How to Regain Your Sense of Smell With Essential Oils
Want to know how to regain your sense of smell after Covid?
This essential oils training could help you smell the roses again.
We don’t usually write about health on our Handmade Stationery website,
but when the whole world goes through a pandemic like we faced this past year,
health becomes a dominant issue.
Other Essential Oil Posts
Mom’s Gift: Classroom DIY Students Will Love to Make
Easy Handmade Seed Paper for a Mother’s Day Card
How to Create the Scent of Fall in Your Home
How to Make Scented Twine Mini Pumpkins
Plus,
the Covid virus stole my sense of taste and smell.
And in the 6 months since I was sick, I’ve gained very little of it back.
Not only can I not smell or taste certain things,
some things taste totally weird. Like watermelon.
Watermelon is a favorite summer treat for almost everyone.
This summer,
I can hardly eat it. It tastes like snow pea pods. It reminds me of going out to my Mom’s garden in early summer and picking a skinny pea pod before they fill in. I loved the taste of that freshness.
But I don’t expect to get that taste when I put a piece of red watermelon into my mouth.
Very disappointing.
So, today, we’re talking about anosmia, the loss of the sense of smell.
More specifically,
how to regain the sense of smell lost by Covid 19.
My anosmia isn’t total. Rather, it seems skewed and unreliable. Some scents I still get, while others are totally missing. Perhaps a better word for my loss would be parosmia, a “distortion of the sense of smell.”
Some I miss, and some not so much. As a rather crude example, the last time we boarded a plane, my husband said he almost gagged from the rank odor left behind from the former passenger load. I was blissfully ignorant, until he told me and I felt a little invaded. I was left with a feeling of “eww, I think I need a shower.”
According to olfactory specialists you can retrain your sense of smell.
And the theory is, if you get your smell back, you can reacquire your taste.
And do it at home with a few essential oils.
My DIL sells Young Living Essential oils, so I’m partial to that brand.
But there are several good brands, so I believe this would work with any good brand of oils.
There is a government clinical trial in process testing the abilities of the drug Budesonide, high concentration essential oils, low concentration essential oils, and a placebo to regain sense of smell loss from coronavirus.
Specifically, Covid 19.
I can’t wait to see if their findings corroborate the real life experience of the following regimen.
How to Re-train Your Sense of Smell
What you need:
You need four different essential oils from four scent categories.
- Woodsy: eucalyptus
- Citrus: lemon
- Spicy: clove
- Floral: rose or geranium. Rose is very expensive.
Other supplies:
- Cotton wool pads or perfume test strips
- Time.
How to do it:
- Place a few drops of oil on a pad or fragrance strip and wait a few minutes to let the scent develop.
- Hold the pad or fragrance strip up to your nose, about an inch away. The order in which you smell the oils does not matter.
- Relax and slowly take short gentle sniffs (10 seconds). Sniffing too quickly, too hard and too deeply is likely to result in not being able to detect anything.
- Repeat 2 or 3 more times, then rest for five minutes.
- Move on to the next smell and repeat as above.
- When you have finished, place each scent in a separate sealed bag or jar and store in the fridge or a cool place so the oil can be reused.
You might not see results immediately.
My Young Living source said,
“Anecdotal evidence from anosmia sufferers who’ve tried the technique suggests that it may take at least a week before you get a hint of any fragrance.
I haven’t begun smell training yet
but look for a conclusion to this post after I’ve tried it.
