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Choosing The Best Essential Oil Diffuser For Your Home And Family

By: Caroline Ashton

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Essential oils have been gaining notoriety for their therapeutic and medicinal actions, becoming more widely recognized than just little bottles of good smelling liquid. For their medicinal use, they can be ingested (in very tiny amounts, and only with supervision from a health professional!), topically applied, or inhaled. It's the inhaling part that most folks associate with "aromatherapy", but its important to see beyond the "spa treatment" image of inhalation of essential oils. This method can really provide therapeutic results, not only in terms of mood and energy, but for the immune system and other physiological activity as well. So which diffuser to use for the most health benefits? Here we'll investigate the most popular styles, and see what each type offers in terms of therapeutic activity.
The Research Is In: Essential Oils Have Proven Health Benefits
Scientific investigation over the last several years has revealed a great many truly medicinal properties of essential oils. We're finding out its not just about great smells, but that these great smells can affect us profoundly. Diffusing essential oils has been scientifically proven to lower physiological markers of stress and lessen anxiety. Other research indicates essential oils can have a very positive impact on our immune system function. Oils stimulate the immune system into action, improve its function, and actually de-activate infectious viruses and bacterial. All these benefits can be gained by using the right aromatherapy diffuser.
Choosing A Diffuser For Aromatic Applications
One of the wonderful aspects of essential oils is that by simply inhaling the aroma, significant changes occur in our body's physiology. This is because the olfactory sense is the most closely tied of the five senses to your brain. A scent can change the way your body is functioning without you even thinking about it (one study notes over 100 changes to the patterns of RNA transcription from smelling Linalool, the primary relaxing component in Lavender). Smelling certain oils can lower stress, improve mood, calm children, and improve the quality of sleep. And for this type of therapy, ANY diffuser will do the job. The only consideration that really matters here is how large an area you'd like to diffuse the oil into -- would you like to smell it from one end of the house to the other, or just in one room.
Each type of diffuser will cover a different number of square feet -- and generally the less expensive models are for the smaller spaces. A "plug-in" diffuser plugs straight into a wall socket, and evaporates oil from a cotton through warmth. Easy to use, silent, great for one small-to-moderate size room. Very inexpensive. Next, the fan diffusers blow air over an oil-saturated pad. They might make a little "white noise" sound from the fan, but are generally very tolerable. The smaller units are inexpensive and for small spaces like the plug-in unit. Larger ones might cover areas up to four hundred square feet. Like the plug in, you'll need to replace the pad every once in a while. Then there's "ultrasonics", which are small ultrasonic humidification units made to diffuse essential oils along with the mist of water vapor they emit (sometimes called "ultrasonic nebulizers"). Also very quiet, and nice if you're in a dry environment. The cover about the same space as the larger fan units. The most powerful diffusers are simply called "nebulizers", as they nebulize the essential oils to evaporate them. This means they make the oil into very tiny particles which you can see as pure essential oil vapor (without water). These are nearly silent, and can diffuse into areas larger than eight hundred square feet.
Any of these diffusers will allow you and your family to enjoy and benefit from the aromatic effects of essential oils. Generally the more costly units will cover more square footage, but will not provide more benefit in terms of aroma. If however you'd like to take full advantage of the medicinal aspects of essential oils, providing immune support (and data is now coming out that essential oils can even prevent cancer) you'll want to be a little more careful with your selection. For actions like disinfecting your living environment, boosting immune function, and perhaps using essential oils to support recovery from an illness, it can be important to put a higher concentration of essential oils in the air than you can do with a simple fan or warming unit.
It is the nebulizing diffusers that allow complete flexibility in terms of essential oil output, and maximizing the concentration of essential oils in your environment. If this is what you are seeking, make sure you find a cold-air nebulizing diffuser, one that uses air rather than water to make the evaporating mist of essential oils. The fancier of these units will have an output control, enabling you to diffuse just a little at a time at the lowest setting, to really creating a visible vapor of essential oil within the nebulizing chamber.
How To Conserve Your Oils While Using Them Therapeutically
An important note when using any type of diffuser, your nose will become sensitized to any aroma very quickly. If you diffuse the same scent continually, you'll notice you smell it less and less within just a few minutes. This is because your nose only has so many receptors for each aroma, and once they're filled, they take a little time before they can signal the aroma's presence to your brain again. All "high end" diffusers will either have a timer control built in, or recommend the use of a programmable appliance timer to cycle the diffuser on and off. A typical cycle is only 5 minutes "on" every hour -- yes, only five minutes! If using the diffuser for immunity purposes, you might consider however running the unit continually on its lowest setting. In any case, know that no diffuser is more efficient than another -- the amount of oil in the air is always a direct result of how much you've put in the diffuser -- but a timer can help you smell a smaller amount of oil from any diffuser.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

More information on therapeutic essential oils and proper use of aromatherapy carrier oil is available online at the Ananda Apothecary.

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