.
0 (14m 55s): And so yeah, I think I'm pretty grateful that that was my experience of having that perspective of, wow, this is just like another plant in our toolbox that was formally, you know, illegal. So no one really learned about it that much or, or when they did, it was always this sort of hush hush thing and now you know, everything's changed and it's this totally different ballpark and yeah, it's very interesting to see how those, that mixture of industry, commerce, capitalism can then kind of affect your perspectives as just a, a consumer, a healer, a teacher, all those things. So yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating.
0 (15m 37s): Well, I wanna ask you about, so you mentioned if you look at C B D you can sort of break it into the terpenes and the cannabinoids. And we are slightly familiar with the cannabinoids in the conversations around copaiba that we've had a little bit on the show. But how much do you know about the similarities between what we consider the cannabinoid properties of C B D and the same types of properties in the essential oil we know as copaiba or some people call it <unk> I like copaiba, it's more fun to say
4 (16m 13s): So. So firstly, CBD is one cannabinoid, so it's one compound. So cannabis is where we find the multiple compounds. So cannabis contains boast, both multiple different terpenes depending on the strain of the chemo and also multiple different cannabinoids. Again, depending on the chemo virus strain, CBD B D is consistently there and it is one of the cannabinoids. So just to be super clear, CBD is just a compound. And then within the cannabis plant we have terpenes, cannabinoids, we have other things as well. We have flavonoids and lots of other smaller represented chemical or phytochemicals, which is great.
4 (16m 54s): So to bring it back to balsam coba as you call it, which is great and there is a similarity and the similarity is beta carline. So beta carline is a terpene, it is a highly anti-inflammatory terpene that's found in lots and lots and lots. It's very common terpene and it's found in lots and lots of different essential oils. And it's one of those very interesting terpenes that it can stretch across lots of different categories of essential oils. So if you're one of those people who thinks about essential oils in terms of you know, the scent categories like floral wood, citrus, you're gonna find that beta Carlene will appear very frequently across all of those scented categories.
4 (17m 35s): Now there definitely was a lot of talk about how few years ago how be Carlene was a equivalent to CBD or even a replacement for cannabis. And it's neither of those things. So be Carlene is a phenomenal ing, but it is a chirping and it is not a cannabinoid. They behave very differently. They really like each other. And cannabinoids beauty Carlene work brilliantly together. It is not a replacement and can never be a replacement for a very simple reason. It is a volatile chirping. It behaves very differently from the cannabinoids. Now why they got into this conversation is justified how they got into this conversation is that Bline very interestingly has the ability to interact with the CB two receptor.
4 (18m 20s): So the CB two receptor is one of two receptors that we know of that's in the endocannabinoid system. So the endocannabinoid system is a system within our body that helps to regulate lots of things including sleep, mood, or appetite. And it's the way to think about it, Samantha is like the endocannabinoid system is the system inside our body that constantly brings us back to a state of homeostasis, a state of balance, and it is two receptors, CB one and CB two. And what we always want to do is to feed those two receptors with beautiful phytochemicals that are gonna help that find that place of and regulation for our bodies.
4 (19m 7s): Beta care offline is one of the very few compounds that are, is not a cannabinoid that will directly interact with CB two for that reason. It gets compared to cannabinoids, but it's from compound. 0 (19m 20s): Yeah. So I don't know, I don't know if we wanna say myth busted, but I think myth clarified absolutely, I
4 (19m 27s): Think clarified and I think whenever I explain, it's like the other analogy I tend to give is, you know, we don't ever mix up eugenol, which is a phenol, a very powerful phenol. We don't ever mix up eugenol for limiting, you know, both immensely powerful compounds, but they behave very differently and they're found in different places.
0 (19m 45s): So Right.
