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Aromatherapy and
the Mixed Blessing
of Feminization
Ruth Barcan

DOI: 10.2752/174589314X13834112761001
Ruth Barcan is the ABSTRACT Aromatherapy is a
author of Nudity: A
Cultural Anatomy (2004),
Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Complementary and practice with several distinct lineages and
Alternative Medicine: with some uncertainty about the most
Bodies, Therapies,
Senses (2011), and
appropriate way to professionalize. The
Academic Life and historical feminization of smell and perfumes
Labour in the New means that aromatherapy is culturally
University: Hope and
Other Choices (2013).
marked as a “feminized” practice. This
ruth.barcan@sydney.edu.au feminization is a mixed blessing in relation
to aromatherapy’s attempts to advance itself
as a discipline. While for many practitioners
and clients the traditionally feminized
associations of smell, such as its connections
The Senses & Society

to emotions, memory, and the unconscious,

serve as a source of value, for others,
feminized languages and practices stand in
the way of aromatherapy’s advancement as a
scientifically validated discipline.

KEYWORDS: aromatherapy, smell, olfaction,

complementary and alternative medicine (CAM),
33

feminization
 Ruth Barcan

Aromatherapy is a branch of phytomedicine (the medical

+ use of botanical remedies) that uses essential oils (the
volatile components of aromatic plants) as its principal
therapeutic tools. It is marked by quite stark divergences in training,
emphasis, and style. These differences reflect a number of factors:
the historical development of two distinct, though communicating,
traditions in France and in England; the more recent appropriation
of aromatherapy by consumer culture, including competition with
but also entanglement in the fragrance industries; and the different
directions taken by aromatherapy over recent years in its quest for
recognition by orthodox medicine. The result of these different heri-
tages and trajectories is that aromatherapy is quite internally diverse
and occasionally divided about its future directions. This article
suggests that these divisions are not just a result of history but also
reflect an ongoing ambivalence about the strategic value of empha-
sizing qualities that are culturally marked as feminine. To argue this,
it draws on a transdisciplinary literature on smell and olfaction as well
as on interviews1 with two Australian aromatherapists carried out as
part of a larger project on the sensory dimensions of complementary
and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies (Barcan 2011).
This article describes how aromatherapy’s different styles and
explanatory paradigms are bound up in attitudes towards science,
rationality, and the esoteric in which gender plays a significant role.
On the one hand, aromatherapy revalues culturally trivialized sensory
practices, bringing to the center both fragrances and the sense of
smell itself. In so doing, it manages to recombine the separated
realms of sensuality, spirituality, and medicine, reviving religious
meanings and uses of scents but placing them within a consumerist
context in which healing and pampering are not mutually exclusive.
For this, however, it must pay a cultural price – that of being con-
sidered a “feminine” practice. As we will see, this feminization is an
ambiguous blessing for aromatherapy, which sometimes struggles
to assert its legitimacy against the “hard” sciences and sometimes
strives to be understood within them. Aromatherapy is both valued
and maligned for its connections to smell and the feminine and is
professionally divided between a quest for scientific validation and a
more radically inclusive holism.
To make this argument, I begin by surveying briefly aromatherapy’s
different lineages. I then consider its feminization within the context
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of the feminization of smell more broadly, focusing on three connota-

tive clusters: mystery and paradox; emotions and the unconscious;
and animality, seduction, and sensuality. I conclude with a discussion
of the radical holism of some aromatherapeutic discourse and the
political tensions within aromatherapy as a profession.

