The Healing Powers of Essential Oils: A Complete Guide to Nature's Most Magical Medicine

by Cal Orey

Boost your immune system with antioxidants, lower your risk for the flu, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and more—with ordinary everyday ingredients you can find at home—and make healthy green choices in today’s fast-changing world!

Follow your nose to nature's pharmacy: the garden, where the essence of flowers, fruits, and trees provide some of our most powerful--and pleasurable--sources of health and healing...

Essential oils--including peppermint, eucalyptus, rose, and tea tree--are nature's ancient medicine, abundant with therapeutic effects. The latest scientific research shows that many popular essential oils and aromatherapy can boost your health and well-being, adding years to your life! This fascinating guide gives you the down-to-earth scoop on the top twenty oils--all of which are budget-friendly and available year-round in everyday products at your grocery store, health food store, and online. Learn how nature's bouquet can help you:

*Fight colds and stomach woes with medicinal eucalyptus and mint; slow the aging process and lower your risk of cancer, heart disease, and depression with relaxing chamomile and lavender.

*Naturally enhance flavor in dishes for every season with sweet-smelling foods like Cinnamon Rolls and Gingerbread Squares that lift your mood and trigger fond memories.

*Discover dozens of home remedies to ease anxiety and stress, improve sleep, sharpen brainpower, increase energy, heal skin problems, and more!

*Enjoy over 50 recipes for delicious dishes from salads, soups and entrees to desserts, including Lemon Oil Raspberry Muffins and Roast Chicken with Rosemary.

Sprinkled with feel-good stories and memorable legends, The Healing Powers of Essential Oils shows you how the comfort and calm of scent can help you get healthy and stay healthy, while taking you on an exciting and life-changing aromatic adventure!

Includes color photos

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

Published December 31, 2019

About the author

Cal Orey is an author-journalist (savvy researcher) and pens fiction. She has a master's degree in English (Creative Writing) from San Francisco State University. Orey lives in Northern CA and is known for her hugely popular Healing Powers book collection published by Kensington.

The Healing Powers of Herbs & Spices: Timeless Treasures #9 has made its way to being a pick in Woman's World Magazine Book Club, Booklist, American Global News, NYC Daily Post, New York Daily, City Buzz News, Huffington Post, more than 68 libraries worldwide, many hard copy and online magazines... noted on C2CAM, KSFO...

These down-to-earth, compelling lifestyle-
cookbooks with lively stories have been translated in 20+ languages; featured by Bookspan (including Literary Guild, Good Cook). Her latest books are The Healing Powers of Essential Oils (2019), The Healing Powers of Superfoods (2019), The Healing Powers of Tea (2018), The Healing Powers of Honey (2018, mass market, gift size 416 pages), and The Healing Powers of Vinegar, 3rd edition mass market format.

Reviews

[Micky Cox]

An excellent resource book written almost like a textbook about essential oils that delves further into health, diet and healing as well as using essential oils in conjunction. It took awhile to read this book as it wasn't a sit down and read for fun book, but chock full of information. If you are interested in the history of, use of and continued use of essential oils then I would highly recommend adding this book to your arsenal of information.

[Joanne Liddement]

I have a good comprehensive box of essential oils in my bathroom and i enjoy mixing my own blends, so when this book came up on NetGalley, i jumped at the chance to read and review Cal Orey's The Healing Powers of Essential Oils.
It has a easy to navigate index with the top 22 essential oils, which i think cover the popular ones. Each of the essential oil chapters has a little travelogue by the author and a potted history of the herb's usage during the centuries. She covers the health benefits and uses and a huge assortment of recipes.
As i grow my own lavender and it is my favourite essential oil, i decided to make the lavender oil dressing, which i used as a dressing on a salad. My husband was the 'guinea pig' and he couldn't believe that such a simple recipe has so much flavour and really livened up the salad.
This is a fabulous book to have on the bookshelf, for both recipes and health remedies and makes a handy reference book.
I just reviewed The Healing Powers of Essential Oils by Cal Orey. #TheHealingPowersofEssentialOils #NetGalley

[CR]

This was a great educational book about essential oils from the history to recipes, this book is for the advance practitioner as well as those just starting out. The recipes in this one are ones that you will be drooling over to try from cinnamon rolls to face masks it gives a wonderful collection of things to try! I could not put this book down at all!!