4 (19m 46s): And 0 (19m 47s): They probably work very well together, which I think people like to exactly, I dunno put these lines between like, what's better than what, and it's like, well why can't they just both be fabulous and work together fabulously
4 (19m 57s): A absolutely. And when I'm blending with cannabis or with C B D I, when I'm working with essential oils with them, I'm gonna want to work with essential oils that are rich in Beta Carlene because they love each other, they're familiar to each other and they work brilliantly together. They synergize wonderfully, but they're not a replacement. Yeah.
0 (20m 15s): So we know Copa IBOs high in that beta carline, what other, at
4 (20m 18s): Least about 50% on average. Okay.
0 (20m 21s): Yeah, that's high. What other oils might we put in that category of working really well with cannabis or cbd?
4 (20m 28s): Ah, great question. So play is one. So there's really common ones, like anything that's really high in cannabis. So there's certain tropin that are very commonly found in cannabis, like Amol, seine, laine, mycin, all of those can of compounds are typically found in cannabis or frequently found in cannabis VIRs. So where you wanna, what you wanna do is find essential oils that are rich in those would be called cannabis terpenes. There were chemotherapy terpenes long before there were cannabis terpenes, but the ones that cannabis frequent, and you wanna try to use essential oils that have similar terpenes.
4 (21m 11s): So we use essential oils like your citruses are always gonna be brilliant, like lime orange, all of your oranges, your bergamo, your grapefruit, and then you're gonna go for those maybe less obvious ones, but ones that are high in sine cine and Seine is a really good tine to work with whenever you're working with cannabis. So things like ply, yaro, uman, bluey, roman kmi, less so, but blue Kali definitely.
0 (21m 40s): Okay,
4 (21m 41s): Ory.
0 (21m 42s): And what exactly happens? I mean, can you paint a picture or I love analogies of what happens when you put these together, when you blend cannabis or C b D with these essential oils that are high in beta carine or these other complimentary terpenes.
4 (21m 59s): Yeah, great question. And I, I have an analogy for this. So it's like kids in the playground. So you'll have, like, let's say you have four kids in the playground and they're all great friends and they're playing and they're really, they're super happy and everything's going really well and they're having a great time. And that's your cannabinoids, they're really happy. There's four cannabinoids, they're having a great time. You introduce terpenes that they are familiar with, that they grew up with, that they literally grew out of the ground with into that playground. So you add another four kids in there and those kids are your terpenes from your essential oils. They recognize each other, they are best friends. They have this, like, they have childhood memories of each other because they grew up together and they work brilliantly together.
4 (22m 41s): So that playground just becomes just a ball of light and joy because they're back together again. Oh,
0 (22m 48s): That's the best analogy I've ever heard. I love it. So, so I wanna ask just a couple more questions about the beauty side of this or the benefits, you know, so we're, we're talking about how these things play together really nicely. They're not the same, they're different, but they, they create magic. Let's say. What are some examples of that magic? What are some examples how we as users or aroma therapists can, can use these synergies to benefit?
4 (23m 16s): So one of the main things for me is, is the two main therapeutic properties of cannabinoids and tropin together. And that is both sets. Both groups are anti-inflammatory and antioxidant in their own right. So when you marry them together, Samantha and you, you just supercharge the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant ability of the product you're making. So let's just for argument sake, say you're making a night serum and it's rich in either CBD or cannabis. And I, I say either because if you're fortunate to enough to live somewhere where you have legal access to cannabis, then I absolutely would have it in skincare for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant benefits.
4 (23m 56s): But let's say you're not or you're not interested in it, or cbd b d isolate is your happy place. Well great, you can still use that and it's gonna be brilliantly antioxidant and anti-inflammatory. Where I find that most beneficial is for repair. And I'm not just talking about wound repair or like scar tissue repair, I'm talking about just your general life is stressful on our skin. Not only the environmental stresses that our skin faces every day like sun and just, you know, pollution, but the internal stress from our endocrine system, just from our central nervous system, our immune system, all of that repair and our skin's ability to get rest and recover happens at night while we sleep.