The Different Styles and Trajectories of Aromatherapy

The use of aromatic substances for ritual and healing is a feature of
34

many ancient civilizations. The ancient Egyptians, for example, used

 Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

the volatile oils of aromatic plants for medicine and for embalming
(Griggs 1997: 288; Buckle 2003b: 12–13). Modern aromatherapy
dates from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when
the antimicrobial properties of some essential oils were noted and
studied by a number of French physicians. For those who think of
aromatherapy as faddish or fey – the worst of New Age claptrap and
the antithesis of scientific evidence-based medicine – it may come
as a surprise to realize that modern aromatherapy was a medical
practice pioneered by scientists and physicians engaging empirically
with “country traditions of medicine and well-being” (Griggs 1997:
290). Among the first of the French scientists to take essential oils
seriously was René-Maurice Gattefossé. Gattefossé was a chemist
whose interest in essential oils arose after a laboratory accident
in which he burnt his hand and successfully treated the wound
with lavender oil. He began researching and using essential oils,
including for the treatment of wounds and the sterilization of instru-
ments in military hospitals in the First World War (Battaglia 2003: 17).
Gattefossé is credited with inventing (or at least popularizing) the
term “aromatherapy” (the title of his 1937 book).
A second major figure was the highly decorated army physician
Jean Valnet, who was to become one of the most famous advocates
of aromatherapy, renowned as “France’s voice for Natural Medicine”
(Griggs 1997: 290). Even in the era of the emergence of synthetic
drugs, France “still retained a solid attachment to phytotherapy, and
traditional plant-lore was still alive and well deep in rural France”
(ibid.: 291). Valnet’s medical training in Lyon occurred in the 1940s,
at which time the study of medicinal plants still formed part of the
curriculum (ibid.: 288). He combined this training with a knowledge
of and respect for medicinal plants born of his upbringing in rural
France, where he was influenced by his grandmother, who was the
local village midwife and who taught the inquisitive young Valnet.
Valnet was to become well known in France and elsewhere for his
brand of what he called “phyto-aromatherapy,” which combined
technical expertise with a conviction that “again and again we find
ourselves brought back to the medicine of ordinary simple folk,”
and that we are wasting many opportunities if we see this medicine
only as a last resort ([1964] 1980: 7). In this, he shared the respect
for observation and tradition that characterized the approach of
Gattefossé, who had contended that “empiricism has never unin-
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tentionally erred, for the very basis of its knowledge is experience

frequently repeated over a long period of time” ([1937] 1993: 32).
Rather than aromatherapy having to prove its worth to science, it
was, rather, up to science to discover how and why “volatile es-
sences have healed people since the dawn of time” (Gattefossé
[1937] 1993: 32).
Valnet’s 1964 book L’Aromathérapie (published in English
in 1980 as The Practice of Aromatherapy) is usually considered
35

the first “medical” book on aromatherapy. It includes a functional

 Ruth Barcan

account of essences – classifying them according to their principal

properties (e.g. analgesic, antibacterial, antifungal, antispasmodic,
blood-thinning, calmative, carminative, diuretic, emmenagogues,
expectorants, parasiticides, revulsive) – as well as a detailed study of
a number of individual essences. It advocates a wide variety of ways
of using essential oils, many of them quite remote from the oil burn-
ers that crowd New Age shops: tinctures, suppositories, ointments,
internal use, fumigation, disinfectant, lotions, decoctions, syrups,
and so on. Although it was a medical text aimed at physicians, Valnet
claimed that it was also “intended above all for the general public”
([1964] 1980: 10, original emphasis); he wanted it to be “one of those
direct links between modern knowledge and the experience of the
past” (ibid.: 7).
The popularity of aromatherapy in France peaked in the late
1980s, at which time aromatherapy suffered from its own success.
As patient demand for herbal medicine, including aromatherapy, con-
tinued to grow, many doctors undertook rapid training courses. As a
consequence, they were often ill-trained in the new techniques their
patients desired but they nonetheless prescribed herbal remedies
and essential oils aplenty, much to the horror of their more qualified
confreres (Griggs 1997: 298). In the end, though, aromatherapy’s
success was too economically costly. The French Ministry of Health,
faced with an already escalating health budget, now found itself
responsible for highly expensive essential oils – often far more costly
than synthetic drugs (ibid.: 298). Herbal medicines were dropped
from the national health scheme and almost overnight, “the dream
of a medical revolution collapsed” (ibid.: 299): doctors’ rooms that
had been full of patients requesting herbal medicines were emptied
after patients realized they would have to foot the bill themselves;
pharmacists turned back to orthodox formulations; and attendance
at training schools dropped (ibid.: 299).
Nonetheless, medical aromatherapy in the French style contin-
ues to be practiced in France and in the French-speaking parts of
Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada, where it is “perceived as a medi-
cal and pharmaceutical approach to diseases and health” (Pénöel
2002). Some physicians continue to research and practice phyto-
therapy and aromatherapy. For example, one of Valnet’s students,
physician Paul Belaiche, contributed to the expansion of the profes-
sion by developing training courses in aromatherapy for doctors
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at the University of Paris. According to Barbara Griggs’s account,

