Episode 103: Pampering Your Skin and Clove

doTERRA: An effective and personalized skincare routine can keep your skin looking its absolute best. But with all of the options out there, it can be hard to know what the best choice is. Today, we'll talk about how you can use the power of pure essential oils to pamper your skin.

Welcome back to Essential Oil Solutions with doTERRA, the podcast where you'll hear exciting, useful, and simple everyday uses for essential oils from experts in the field. If you like what you hear today, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen. We always appreciate hearing from you.

Today, we're excited to talk to Samantha Lewis about how you can incorporate essential oils into your personalized skincare routine. Samantha, thank you so much for being here with us again this month. This is a topic that I am so excited to talk about.

Samantha Lewis: Yeah, thanks for having me. This is one of my favorite topics.

doTERRA: So I think one of the biggest questions around this topic is can I actually put essential oils on my face?

Samantha: Yeah, I think that that is—I mean, that's a massive question that a lot of people ask me actually because a lot of people are, you know, maybe a little timid or a little frightened and not sure how they can use them safely. And I want to dive into all of that because, like I mentioned, this is my personal favorite. This is my favorite topic to talk about is skincare and applying essential oils to your face and really utilizing all the benefits.

So like I mentioned, safety is something that's super important to follow here. We talk about safety with internal use and aromatic use, but topical use is very important too. It's very important to pay attention to the essential oil label and the usage online.

So when you go to doterra.com, on each product page, you'll see these little icons. You'll see a couple different ones. There's N for neat, S for sensitive, D for dilute. It will also say if it's safe to use aromatically, topically, or internally, so pay attention to that because we do carry some oils that are considered “hot” oils, and those are usually marked with a “dilute,” which means that you want to be cautious and careful while using those topically.

I personally avoid using any of the “dilute” oils topically, just because I have very sensitive skin. And then any of the S or sensitive oils, I always dilute with a carrier oil. And then with some of the neat oils, I even have diluted them as well on my skin as well because it's a little more sensitive. So keep in mind your own personal sensitivity, everyone else’s around you, as you're using oils on your kids, on your family members. And, you know, just play around, test with different carrier oils on different spots of the skin, on different spots of your face.

doTERA: So with that, what are some of the oils that you recommend as using as part of my skincare routine?

Samantha: Well, like I mentioned, each person's skin has its own individual needs and sensitivities. Like, you might have more normal to dry skin, and so you could maybe play around with Yarrow|Pom or even Rose. Rose is meant to help balance moisture levels in your skin. So if you have more normal to dry skin, Rose could be a good one.

Some quick additions for normal to oily skin could be Geranium, Tea Tree, even HD Clear. So we have our blends, our skincare blends, right? HD Clear and Immortelle. Those are specifically created for certain people’s skin types. And HD Clear is for maybe problematic, uneven skin texture, and Immortelle is for aging skin. It also can be used on the skin to help decrease signs of aging.

One thing I like to do as well is look at the ingredients in blends or skincare products that I know and love and identifying essential oil that I think might be advantageous to my current skin concerns.

doTERRA: I love that, looking at what you already use and what works for you and then going from there. I think that's a wonderful idea. So how do I go about incorporating essential oils into my routine? At what point am I applying the essential oils?

Samantha: I think that's a great question. And again, that kind of changes from person to person. Once you've identified an essential oil and think about how it will benefit your skin, I try to use it consistently for at least a couple weeks. Within this time frame, for me, I often can tell if the added oil will benefit my skin or not.

While you're trying to nail down the when of skin application, like you mentioned, it can depend on the benefit you're looking for. Is it a spot treatment, added moisture—like we talked about—or even skin cleansing? So each of these can be applied at different times.

If you're looking for skin-cleansing benefits, maybe add some Tea Tree into your skin cleanser, and—you know—use it twice a day, at the beginning and at the end of every day. Or if it's a spot treatment, take some Turmeric and apply that—I like spot treatments personally at the end of the day, when you're going to bed, because you don't have to smell like oils all day if you don't want to. But then also, you're not worried about maybe applying makeup over top of them or walking around with essential oils on your face. So spot treatments, I would say end of the day, skin cleansing throughout the day, whenever you cleanse your skin, and then added moisture could be add it to your moisturizer at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day, depending on how strong of an additional moisturizing effect you're looking for.

doTERRA: So you've mentioned quite a few as we've been going through different oils that you can use, but what are some of the other benefits that I can see from using essential oils as part of my skincare routine?