4 (24m 40s): So if you're going to really, really choose one place or one time to focus on cannabis or C B D and aromatherapy skincare, do it in a serum and do it at night. And the reason I say do it in a serum is because oils love oil and our CBD and our cannabis loves oil. So use it as the base for a serum and use a nice rich serum at night. We're also not gonna use a rich serum during the day and then try to put on makeup or go out in public with very oily skin, whereas we can at night. And the other reason why they work so well together is the terpenes help enhance the penetration ability of the cannabinoids.
4 (25m 20s): So I'll say that again. The terpenes that are in the cannabis and the terpenes that you add with your essential oils, what they will do is that they will help speed up and maximize the penetrative cap capabilities off your product by getting through those, those hair follicles and the sweat ducks in the surface of your skin to break through the epidermal layers and get into the dermis, which is where all of your bloodies are and all the hard work is happening inside your skin. So you wanna work with them together for those two reasons.
0 (25m 53s): Can you share, do you have a nighttime routine that you go to of, of something you do for your skin or a recipe you could share?
4 (26m 1s): Yeah, yeah. My nighttime routine is very simple. I am, I stopped using, well I, my mom rarely used, we weren't a home, we were a house full of girls, but we weren't our house that was full of cosmetics, like store bought cosmetics wasn't really our thing. Mom had a really simple skincare routine. She's super young, she's only 62 now, but she looks over 52. And I remember always thinking, I understand this makes sense to me, you know, that we don't need all of the stuff that's being marketed at us, which I'm very fortunate for. Yeah, her showing us that. But I also found her own therapy when I was 16. So from a very, very early age I was making my own skincare and that has never changed.
4 (26m 44s): So, and that's been a long time. Yeah. So my skin and
0 (26m 48s): You have great skin. I know not everyone could see, but you have great skin. It's,
4 (26m 52s): But it hasn't been subjected to a lot of stuff, which is good. I'm a big fan of spf. I will say that every morning I wear spf, but, so my nighttime routine is really simple. I take off my makeup with a flannel. I don't even use a cleanser or anything like that. And then I use a rose and like a
0 (27m 7s): Flannel cloth. Like you just rub it off with flannel cloth and that works out. You
4 (27m 11s): Literally take it off the flannel cloth. No, I don't use any, any cleansers, I don't use any soaps, anything like that. I just take it off. And then I use a rose floral water. I do use a, an eye cream and I buy an eye cream from a company and I never Sunday ri their eye cream. I use their eye cream. I've used it for years. And then other than that, I use my night serum. So I have a good four night serums that I flip between. My favorite one is probably Sweet Dreams, I call it Sweet Dreams. And all of our community have access to all of my recipes. I'm gonna try to remember this one. It's, it's, it's my most expensive one, so I use CBD in it.
4 (27m 52s): So the base is rose hip, Jehovah, Blackberry oil, <unk> oil, I know it's four and four. And then I use CBD oil in it. And then I have Rose Yaro, Yasmin, and Lavender. And that's why we call it Sweet Dreams because the lavender's in it.
0 (28m 13s): Nice. Yeah, that sounds absolutely lovely. Why do you rotate between those? You have four different serums.
4 (28m 21s): I believe what we talked about earlier, I think our skin every so often gets immune to what we're doing. So I like to swap it up so I only I, I'll make a bottle and it'll last maybe three months, so I rotate like every quarter or so around that. Every three or four months. I don't want my skin to get complacent.
0 (28m 38s): Yeah, exactly. That's a good point. That's a good point. Well I'm, I bet that you, you know, you said it's an expensive one to make, but I'm sure it's probably much, much less expensive than buying 50 different Oh, absolutely. Like marketing
4 (28m 53s): And make Absolutely, I make it every Christmas. I make it for my family every Christmas lot. The batches are getting bigger and bigger every year, so I always tend to have that one in the winter. And I've just actually moved to a new one. But the reason that I move is just to get my skin. It's still essential oils, it's still cannabis for c b, it's just to get my distill carry. It's just to give my skin, you know, something new to, to work with.