Belaiche wanted to move aromatherapy away from Valnet’s “folk-
loric” approach, towards a “new, updated, scientifically respectable
phytotherapy” (1997: 295). Belaiche was Chief of the Phytotherapy
Department at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris for
many years, and his research into the antimicrobial properties of
melaleuca (tea tree) oil has been influential.
The English approach to aromatherapy is very different from this
36

French medical tradition, though it arose from it. Its core technique is
 Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

a style of gentle touch known as MR massage, which uses aromatic

oils in low concentrations in the massage oil (Webb 2003: 112). This
lineage is usually traced to the French (Austrian-born) biochemist
Marguerite Maury, who was herself influenced by Valnet. Maury
trained as a nurse and researched essential oils, in conjunction with
her husband, a homeopathic physician. She was responsible for
the spread of aromatherapy to Britain in the 1960s, and its uptake
in the beauty industry and then in therapeutic contexts, especially
nursing. Maury’s work focused on the effects of essential oils on
the skin. She forged the link between aromatherapy and the beauty
industry (Battaglia 2003: 19). Her book Le Capital “Jeunesse” (1961)
(published in English as The Secret of Life and Youth (1964)) focused
on the cosmetic benefits of aromatherapy, in particular the role that
essential oils could play in helping people to resist the “threat” of
aging, which she conceived as “Enemy No. 1 of our existence”
(1964: 13). Maury’s conception of youth and beauty straddled the
cosmetic, the psychological, and the medical. She conceived of
youthfulness as emanating from a physical resilience born in part
of mental flexibility and freedom. She pioneered two techniques
that have become staples of the English tradition: the “individual
prescription” (a blend of several oils made up after consultation with
the patient) and the use of massage – a practice that arose in part
because, as a nurse rather than a doctor, she was not licensed to
prescribe essential oils for internal use. These laws continue in many
countries today (e.g. the USA) and are one factor behind the uptake
of Maury’s style of aromatherapy in contemporary nursing. This style,
which the Australian aromatherapist Salvatore Battaglia calls holistic
aromatherapy, was further developed by one of the few male British
aromatherapists, Robert Tisserand, whose 1977 book The Art of
Aromatherapy was the first book on aromatherapy in English and the
first to leave the purely medical domain and to consider the esoteric
dimensions of the oils. Tisserand played a role in pushing British
aromatherapy away from Maury’s cosmetic work and towards more
clinical applications, especially in nursing (Bensouilah 2005: 136).
But the beauty therapy dimensions of her work have also continued,
via the work of three of her pupils: Daniele Ryman, Micheline Arcier,
and Eve Taylor (ibid.: 135).
In a number of countries, aromatherapy is arguably gaining
ground as an adjunctive clinical practice, especially in nursing. In
The Senses & Society

that context, it is often used in palliative or cancer care, in childbirth,

and in care of the elderly, where it may be administered by carers in
nursing homes under a program developed by an aromatherapist.
In the UK, nurses are insured by the Royal College of Nursing to
use essential oils (Buckle 2003a). In the USA, where therapeutic
massage is recognized in clinical settings but not as tightly linked
to aromatherapy as it is in the UK, clinical uses of aromatherapy are
less common and most likely to be welcomed only where their eco-
37