Samantha: So the benefits can range, depending on the essential oil. Like I mentioned, Tea Tree is a good skin cleansing, and it can even help with the appearance of blemishes. So I like that as a spot treatment as well, along with some Turmeric.

And then Rose and Geranium are renowned florals for the beautifying benefits. Like I mentioned with Rose too, if you have maybe more dry skin, add some Rose to your moisturizer or even as a spot treatment in a carrier oil to any dry patches that you might have. It really helps to balance those moisture levels and soothe the skin too.

So from smoothing the complexion like we talked about, balancing those moisture levels, soothing any irritated skin that you might have, essential oils can completely change your skincare routine. Just play around with your application, with the essential oils, and figure out what your custom skincare routine is because it's going to be different for everyone.

doTERRA: Well Samantha, thank you so much for sitting down with us and clearing up some of the confusion about using essential oils as part of a skincare routine.

Samantha: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This is a fun topic

doTERRA: The scent of clove evokes the warm feeling of Christmas and comforting holiday foods. It's a spice that has found its way into the tradition of many cultures around the world. Its source and place of origin were shrouded in mystery until the Portuguese discovered the Moluccas Island or Indonesia in the 16th century.

History of Cloves

Originally, cloves were grown or, rather, grew wild on the famous Maluku Islands in Indonesia, which became known as the Spice Islands. Vast forests of clove trees flourished on these islands and were encouraged in their abundance by a native custom of planting a clove tree whenever a child was born. It was believed that if the tree flourished, then so would the child.

There’s a Zanzibar saying that goes, “Clove trees will not grow except within sight of the mountains and within smell of the sea.” And the clove tree does flourish in the warm, humid climates of places such as Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and Tanzania. Today, in fact, Tanzania alone produces nearly 80 percent of the world's cloves.

Harvesting Method

The clove harvest traditionally consists of a few busy days when the more nimble members of the community head to the treetops, beating the cloves from the branches with sticks. As the cloves shower down, they’re gathered in nets and spread out to dry, where they harden and blacken in the tropical sun, taking on the characteristic nail-like appearance that gives the spice its name, from the Latin clavus or nail.

Oldest Records of Cloves

Now the first record we have of clove actually comes from a handful of cloves found in a charred ceramic vessel beneath the Syrian desert. In this ancient small town on the banks of the Euphrates River, an individual by the name of Puzurum lost his house to a devastating fire. In the perspective of overall history, this was an extremely minor event. A new house was built over the ruins of the old, and then another, and many others after that. Life went on and on and on.

Thousands of years later, a team of archaeologists came to the dusty village that now stands atop the ruins. As they dug through the packed and burned earth that had once been Puzurum's home, they extracted not only the vessel containing the cloves but also an archive of inscribed clay tablets. By happy accident, the blaze that destroyed Puzurum's house had fired the fragile clay tablets as hard as though they had been baked in a kiln, thereby ensuring their survival over thousands of years.

A second fluke was a reference on one of the tablets to a local ruler that we know from other sources: a king Yadihk-Abu. His name dates the blaze and the cloves to within a few years of 1721 BC.

To find the earliest written mention of cloves, however, we have to look to the Han dynasty in China in 207 BC. The writings tell how officers of the court were made to hold cloves in their mouth when talking to the king, apparently to ensure the sweetness and acceptability of their breath.

Europeans, however, did not experience cloves until about the 4th century, when the spice arrived on the continent via traders as a luxury item. They were such a luxury item, in fact, that in Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries, cloves were worth at least their weight in gold.

Traditional Uses of Cloves

Now clove has been used in a wide variety of ways throughout history, from cooking to traditional medicinal practices. For instance, clove can be used to make a fragrant pomander when combined with an orange. A pomander is a ball made for perfumes and traditionally was often carried with the owner. When given as a gift in Victorian England, such a pomander indicated warmth of feeling.

Clove is also known to possess many properties that make it useful in oral health, and it's used in various dental creams, toothpastes, mouth washes, and throat sprays. Traditionally, people have also pressed a clove bud between the jaws at the site of a tooth that may be bothering them.

Clove has been used traditionally in many healing traditions including Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, and Western herbalism. In fact, in Ayurveda, cloves are said to be kaphahar, which means that they have the ability to balance the kapha dosha, one of the three life forces in Ayurvedic tradition.

Whatever way you choose to use Clove, we know that it can quickly become one of your favorites.

Thanks for joining us and congratulations on living a healthier lifestyle with essential oils. If you liked what you heard today, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen. Also, if you want to try any of the products you learned about, go to doterra.com or find a Wellness Advocate near you to place an order today.