0 (29m 19s): Yeah, yeah. I love that. Well, Colleen, I wanna move on and ask you a couple other questions because you said you've been an aromatherapist since you were 16. I mean, that's incredible. What got you interested in that as a, as a career? And has there been sort of your, let's call it a spark oil, like when people get into birding, you know, and they have their spark bird, was there like a spark oil for you?
4 (29m 44s): Well, I, I've been in a room therapist since I was 19, so I didn't qualify until I was 19, but at 16 I took my first 10 week course. I remember it was a 10 week night course, and mom had suggested it. She, and I can't remember why she, I always liked to create things and I was always curious for things and always, like, I was always reading the back of cosmetic bottles, like even shampoo bottles. It makes complete sense now because I then became a cosmetic chemist. I never understood, I never understood how when I read the back of cosmetic bottles, I didn't understand any of the words and we were putting this onto our bodies, never made any logical sense to me. And I was one of those really annoying kids that asked why to everything.
4 (30m 26s): Like, just because was not an acceptable answer to me in any, in any conversation you can imagine how frustrating that was for my per parents. And that continued into, into being an adult, an adolescent. So at some point mom must have said, you know, you maybe would like aromatherapy. She, I don't remember mom having aromatherapy in her home. I don't really remember diffusers or anything like that, but she, you know, no one knows you better than your mom. And she had said, you should go and do this night course. And I remember she, I was young, I wasn't driving, she had to drive me to it. So one night a week for 10 weeks, she took me to this course, drop me off and collected me again. And it was super simple. It was like a hobby course for people who wanted to get into aromatherapy.
4 (31m 9s): And I just got bitten and just knew from then that I didn't know what my life was gonna look like, but I knew the plants were gonna be there with me. And from that very early age, I was sharply aware that these little 10 mil bottles came from a vast amount of plant. Like I wasn't naive enough to think that these 10 mils of bottle, you know, these 10 mil bottles of oil were, you know, just, they came lightly. They didn't come lightly. I knew that there was vast quantities of plant material used to give us these 10 mils and they were precious oils. And that was, I was sharply acute with that from very early on. And then I never really sat aromatherapy down.
4 (31m 50s): I went to college because it's what you do and I'm a good girl. So I, I followed, I followed the traditional path and I done one semester and I remember coming home for Christmas and saying, I'm not going back. Like there's work to be done. You know, there's stuff to get on with. And to me, just for me, university was very slow and it wasn't, didn't stimulate me in the way I needed to be. My hands were idle and I wanted to get back to it. And I came home and I said, I'm gonna become an aromatherapist, which was not easy back then. It's still not that particularly easy now, but there was no third level education path to do it. Right. It wasn't simple and I had to find my way around it and there was no path.
4 (32m 30s): And you, even to this day, I look back and I think when I was very young to try to carve out a, a path that just didn't exist. And there's not many people at 18 say, okay, I'm gonna figure this out on my own. You know, I had to and, and there's not many 18 year olds say I'm gonna be in a room with therapist either. For a lot of people it's a second career.
0 (32m 49s): Yeah. There's no clear path to employment. So yeah. Did you, did you go back to college then to, to keep studying?
4 (32m 56s): No, so, and, and I had went to Scotland to college, my degree, my degree was in psychology, which was interesting. And I still read books about that topic. So the topic wasn't a bad idea, just the, that path of education was a bad idea for me. And I'm dyslexic, so it was never gonna serve me. It didn't work. I learned by doing and I needed to be doing, not sitting in a, a lecture room, a lecture hall. So there was no university degree. I didn't have a straightforward, I like aromatherapy path. So I started taking part-time courses to get diplomas and I done, my first diploma took me 18 months and it was like 250 hours or whatever it was back then.