nomic benefits (e.g. through medication reduction) can be proven

 Ruth Barcan

(Buckle 2003: 43). It is probably fair, then, to say that aromatherapy

has made significant inroads into a number of mainstream medical
contexts, but that its fortunes are somewhat mixed.2
Aromatherapy is perhaps better known because of the inroads
it has made into the marketplace, initially through the workings of
the New Age and later as an aspect of the broader contemporary
commodification of smell. Aromatherapy thrives in consumer culture,
where the beauty industry and the New Age have provided vehicles
for the translation of its folk medical and herbalist principles into a re-
ceptive popular culture. Aromatherapy (and pseudo-aromatherapy)
products have proliferated, and amateur modes of practice – oil
burners at home or in the office – have grown. Aromatherapy is, in
fact, one of the CAM therapies most amenable to commodification
and most easily (though not necessarily safely) picked up by ama-
teurs and hobbyists. Essential oils (or their synthetic imitations) and
associated paraphernalia such as oil burners are now very visible
commodities. In that guise, aromatherapy has become the province
of battalions of usually female consumers, and has also spawned an
ersatz industry of synthetic fragrance oils, which are much cheaper
and which have no therapeutic properties, though they may be
“psycho-physiologically active” (Damian and Damian 2006: 157).
Aromatherapy’s contemporary complexity lies in the relations
between its differing styles, traditions, and trajectories. In 1991, aro-
matherapist Anna Gwilt considered there to be four different types of
aromatherapy – clinical, stress management, beauty treatments, and
the use of smells to influence mood. These strands are so different
that she wondered whether they would evolve into “fundamentally
dissimilar activities” (1991: 19). What complicates the issue is that
the “divisions are not [necessarily] obvious to the public” ([ibid.: 19,
my interpolation). Even if they were, the dynamism of consumer
culture – its drive to proliferate and hybridize commodities and prac-
tices – means that an already complex situation does not remain
static. The various strands of aromatherapy pull in different direc-
tions. Some forces encourage them to differentiate themselves from
each other, while others lead them to intersect, overlap, or blur into
each other. So, while it is indubitable that medical aromatherapy and
what Jane Buckle calls “aesthetic aromatherapy” are “very distinct”
(2003b: 11), there are nonetheless ways in which the marketplace
and the clinic can blur into each other. To give one example, in
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Australia, the eminent aromatherapist Salvatore Battaglia straddles

the two worlds of clinical aromatherapy (where he is known as a
practitioner, trainer, and author of a widely used aromatherapy text-
book) and the marketplace (where he is the founder and manager of
an aromatherapy business, The Perfect Potion, that has grown from
a single store to a chain).
38
 Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

Aromatherapy as a Feminized Practice

On a quite straightforward level, aromatherapy is feminized in that
the majority of its clients and practitioners are women. In this, it rep-
resents a strong case of the condition of alternative therapies more
broadly, where young-to-middle-aged women predominate both as
clients and practitioners (Ruggie 2004: 46). This female centered-
ness holds for both aesthetic and therapeutic aromatherapy, where
clients, usually women, enjoy an aromatherapy treatment from a
beautician or masseur, and for more clinical applications, such as
its use by nurses in a range of caring contexts, including hospitals
and nursing homes. Aromatherapy massage is a practice of inti-
mate care, often for vulnerable patients like the elderly, the dying, or
women in labor.
Aromatherapy’s widespread uptake in nursing, midwifery, and
palliative care is congruent with the historical gendering of aromas
and indeed olfaction itself. In the late nineteenth century, perfume
and olfaction became feminized in the West (Classen et al. 1994:
84). Since this period, an “olfactory divide of the sexes” (ibid.: 83)
has characterized perfumes (floral for women, pungent for men).
Aromatherapy texts may pick up on such gender codes, whether
implicitly or explicitly. Philippe Mailhebiau, for example, describes
Petitgrain Bigarade (an oil produced from the leaves of the bitter
orange) as “a lunar, feminine essence … like a middle-aged woman”
(1995: 135), while rosemary is a “symbol of the perfect person,
the hero or the demi-god who saves humanity from the hell of its
downward slide” (ibid.: 107). While cinnamon might be a “bully,
sometimes pleasant, sometimes vulgar” (ibid.: 217), or cedarwood
might impart some of its strength and majesty to the patient, other
oils are presented in more feminine terms – as comforters, nurturers,
pamperers, or companions:

Rose oil has also been used as a companion for the dying,
since it reduces fear and provides wisdom for people who
journey to the other side. Rose’s comforts suggest that every-
thing is as it should be – small earthly events serve something
higher. (Fischer-Rizzi 1990: 156)

The gendered meanings and experiences of smell influence clients

in terms of their odor preferences and their perceptions of the effec-
The Senses & Society

tiveness of particular essential oils. Battaglia described how many

male clients, uneasy with the subtlety of more delicate essences
and/or their association with femininity, prefer the more “medicinal”
smells:

I’ve noticed this with guys in particular who want to have more
muscular-skeletal treatment. The more herbaceous, the more
wintergreeny, the smell- they’ll go “Oh, that smells good.”
39

So there would be a perception because it has that strong

 Ruth Barcan

medicinal smell that the massage oil that you are using is going
to do some good.

If these seem like clichéd responses, it is worth considering the

fragrance chemist Luca Turin’s assertion that cultural smell habits are
very long lasting (2006: 47).
But aromatherapy is also feminized more comprehensively in that
the sense of smell itself is classically feminized. Constance Classen
et al., pioneers in the cultural analysis of smell, consider smell one of
the most feminized of the senses and, relatedly, “probably the most
undervalued sense in the modern West” (1994: 2–3). Philosophical,
literary, and cultural analyses tend to emphasize its personal, vis-
ceral, and emotional dimensions, attributes which may help explain
why many key thinkers in the West – Aristotle, Darwin, Freud, Kant,
Hegel, among others – tended to ignore, underestimate, or devalue
smell, despite its long history of sacred and ritual uses and mean-
ings, and its often positive, though feminized, associations with
eroticism, romance, and luxury. Since olfaction plays a major role in
animal life, including in “detection and discrimination of conspecifics,
mates, mothers, home, predators, prey, and food” (Wilson and
Stevenson 2006: 4), smell has frequently been considered a lesser
or lower sense, associated with animality.
Most sociocultural studies of smell focus on absence, limitations,
or mysteries. Academic studies often begin with a discussion of
its absence from social theory (e.g. from sociology, philosophy,
geography) (e.g. Synnott 1993: 183; Rodaway 1994: 61). There is,
it is claimed, no aesthetics of smell in Western philosophy (Synnott
1993: 185), nor have its cognitive possibilities often been considered
(Howes 2002: 67). In medicine, the role of smell has been greatly
reduced, both in diagnosis (e.g. the diagnostic sniffing of urine,
sweat, or breath) and in treatment (e.g. the prescription of aromatics
in a variety of forms, from fumigation to sweet-smelling flowers,
clothes, and bedding; Palmer 1993: 66). This decline is linked not
only to the decline of miasmatic and humoral theories of disease, but
more broadly to the “silencing” of smell in modernity (Classen et al.
1994: 4). Classen et al. claim that the curative and religious powers
of smells had by and large disappeared by the nineteenth century –
scents had moved away from “the realms of religion and medicine
into those of sentiment and sensuality” (ibid.: 6–7).
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Terms like “sentiment” and “sensuality” again alert us to the gen-

dered nature of smell and remind us that the anxiety provoked by the
formlessness, invisibility, and indefinability of smells (Howes 1991:
140) is linked to its metaphorical feminization. Indeed, a summary of
the commonly recounted qualities of odors or olfaction reads like a
textbook checklist of qualities imagined in the mainstream Western
philosophical tradition as “feminine.” Smell is, supposedly: primal,
bodily, invisible, subjective, dispensable, seductive, hard to classify,
40