[Reen]

I have a good basic knowledge of essential oils and a close friend who swears by them and shares her vast knowledge with me. This book was a great educational book on the history of essential oils and "natures pharmacy" as well as basic recipes for cinnamon rolls and natural face masks. A great resource.
Thank you to the publisher, author and NetGalley for an ARC.

[Elizabeth]

If you know anything about essential oils or are interested in learning more, check this book out by Cal Orey. I've been using essential oils for years now, mixing my own concoctions, whipping up a lotion or creating an air-freshener for the house. I've even made dryer clothes and laundry soap using a blend of fresh-scented oils to spruce up the wash a little.
Lavender and Peppermint oil go a long way, both are my favorites for headaches and can soothe your pain within seconds just by inhaling the scent.
With pictures, history, and instructions, you can be well on your way to creating some of your own special blends. You just mind the magic within the oils or at the very least find one that's your absolute favorite.

[Denise]

Another outstanding book in Cal Orey's Healing Powers series! Great information, wonderful read. Add it to your collections - it's the best yet!

[Mary]

Cal Orey's book "The Healing Power of Essential Oils" is a terrific resource for anyone interested in using essential oils in aromatherapy, household products, lifestyle and cooking. The book begins by telling us about the healing power of plants and about the science of how scents impact our lives and how they effect the brain, memories and emotions. Next the author going into greater detail on the top 20 more popular and well known essential oils. We learn of their many uses and applications, cautions to undertake when using them, recipes, medicinal powers and read personal ancedotes and memories of the author's.
The books then going on to describe ways that essential oils can be used for everything from improving sleep to slimming down and cleaning the oven to flavoring muffins!

This is a great book that I'll refer to often. It made me want to go buy a good essential oil kit and get started on my own creations.

#TheHealingPowerOfEssentialOils #netgalley

[Witch-at-Heart]

Very comprehensive book on essential oils and their history. I really enjoyed the history and the recipes. Great book for anyone interested in essential oils. I received this book from NetGalley for an honest review.

[Sharon Naylor Toris]

So informative! The author did a great job of taking a multi-faceted concept and making it accessible to readers of any knowledge level. I found my own experience with essential oils revved up by this book, encouraging me to try out some of the recipes here, and Orey has a nice voice as our guide through this topic. Well done, very engaging. Will be using this info throughout the holiday season and beyond.

[Kerrie Hatcher]

Healing Powers of Essential Oils is a well-researched book to use if you are just beginning to use essential oils, or if you need a reference book to check on the use of a particular oil.
Included are the author’s top oil picks for health and healing. She tells a little about each oil’s roots, so
to speak, and how it can be used independently or in conjunction with other oils. The author includes recipes to enhance food flavors, to use in medical situations, and to use in environmentally-friendly cases instead of using chemicals.
I was impressed with the amount of information contained in Healing Powers of Essential Oils.
Even the essential oil skeptic can glean useful information from this book.
I received an advanced copy of this book. The opinions are my own. Thank you #NetGalley and #TheHealingPowersofEssentialOils for this ARC.

[Annie]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Healing Powers of Essential Oils is one of a series of 'Healing Powers' books by Cal Orey. Due out 31st Dec 2019 from Kensington, it's 336 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

This is an accessible and attractive tutorial guide for sourcing and using essential oils. The introduction and first section of the book covers materials, sourcing, quality standards, and a little bit on scents and how they can affect mood and perception. There's also a timeline with some interesting history and how the essential oils we use today came down to us and how they were used historically.

There's an herbal compendium with entries for 20 of the most useful and popular essential oils. Each of the entries includes the botanical (Latin) name as well as some uses and interesting info about each one as well as a recipe (edible or non-edible) to try.

The next four chapters contain specific recipes for everything from skincare to home remedies to culinary uses. The compendium also includes links and materials lists for further investigation as well as a bibliography, recipe suggestions, and other info.

The photography is mostly from stock sources, but is clear and attractively presented.

Well done and useful guide. It would make a nice gift or addition to the home library of an enthusiastic gardener or aromatherapy fan.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

[Karen]

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher and NetGalley. I am a huge essential oils fanatic. I diffuse lavender every night which helps me sleep and calm my mind. I enjoyed this book and liked how to included the top 20 essential oils. I would have liked more information about mixing oils. This book would be great for someone new to using essential oils. It would also be a great gift for this holiday season.

[Lora Milton]

It's encouraging that the Foreword of the book was written by someone with a Ph.D in Biological Science. I could warm up to this idea of essential oils having healing properties.