4 (33m 38s): And it was great. But I remember at the end still having this big why and the why wasn't, hadn't been answered. So I was technically INO therapist, I had this certificate to say I was in a therapist and I didn't feel like it. And everyone else in my class was so happy. And they were, you know, a lot of them were nurses and they were starting to bring it into their, their nursing practices or they worked in hospices or they were, you know, starting massage clinics. And I just didn't feel qualified or equipped to take these precious oils into the world. And then I done a class with Rihanna Harris a long, long time ago, and she talked with the chemistry and the penny dropped and I realized that was what was missing.
4 (34m 17s): No one had ever talked to me about the chemistry, not in the way she did, not in the way that, and her background was nursing, so science was her thing, which was the bit I needed. I needed high level science to make me understand these plants and to do justice with them. And once that penny dropped, the rest of it just became natural. But I studied for about eight years while I ran my own practice and done hospice and cancer work because I just needed to learn so much more. So I studied to a level of clinical aromatherapy as well as doing then multiple massage techniques and lots of different complimentary alternatives as well.
0 (34m 58s): Yeah. So I, I wanna ask again. Was there an oil that was sort of stayed with you this entire time or that got you launched on this trajectory? I mean, surely there was like a personal experience or something that made you go, wow, there's some, there's really something to these oils.
4 (35m 13s): I remember lime and it's such a strange one.
0 (35m 16s): Lime. Yeah, lime. 4 (35m 18s): Very strange. I know that sounds really weird. I remember lime sticking out as just this, oh, I let it felt, I, I was nearly afraid of it. It felt so powerful. Edan bergamo, both of them. And I, I just remember thinking that they were incredibly powerful and I didn't really understand the concept of getting that amount of oil from the round of a lemon into this bottle. I think all of that kinda blew my mind for a long time. And I also remember at the start not appreciating lavender. Like it was not my oil. I always knew it would be with me my whole life and it would be an oil I would be eternally grateful for, but personally it was never my oil.
4 (35m 58s): And even to this day, it is still not my oil. So even in times when I've been very, very stressed and lavender would be the, the oil I would prescribe for people, it wouldn't be mine. So I take it with me, I appreciate it. I highly value it. It's just, it's not my companion. And then over the last, you know, 24 years, nearly 25 years, I've had different oils that have come with me for in different, you know, different oils for different seasons of my life. Palo Santo is my oil at the minute and it has been for about five years. And it's my meditation partner. And I, even if I don't have, if I make the mistake of traveling without it, I, I can close my eyes for long enough and think about it, it'll come back to me.
0 (36m 41s): Mm. That's lovely. Well, Colleen, I wanna ask you one more question before we, we close up. You mentioned a few times this, this awareness of how much plant it took to create, you know, one bottle of essential oil. You know, and that is a, that's a valid concern that I think a lot of aromatherapists and herbalist are really, they they're concerned about it, you know, they wanna be good stewards of the earth and we, we don't wanna be, you know, over harvesting these precious plants just to cram it into this tiny bottle, you know? So what are, what are your thoughts on that?
4 (37m 22s): I, I like, this has been a concern of mine long before we were even aware of our climate emergency or climate change and long before we were even having the conversation about plant conservation and how what's happening to the world is gonna factor access to plant medicine. And I actually don't know how much the conversation about access to plant medicines, the risk to ac the risk for access to plant medicine is even being talked about. Because, you know, when I try to have this conversation with people and people, they'll say, oh, I don't think it's that big a deal. Or me talking about it will be the first time they've had a minute to think about or considerate. And that terrifies me. I don't wanna be the person that is saying to people, are you aware this is a concern?