formless, and intractable to rationality. It is linked to the emotions,

 Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

sex, the unconscious, animality, desire, instinct, childhood, and to

transitory rather than permanent pleasures. Smell is “speechless”
and “continuous”: it cannot be broken down into component parts
except by training (Howes 1991: 140). The philosopher Immanuel
Kant considered it the “most ungrateful” of the senses, unworthy of
cultivation or refinement ([1798] 2006: 50).
Among this welter of feminized attributes, I will focus on three
clusters – mystery; emotions and the unconscious; and animality,
seduction, and sensuality – in order to tease out their relevance to
aromatherapy’s ways of understanding and promoting itself.

Smell as the “Mysterious” Sense

As noted earlier, the idea of smell as a problem, paradox, or mystery
is a recurring trope, found not only in popular culture, but also in aca-
demic writing. The paradoxical nature of smell is a frequent starting
point in cultural analysis. Jim Drobnick, for example, opens the Smell
Culture Reader with the observation that “the sense of smell is mired
in paradox” (2006: 1), and John Trueman’s popular study of scent
opens in a similar way. Our sense of smell is not good, he says, and
yet we cannot ever block it off (as we can with sight or sound) as we
need to breathe. We have only a “rudimentary” ability to smell, yet we
have “large, protruding noses” (1975: 7). And despite the limitations
on our sense of smell, our emotional response to smell is “acutely
sensitive” (ibid.: 12).
This idea of the mystery or paradox of olfaction permeates scien-
tific writing too. Smell is frequently characterized as “the last mystery
of the senses” (Burr 2003) – indeed, a double mystery since “both
sides of the fragrance equation” – olfaction and perfumes – have
their secrets (Battaglia 1998: 3). On the olfaction side, there is,
it seems, still considerable scientific uncertainty about how smell
actually works. There is agreement that learning, experience, and
expectancy have a large role to play in the perception of smells.
Smell is not “an intrinsic property of a molecule” but a question
of “molecular recognition” (Turin 2006: 82). The brain synthesizes
component molecules into a perceived whole and compares that
to previously learned patterns (Wilson and Stevenson 2006: 3).
But there is still some conflict between different models of how the
olfactory receptors actually work. The current orthodoxy is a shape
theory – scents are recognized according to their molecular shape
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– but in 1996 a well-publicized and controversial challenge to this

theory was mounted by the biophysicist and fragrance chemist Luca
Turin, in the form of a refashioned vibrational theory.3
The scientific understanding of olfaction is also hampered by the
“mysterious” nature of odors themselves. Humans can discriminate
around 10,000 different odors (Wilson and Stevenson 2006: 6), but
odors are resistant to perceptual analysis. As Wilson and Stevenson
explain, while we can visually examine a word like “coffee” and break
41

it down into its component parts, “we have virtually no access to the
 Ruth Barcan

