Essential oils, dark skin beauties and beauty and wellness. This combination fits together like a hand in gloves. After all, essential oils have been used for centuries to provide dark skin beauties with beauty and wellness.

When you hear a conversation about essential oils, what are people really talking about? In essence they’re describing the concentrated extracts from a given plant. It takes 250 pounds of lavender flowers to make a pound of lavender essential oil.

A minimum of 5000 pounds of rose petals to make one pound of rose essential oil. What does that tell you? It’s letting you know that it takes a lot of the plants to make an oil. Often essential oils have been referred to as botanical medicine.

Essential Oils for the Beauty of My Dark Skin Complexions

Whether it’s your hair, your facial skin or your body as a whole, essential oils have been known to help you with your challenges.

For hair, they are said to help with hair growth, thinning edges, dry scalp and provide a lustrous sheen. Rosemary essential oil is an often used oil for hair growth and thinning edges. Peppermint and tea tree help with itchy scalps and dandruff problems.

With your facial skin, essential oils can aid in minimizing pimples, oiliness and even surface burns. Lavender, tea tree and frankincense have been used extensively in skin care products as solutions to problems.

Tea tree is excellent for helping to minimize and in some cases,  remove pimples from acne flair ups. For maturing skin, frankincense, lavender, neroli, rose and geranium are excellent oils to moisturize and handle fine lines and wrinkles.

Skin challenges such as eczema and psoriasis are often because there’s inflammation int your body. There are essential oils, that are known to help with inflammation.

Your skin type will determine exactly what oils you can use to benefit you and your challenges. However, the oils mentioned above, in general, will get your off to a good skin care regimen when used properly.

Essential Oils for Wellness and My Dark Skin Beauties

Wellness is a wide open category. For my dark skin beauties, it’s often used as a way to describe self care.

Essential oils can play a very important role in your wellness and self care. A simple bath can be turned into a wellness retreat with the right oils and ingredients.

An Epsom salt bath can become a detox bath and relaxing bath when lavender essential oil and dried lavender flowers are added to your bath. Lavender is calming and relaxing to most users.

There was a time when I didn’t vibe with lavender oil. I couldn’t take the smell. As I grew in my knowledge of essential oils, I began to realize that the source of oils was very important. When the supplier doesn’t offer you the best quality, it compromises the results and the smell of the oil.

Depending on your challenge, these oils can become a way for you to find grounding and tranquility. Grounding oils such as sandalwood, has been known to help calm and ground us when we find ourselves in an agitated state. In today’s environment, sandalwood is probably a big seller.

As Black women, we have a very close relationship with the spiritual world. Myrrh is one of those oils that is often used to help ground us in both the spiritual and physical energies.

Lemon essential oil is known for its energizing and purifying properties. Orange, grapefruit and tangerine are also energizing and uplifting oils.

The cool thing about essential oils, when it comes to wellness, is that there are oils to help lift your spirits as well as help you relax, when needed.

Basic Ways to Use Essential Oils for Beauty and Wellness

There are three basic ways to use essential oils.

Aromatherapy

Aromatherapy, which involves smelling essential oils to improve your health and state of being. You can simply pass a bottle under your nose and gently inhale or take it all in with a deep breath.

Diffusing a single oil or blend will change the energy in a room and your mood. Diffusers come in different types. You can take a deeper dive into differs on your own.

Ingestion

Yes, some people add a drop or two in water or in their teas and take them internally. When you use a cough drop that’s flavored with lemon or peppermint, you’re taking in an essential oil internally. It’s mixing with the fluids in your mouth and being ingested into your system.

Topically

An essential oil that has been diluted with a carrier oil can offer great benefits to your skin. Carrier oils are typically thought to be jojoba oils, coconut oil, olive oil, even grape seed oil. Yet, you can also use butters. Shea, cocoa and mango butters in a blend are used as carriers for essential oils.

This is where you can really get creative and make custom butters for your skin care needs.

Let me know if you want to learn more about essential oils as it applies to you dark skin beauties.

That’s it for this week. As always ….

Dedicated to Your Beauty,

Juliette Samuel,
Esthetician/Author/Publisher,

Nyraju Skin Care