4 (38m 3s): You know, I want to be fit to be in a group where I'm not the one bringing that up. I want people to be, you know, talking to me about plant conservation and solutions to plant conservation. And it that rarely happens. I feel like I'm the, the grim reaper a lot of the time where I, when I talk about this, I'm like, we really need to consider this. To the extent that I deliberately last year launched a, a program called Lab Census. And the em was to fully raise awareness about what it looks like. And I took it back to the field cuz that's where it was, was practiced. So we went and we visited farmers and we focused on Provence because it's where my aromatherapy heart lives. And we went to Provence to some of the farmers I've known for 15 years.
4 (38m 45s): And we talked about how either lavender yields not only are unpredictable now some years there is no yield because of unpredictable weather, because of frosts in April or you know, droughts in May. And that sometimes the tweet can happen a month apart, a month apart. And when I thought, let's humanize this because, you know, we're humans and we, we understand stories much better than we understand words a lot of the time. So I I I took our community on this journey to show them through our farmers what our farmers are such nice humans, what it means not just for their lives and their livelihood, but actually their, their hearts and their hands live in their soil.
4 (39m 28s): And it's heartbreaking to see that they just, they can't keep their crops. They, they have gave up on, you know, they've limited where they used to grow 20 crops. They're just, they're down to five crops now because it's easier to steward and care for five crops and hope for yield and get yield as opposed to keep an eye on 20. And the weather just ruined that for them. So I think it's, it's helped and it's raised awareness and it's helped those farmers to do that. But if I had all the time in the world I would only do that, I would only spend time raising awareness about plant conservation and helping our aromatherapist, would you write my, the aromatherapists are, are becoming more aware of it slowly but steady and they want to be good stewards.
4 (40m 13s): And I would love to spend time being fit to give them access to directly to the farmers who are actually working on our land and be able to support them directly. Especially those farmers that are in bringing us the most beautiful oils like roses, like roses from the Martins of province is just, there is no smell like a rose from the Martins of province. But if we don't, if we don't start continuing this conversation in a really productive way, then we might never have that. Well I don't think, I don't think my nieces and nephews are going to have that smell number 10 years if we don't do
0 (40m 47s): Something. Oh, that is a very, very sad thought. Absolutely. And you know, like you said, a productive conversation, like a productive conversation is not let's all stop buying essential oils, period. No, no, no. You know, that is not the solution of, you know, so Yeah, exactly. Talk, talk just a little bit more about that and then we'll close up.
4 (41m 8s): Yeah, it's the opposite and I'm a big fan of, you know, let's spend five minutes understanding the facts and then let's move on to solutions. There is no point dwelling on what's happened because we can't fix the past. All we can do is focus on making the future better. So when I talk about this, I talk about the facts and the, you know, the emergency very quickly and it's like, okay, these are the facts. They're really hard to stomach. You can stomach those later on. We're here to sort out solutions. And my solutions are things like, please don't stop buying essential oils. Continue to buy them, be conscious about how you use them, but be more conscious about where you're buying them from. Buy them directly from the farmer, make sure they're not adulterated.
4 (41m 50s): And you know, source and the source that you buy from is the most important thing in this conversation. And the closer we can keep our purchasing to the source, the longer we will have medicine because we keep those farmers in their fields. They don't have to go and close up their fields. They can keep working, keep doing the beautiful work they, they do. And you know, as an aromatherapist, we can all ride the scale from being a scientist to being a witch. And I very happily ride up and down that scale all day long, more than happy. I'm happy when someone calls me a witch and happy when someone calls me a scientist. And I think that, you know, no matter where you sit in that scale, there's no denying that the energy that our plants are cared for with and then harvested with and then distilled with and bottled with is really important.
4 (42m 38s): And it affects our oils and we know that when we use them. So I wanna be buy-in from the men and women who live on the land, who care for the land, who love the land, who sing to their plants, who harvest them with care and love. I, that's the oils I want to be using and that's what I wanna be putting onto my skin. I don't wanna be using anything that comes from the source other than directly from my farms.
