The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Why does everything smell, so peacefully, of lavender?
Herb’s aroma found in all types of household, beauty products.
Not long ago Erin Wexstten, the 35-year-old founder of Oxalis Apothecary, a plant-based skin care 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.
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 sanitizer, face mists, eye masks. It’s even in food and 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, Kan
sas and West Virginia, where growing lavender on coalstripped mountains is being explored as a land reclamation project.
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; a lavender-scented candle; a bouquet of dried lavender in a vase in the bathroom; and a small pillow stuffed with lavender to be placed under one’s nose at bedtime.
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. That bath soap would have been a special imported treat costing $15 a bar, not something I might have gotten at the corner CVS.
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.
Now you can buy Downy Infusions Lavender Serenity fabric softener.
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 this age of fractious politics, 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 moisturizing lotions, like the one from Aveeno, a division of Johnson & Johnson, which claims on the purply bottle that it “calms & relaxes.”
Anit Hora, 39, the founder of M.S Skincare, a vegan skin care 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 spelled “ohm.”
“It’s very calming to chant ‘ohm,’” Hora said. “And that’s the effect I wanted this to have.”
Wexstten’s Feel Good Potion is “there to reduce stress and anxiety in a world full of chaos,” she said. (The label instructs users to “apply to temples, third eye and wrists. Breathe deeply.”)
While Wexstten doesn’t think there’s a lavender boom, she said, “I think people are paying attention more, handling their self-care. In an old-world apothecary, lavender is not a new thing.”
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.
Crop this
The largest seller of essential oils in the world, the Utahbased 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 38 kilograms of lavender oil in 2008, and sourced 152,000 kilograms to support sales in 2018.
“We have spent a long time optimizing 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.”
(Not all lavender is even grown in a field: It’s likely that the $3 bottle of lavender oil at the chain drugstore, or the liquid hand sanitizer at the supermarket, derives its lavender scent from synthetic perfume made in a laboratory.)
If the small and mediumsize 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.
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 8-acre plot, and has sold thousands of lavender bouquets to brides. “Millennials love it for weddings,” she said. “It’s the new boho thing.”
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 look out over the fields, it’s calming. It’s that serene calming feeling, like when you stare over the ocean.”