approximately six hundred different volatile components that make up

the perceptual odor object coffee” (ibid.: 6). The masculinist analytical
bias of Western thought construes this resistance to segmentation
as a problem rather than a plenitude. So odors have repeatedly been
characterized in terms of lack, as in the anthropologist Alfred Gell’s
description of smell as “distinguished by formlessness, indefinability
and lack of clear articulation” (1977: 27). Lack of articulation includes
both the difficulty of rational classification (Howes 1991: 133) and
the difficulty of finding a non-impressionistic language to describe
smells. We are, says Trueman, “singularly short of words with which
we can describe scents meaningfully to one another” (1975: 12). It is
easier to recognize a smell than to name or describe it (Lawless and
Engen 1977: 52). Odors can be described only by analogy, and we
mostly name them according to their physical source (Wilson and
Stevenson 2006: 7) (e.g. yeasty, minty, smoky). Even those people
with an acutely trained sense of smell, such as professional wine
tasters or parfumiers, must work within the particular taxonomies
and vocabularies set out for them by their profession, which enable
them to perceive subtleties, and to draw up a shared picture with
others, but which remain opaque to outsiders. Scientific taxonomies
of smell are also limited, as evidenced by the one proposed by
Linnaeus in 1756 – aromatic; fragrant; ambrosial (musky); alliaceous
(garlicky); hircine (goaty); foul; nauseating – or the surprisingly similar
one published in 1970 by the chemist John Amoore (ethereal; floral;
musty; pepperminty; camphoraceous; pungent; putrid) (Rodaway
1994: 66). Apart from being subjective, Linnaeus’s taxonomy is
based on a range of principles: some terms refer to sources; others
are adjectival; others describe the effects of odors. In recent years,
some olfaction and taste researchers, especially in applied fields like
perfumery and food technology, have developed detailed descriptive
terms and databanks of odor descriptors in order to try and counter
the linguistic subjectivism that plagues olfaction research (Köster
2002: 35).
As Rodaway points out, it is not just a matter of vocabulary but
also of grammar (1994: 65). Smells are not “neatly defined objects,”
but “experiences of intensities,” like joy or pain (ibid.). Odor percep-
tion is mediated by a whole host of personal, cultural, and physi-
ological factors (including, it has been claimed, which nostril one is
breathing through (Walter et al., quoted in Buckle 2003b: 30). So it is
The Senses & Society

difficult to develop the types of “objective” taxonomy or vocabulary

prized within science.
The classically feminized attributes that recur in discussions of
smell – such as formlessness, mystery, and intractability to language
– are not valued in science, but they are often popularly cherished.
Indeed, the perceived mysteriousness of the olfactory process and
of smells is one of the reasons for the nostalgia or exoticism of
some aromatherapy discourse, which so annoys critics of alternative
42

medicine and frustrates more scientifically minded aromatherapists.4

 Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

But there is no doubt that for many Western consumers, the exotic
origins of oils and the invisible and seemingly mysterious nature
of olfaction can be pleasurable. The act of concocting one’s own
personal blend of aromatics from a host of identical little bottles
on the shelf may call up fantasies of medieval apothecaries, or
alchemists, or Ancient Egyptian perfumers, depending on your bent.
As the aromatherapy I am describing is predominantly a Western
practice, the nostalgic fantasies in play in such encounters often
have an orientalist bent. Still, it is interesting to note that globaliza-
tion adds twists and turns to exotic trajectories. As aromatherapy
becomes more common in Japan, for example, one of the sources
of its appeal is that it brings with it a sense of “European exoticism”
(“L’aromathérapie au Japon” 2007: 96).
For aromatherapists, the imaginative, individual, and intersubjec-
tive dimensions of experiences of smell do not constitute a problem.
Aromatherapist Catherine Bird agrees with the scientists that even
the seemingly neutral science of the chemistry of essential oils is
much less objective than it seems, but she does not seek to “solve”
this non-problem. She describes being in an aromatherapy class
where the students were asked to mix an identical blend using the
same number of drops of several specified essential oils:

And then we all passed them around and smelled everybody’s

and they all smelled different. There is an aspect to it that you
can’t measure. And if you try to measure it, you’re going to kill
it. That’s how I see it.

Fragrance chemists would explain such phenomena in terms of

the “bugbear” (Turin 2006: 140) of purity.5 But for many aroma-
therapists, the odors of essential oils cannot be completely reduced
to an objective, repeatable analysis of chemical constituents. The
chemistry of aromas and of olfaction is not, they claim, so pure.
For them, aromas cannot be disentangled from those who prepare
them, who are understood, in the energetic model of the body within
which many aromatherapists work, as introducing something of
themselves into the blend. The mental and emotional state of the
practitioner, her intention, and her degree of focus and presence in
any therapeutic interaction – in New Age parlance, her “energy” – is
a crucial, indeed defining, part of the chemistry: “You can’t measure
The Senses & Society

that,” says Catherine. “And that’s where real healing comes into it.”
Moreover, the patient also affects the oils’ actions. Plant medicines,
including essential oils, are understood to have “differing psycho-
logical and physiological effects depending on the requirement of
the host” (Buckle 2002: 88) – that is, their therapeutic effects are
affected by the “terrain” of the patient (Buckle 2003b: 7). This, then,
is a thoroughly intercorporeal conception of how essential oils work,
remote from any mechanistic accounts of cause and effect.
43
 Ruth Barcan