0 (43m 5s): Hmm. That's well put. Well that's so many reasons that I'm very proud to be in the work that I am and raising awareness of that. We talk a lot on the show about the importance of where you get your oils. Yeah, absolutely. And it it, because it has impacts not just on the product and, and the way that you experience it, but on our planet as well. And the people like the farmers, you said, who are the best people on our planet? Yeah, absolutely. Well, Colleen, this has been absolutely wonderful. I've loved sending this time with you. We have to have you back on soon. There's so much more I wanna talk to you about.
0 (43m 44s): But, but we, you know, there's only so much time in a day. So before you go, we always love to ask our guests a couple closing questions. And the first is, what's one or two self-care practices that you try to do every day to stay healthy?
4 (43m 60s): Well, I meditate most days. I skipped the odd day. No one's perfect. I think that's become really important to me, especially in the last about six or seven years. Really, really important to me. And sleep, I am a massive fan of sleep and I unapologetically take eight to nine hours a night. So those two things keep me sane. Ugh,
0 (44m 20s): I love that Unap, unapologetic. Nine hours a night. Yeah, love it. It's great. Is there a certain type of meditation that you do?
4 (44m 28s): No, and I, I have tried lots of different types and I do retreats and I'm, I'm one of those like, I like to explore different types, but my meditation is very simple. A lot of it is, I do mantra meditation most of the time and silence. I spend a lot of time in silence. So, but I've never fell into anything other than really just sitting in silence with mattress.
0 (44m 52s): And finally, Colleen, what's just one thing we should all ditch completely and replace with something healthier today?
4 (44m 58s): I'm gonna stick with coffee, you know, even though I need to take that advice myself, I think we should all ditch. And I know there's benefits to it, but water outweighs the benefits of coffee.
0 (45m 11s): That is a hard one. Sometimes we have to, yeah, tell ourselves what we should do. Yeah, hopefully follow through. Well, this has been fabulous, Colleen. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing and you have so much to offer.
4 (45m 26s): What's the best way for people to become a part of your community and talk a little bit about the courses that you offer. Yeah, so well, you can get us@labroma.com. All our courses are on there and our access to our software is there. Also, I go live every Monday and our community group, which you can find again@labroom.com, just search for community. It's a free platform. It's not on Facebook. We have it on a private platform, but it's fully free and it's my happiest hour of the week. It's totally informal. We rock up, we have a chat about whatever's going on in terms of aromatherapy and essential oils. Sometimes people will just come with their like day-to-day concerns and we'll work on solutions or substitutions.
4 (46m 9s): I always share a new recipe every week and we work through that recipe. We talk about the courses and any questions anyone has on them. So that's a really good way to like access me and it's super casual. I rock up and with a cup of tea and it's brilliant. I love it. And that's every week. And that's where you can get me. You can also direct me, contact me directly@aromalama.com. I love to get emails from people who wanna talk about the plants with me, especially if it's conservation and plants, then I'm super happy.
0 (46m 38s): Oh, I love it. I love it. Well, we'll definitely put a link below for those resources in the show notes. So wherever you're listening, just scroll down, hit show notes, hit show more, or go to our website and you can find the show notes for that to make it easy to connect with. Colleen. Well, thank you. Thank you. It's been lovely meeting you and I hope that this is just the first of many conversations in the future. We appreciate you so much here on the essential oil revolution.
4 (47m 6s): Thank you, Samantha. It was a pleasure to be here.
0 (47m 9s): The essential oil revolution is created by me, Samantha Lee Wright, thank you to each and every one of you who tunes in week after week to the show and shares it with others. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, go ahead and leave us a rating and review. Wherever you listen, whether that's on Apple Podcast, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you listen, you can find show notes, instructions, swag, and more on our website@revolutionoilspodcast.com. We'll get you here next week with a brand new episode of the Essential Oil Revolution. In the meantime, keep on learning, keep on discovering, and most importantly, keep on treating yourself well.
0 (47m 53s): You are worth it.