My daughter, six years old and full of life and energy, sometimes finds it hard to settle down for the night.
“Do I have to?” she protests.
We needed a wind-down routine.
In the year B.C., (Before Children) I had the good fortune to travel to Grasse, France, the epicenter of the perfume industry, world-famous for its lavender farms.
I had the chance to tour a farm and was taken in by the sight and smell of acres and acres of lavender in bloom. I learned about lavender’s value in alleviating dozens of minor maladies, such as dermatitis, headaches, sunburn, and earaches, to name a few, (the list is long). This launched my interest in not only the visual and olfactory benefits of plants, but the health benefits that can come from harvesting their dried flowers and distilling the plants into oil.
As I tried to calm my resistant child, my mind recalled that lavender has calming and relaxing qualities thanks to the presence of linalool, the component that gives it a distinct smell and anxiety-reducing effects. Our wind-down routine, I decided, would need to include a fragrance diffuser loaded with a bottle of lavender essential oil.
The Belle Aroma® Essential Breeze® Aromatherapy Fan is the perfect tool with its quiet, undiluted diffusion, getting me the most benefit out of whatever essential oil I use in it. Its gravity-fed wicking design means I don’t have to refill it each night and the heat free diffusion makes it a safe choice for my child’s room.
I paired this strategy with one of our favorite bedtime books, Lavender’s Blue Dilly Dilly and other Nursery Rhymes, and the combination was like fairy dust.
Now, thanks to the “Lavender Dilly Wind-down Routine,” that little girl is getting to sleep each night quite nicely.
And so are her parents.
Jean Greco for The Gift of Scent