The Complete Book of Essential Oils and Aromatherapy: Over 600 Natural, Non-Toxic and Fragrant Recipes to Create Health - Beauty - a Safe Home Environment

As someone very new to exploring essential oils and how to use them in daily life...this book is great! I think I learn something new each time I open it. I highly recommend this book for beginners.

I love this book!! It has so much information that I can use. It was delievered quickly and in great condition!!

The reason I gave this book a 4 instead of a 5 was that it covered many remedies and concerns in depth using a few select oils. Handy charts in the back were a plus. But it is not comprehensive in that it went in depth into only a few select oils. Many are not even mentioned. Perhaps the book would be several times more thick if it did this? So, overall, it's a good refernce.

As an aromatherapist, I have many titles in my library of reference material. This book is one of the few that is unique. It is a great book for someone just starting to delve into aromatherapy, but it goes farther than that. You will find yourself going back to this book over and over and over again as you develop and hone your skills. I have been using essential oils for almost a decade, and I picked it up just the other day to look something up. When I grabbed it this week, it hit me just how good a book this really is. I decided I had to review it here so others could benefit from reading it as well. I hope this helps someone :)

This has a lot of interesting explanations on how the oils mix, about synergistic blends. It is a great overview of aromatherapy.

However, I find the book to be a little bit too preachy. When the author wrote this book, did she consider the audience? Every other sentence explains about the toxicity and the poisons of our every day products. It's a bit much. One doesn't need to convert the choir. They are already converted, at least part way. One can do without such overt preachiness.

My second criticism is that the book is designed for a beginner. As a beginner, it seems to me that the recipes should be a little more basic. While in the beginning, she discusses the 10 essential oils that everyone should have in their basic care arsenal, the other recipes often go far beyond those 10. As a beginner, I have yet to acquire all of these costly oils, and then some. It would be helpful to have recipes that didn't contain 6-10 different oils. An example would be: these two oils is a basic recipe for this, and if you really want to go further, add these as well. (There are a number of recipes like that, but they are far and few.) Also, it would be nice to know why one essential oil was chosen over another for a certain mixture. Is it for anti-inflammatory reasons? For general antiseptic? Anti fungal? One has to do a lot of guessing. This is supposed to be a beginners book, after all.