WHY DOES EVERYTHING SMELL, SO PEACEFULLY, OF LAVENDER?
The striking purple flower has become ubiquitous, be it in health, beauty or beyond
Not long ago Erin Wexstten, the 35-year-old founder of Oxalis Apothecary, a plant-based skincare brand, ticked off all the ways she uses lavender in her life.
“I personally have lavender everywhere,” she said. “Hand soap, dish soap. I have sachets you stick in the drawer. It makes the underwear smell nice. Dried bunches. They make for a beautiful piece in a vase.”
Wexstten has spread the lavender love through her products, including Feel Good Potion, containing essential oil of lavender, and Reverie body oil, deodorant and a wildflower clay mask, which contains lavender in powder form as a gentle exfoliant.
“I call lavender the quiet queen — she’s purple majesty,” Wexstten said. “It’s an abundant plant. It isn’t a precious, exotic plant. It’s used everywhere.”
Indeed, these days there’s hardly a household, grooming or wellness product that hasn’t been infused with lavender’s sweet, antiseptic-clean aroma: candles, diffusers, shower gels, liquid hand sanitiser, face mists, eye masks. It’s even in food and — shudder — cocktails.
To feed the demand, hundreds of lavender farms have sprouted up in recent years far from their well-known location of Provence, France: in places like Maine, Kansas and West Virginia, where growing lavender on coal-stripped mountains is being explored as a land reclamation project.
The lavender field has become such a visual cliché on social media that Simon Porte Jacquemus, the French fashion designer, decided to subvert it by hold
ing his spring 2020 fashion show in an actual field in Provence.
“I wanted a place that looked like a postcard — almost too much like a postcard, even,” he said. Even when you’re not seeking it out, lavender has become hard to escape. A look around my own apartment revealed three bars of lavender bath soap; a lavender “relax” aromatherapy bar by Treestar; a vial of Wexstten’s
Feel Good Potion; Sleep Well Therapy Balm by Scentered; Dr.Kerklaan Natural Sleep Cream with CBD extract and calming sensation citrus and lavender; alavender-scented candle; abouquet of dried lavender in a vase in thebathroom; and a small pillow stuffed with lavender to be placed under one’s nose at bedtime.
Lavender has entered the men’s grooming world too, in products like Jack Blackpost-shave cooling gel and overnight balm from the Art of Shaving.
NATURE’S CHILL PILL
If not a precious plant in modern times, lavender once carried the whiff of semi-luxury. If you stayed in a nice European hotel, your room had crisp linens scented with lavender.
Lavender was a key ingredient in the bougie domestic fantasy sold by retailers like Williams Sonoma and L’Occitane en Provence. It wafted gently over the entire oeuvre of Peter Mayle, the author of A Year In Provence, among other books.
Jeannie Ralston, a New York journalist turned Texas lavender farmer who wrote a memoir about her experience,
The Unlikely Lavender Queen, believes lavender’s popularity comes, in part, from the way it activates all the senses, especially when standing amid rows of it. “You’ve got the smell, but to look at it, it’s almost like a pointillist painting,” Ralston said. “It’s a beautiful, sensual experience to be in a lavender field.”
Dahlias planted tightly to the horizon can be beautiful, too.And roses also evoke grandmotherly nostalgia. But lavender promises something those plants don’t, something very much desired in thisage of fractious politics, climate dread and unceasing demands on our time: escape. Though the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans believed in its benefits, as both a cosmetic and a medicinal plant, lavender’s true time has come in the stressed-out early 21st century.
Now, artisanal wellness brands and billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies alike have packaged and marketed lavender to a freaked-out populace. No longer is it just a nice way to freshen your linen drawer. It’s become a magic ingredient: a plant-based Prozac put into therapy balms, sleep creams and stress-relief moisturising lotions, like the one from Aveeno, a division of Johnson & Johnson, which claims on the bottle that it “calms & relaxes”.
For consumers, especially millennials hungry for ways to unplug from 24/7 work and digital lives, lavender has come to mean calm.
Anit Hora, 39, the founder of M.S Skincare, a vegan skincare line made in Brooklyn, sprays lavender mist around her office when things get hectic, and has hung dried bunches in her bathroom, pressing them to scent her shower. She also named the brand’s restorative lavender body oil Aum, after the yoga chant more commonly spelt “ohm”.
“It’s very calming to chant ‘ohm’,” Hora said. “And that’s the effect I wanted this to have.”
According to the alternative medicine guides and lavender farmer websites, the herb is a cure-all for many, many ailments: anxiety, insomnia, migraines, depression, flatulence, hair loss and more.
“Some books have two, three pages of attributes that lavender possesses, and a lot of it seems far-fetched,” said Charley Opper, 68, an owner of Cache Creek Lavender Farm in Rumsey, California.
Opper makes body mist, bath soap and 21 other products from the lavender he grows, and he sticks with the folkloric wisdom that dates back to Pliny the Elder. “What I tell people is it’s a sleep aid, a relaxant and it does have anti-bacterial properties to it,” he said.
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The largest seller of essential oils in the world, the Utah-based doTerra, operates a distillery in Bulgaria, and production has increased exponentially to match demand, said Dr Russell Osguthorpe, the company’s chief medical officer. The company sold about 38kg of lavender oil in 2008, and sourced 152,000kg to support sales in 2018.
“We have spent a long time optimising our lavenders for their aroma because we use them in aromatherapy. You might even call it a pharmaceutical standard. Not all species of lavender are created equal.”
If the small- and medium-size lavender farms stretching from the Sequim Valley in Washington state to the East End of Long Island in New York don’t significantly contribute to industrial-scale production, they perform another role. No longer do Americans have to go to France to stand in a lavender field or picturesquely fill a straw basket with all-natural products.
When Ralston and her husband, Robb Kendrick, a photographer, started their commercial lavender farm in Texas, back in 2000, the couple had little experience with lavender. But the herb proved easy to grow and easier still to monetise.
“We ended up with 97 different lavender products,” Ralston said, ticking off a list that included bath balms, bath salts, bath oils, essential oils, eye creams, sachets and “lavender smokes”, or dried and bundled stalks to put on a fire. “We actually sold lavender-scented pencils at one point. And my husband said, ‘That’s enough.’”
Aimee Crane, who four years ago started Bee Loved Lavender farm, has brought culinary lavender to northeast Ohio. Jim Morford has brought homemade soaps, lotions, creams and infused teas to Kansas (“You really have to want to grow it in our hot climate,” Morford said). And Kaia Nustad has brought the joy of lavender to the Carmel Valley in California (and to Etsy).
Last year, Nustad hosted 54 weddings on her plot, and has soldthousands of lavender bouquets to brides. “Millennials love it for weddings,” she said. “It’s the new boho thing.”
Nustad discovered lavender’s popularity by accident, in 2014, when she visiteda farm nearthe “lavender trail” in Washington. And two years after planting her own farm, she still asks herself what it is about lavender that makes people respond the way they do. But, she reasoned: “I’ve never had a sad person on my farm. When you lookout overthe fields, it’s calming. It’s that serene calming feeling, like when you stare over the ocean.”
These days, there’s hardly a product that hasn’t been infused with lavender’s sweet, antiseptic-clean aroma