I just finished reading a book on essential oils that warns against ingesting them, so I was a little surprised to see an emphasis on ingestion and using them in recipes! The tone of the author's writing struck me as a little new age and trying too hard to convince, but the information was good. As much as I love the scent of Lavender, I have no interest in eating it, considering I don't even like Parma Violets, but I found the information on olfactory sense and how it affects the mind and body of interest.

The second chapter is about the history of essential oils, or at least starts out that way. It gives more of a time line than a comprehensive history and delves into usage and cautions by the end. The book as a whole is a little scattered and non-linear in relation to most non-fiction books and often goes into the autobiographical before getting to more general information.

The weight loss chapter had an interesting concept about scents diverting us from eating fattening foods which bears some personal research. I did wish the author would quit going on about the Mediterranean diet and giving us health food recipes, as I didn't choose this book for food or lifestyle advice, just to learn more about essential oils. The idea of using cinnamon or ginger oils in a recipe where you could use the actual spice didn't sit well.

There was a long medical uses segment which I will refer back to and try as needed. It's mostly for things like colds and skin ailments, what you would expect to treat with this medium. This flowed neatly into Aromatherapy and Spa treatments, followed by a chapter on scenting cosmetics with some recipes that bear testing.

Next is a chapter called 27 Essential Oils for a Healthy Household, but there is no list of these 27 oils. There is, however, some very interesting ideas for scented household cleaning products made with things like baking soda rather than harsh chemicals.

The book goes over trends, making scented candles, and to my alarm, a chapter on using oils on babies and cats which were strictly warned against in other books on the subject and this makes me very uncomfortable.

Then it wraps up with food recipes that I won't be trying. As I said, I'd rather use the spices than a concentrated oil. Resources for obtaining oils are provided, but all American.

Overall the book had some very interesting information, but it wasn't organised as well as it could be and the safety of using oils in food, on babies and on cats is something I feel is just wrong here.

[Jane Dennish]

My absolute favorite scent in the whole wide world is lavender. I love that it is featured on the cover of this book and that there is a whole chapter devoted to it in this book.

I have friends who use essential oils and swear by them when people get sick or for different ailments. I never really looked into the specifics of the oils other than knowing I love lavender and the scent helps with stress and anxiety. I also love when I get a massage and she incorporates lavender and eucalyptus into it.

What I like about this book is how it is broken up. You could read it easily in one sitting or you can use it as a reference guide as needed. It first goes over essential oils as a whole and how they are beneficial. Then, my favorite part of the book devotes a chapter each to 20 different essential oils. It shows you how you can use it, the benefits, what it can aid in and if you can use it in cooking. I found this section of the book to be super helpful, especially for someone like me who has no clue, but would like to start using them!

Thanks so much to @citadel and @kensingtonbooks for the #gifted copy! This book is super useful and I am so glad I have it in my collection now to reference!

[Shannan Harper]

I had high hopes for this book, but as I read the pages, I saw that it wouldn't be the case. I dabble in essential oils myself, and personally, I'd take the advice in this book more seriously had the author been a certified aromatherapist, someone who has actually studied the saftey of essential oils. Nor would I take the advice of someone that would tell you that it is ok to ingest essential oils. I don't care what anyone tries to tell you, ingestion should only be done under the care of a certified aromatherapist. Although the author does mention diluting in a carrier oil, there are other things in the book that feel unsafe. Theres no way I'd feel comfortable with taking any of the advice in this book

[Rachelle]

The Healing Powers of Essential Oils... an amazing guide for beginners into the world of essential oils.
Suggestions are provided on how to use each, what the oil blends well with, and benefits into continued use of each oil. A timeline and history was a surprise for each element, and provides a more comprehensive glimpse into various professions and personal usages of these distilled essences. Last 25% is food recipes including essential oils.

[Jozef Syndicate]

The Healing Powers of Essential Oils by Cal Orey adds to the beginner's knowledge of essential oil uses, accessibility, and viability for personal use and homeopathic remedies. The book provides valuable, easy to understand passages to explore the most useful oils and those that are readily available. Good resource.

[Alexandra]

A selection of different uses for the oils. Get an introduction to some oils. From health (bruises, burns, etc) to beauty, home, and other uses. Some information placed with how to make different stuff.

[Andrea]

Lots of great information on essential oils and uses. As a beginner, I am trying to learn as much as I can and mostly just diffuse a few oils like lavender, peppermint, citrus. I am hesitant to do much more until I have a good handle on possible sie effects, etc. The author included some recipes and blands that seem promising. I will be checking it out from the library again.