Emotions and the Unconscious

A second cluster of feminized associations – those between smell,
emotions, and the unconscious – likewise permeates both scientific
and popular accounts and is valued within aromatherapeutic dis-
course. Smell is understood as the “hidden” sense (Köster 2002:
37). It is well known that olfaction can have instant and often power-
ful effects, which may often be unconscious (ibid.: 31, 37). The
initial processes of olfactory reception are not “behaviourally or
consciously accessible” (Wilson and Stevenson 2006: 9). Indeed,
the brain can detect some smells subliminally (Lorig et al. 1990) or
even while we are asleep (Badia et al. 1990). This is one reason smell
often appears in both philosophy and popular culture as a danger-
ous, “animal” sense – able to influence us without our knowledge.
Today, the potential of smells to influence us unseen is the subject
of much research, especially in the new field of aromachology, the
science of the effects of odor on behavior, with particular emphasis
on practical and commercial applications.
Equally well known are too smell’s profound links to the emotions,
which are enabled by the connections between the olfactory neurons
and the limbic system. The receptors in the olfactory bulb are extremely
sensitive, frequently renewed, and easily fatigued (Buckle 2003b:
29). They connect directly not only with the hippocampus, where
memories are formed, but also with the amygdala, where emotions
are processed (Broughan 2002: 92). This gives smells their famous
“penetrating power and emotional impact” (Classen 1993: 105).
Smell’s ability to bypass cognition and its “resistance to abstrac-
tion” (Le Guérer 2002: 11) are obvious reasons for its typical denigra-
tion within philosophy and psychoanalysis. A few philosophers and
psychoanalysts have, however, attempted to rehabilitate the sense
of smell, valorizing it as a form of “‘non-rational’ intelligence” (ibid.),
which might manifest positively as the ability to “sniff out” something
subtle but true in a person, place or situation (ibid.). Nietzsche, for
example, considered the (supposedly) animal nature of smell to be
one of its surest virtues. For Nietzsche was one of the few Western
philosophers to value smell and its connection to essences and to
animal instincts.6 In his last, autobiographical, work, Ecce Homo
([1967] 1989), he linked smell to intuitive awareness, claiming for it
the ability to “read people’s hearts and souls and to sniff out falsity
and illusion” (Le Guérer 2002: 6). “My genius is in my nostrils,” he
The Senses & Society

declared ([1967] 1989: 326). For Nietzsche, then, as for a very small
pool of post-Enlightenment philosophers (Le Guérer 2002: 7), the
supposed sensualism of smell was one of its virtues. The animal
nature of smell did not, as many claimed, make it more important to
sensory pleasure than to knowledge (2002: 4). Rather, its ability to
sidestep language was a boon to true understanding (ibid.: 6).
Certainly, this is how it is understood in aromatherapy, where
smell’s ability to get under the rational radar and to tap directly
44

into emotions, memory, and the body is a valued resource – one

 Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

that makes the therapy particularly helpful in work with dementia

patients, psychiatric patients, the intellectually disabled, and even
animals (Catherine, the aromatherapist cited above, works primarily
with horses, and valued horses’ “honest” responses to smell).7 Lest
this list of potential patients look too much like a simple repetition
of smell’s role as “the sense of madness and savagery” (Classen et
al. 1994: 3–4), it is crucial to note that aromatherapists value smell’s
ability to bypass cognition and language in all clients, especially
among those skilled at performing for the therapist or using their ra-
tional mind to avoid dealing with emotions. Aromatherapists, like all
CAM practitioners, consider emotions to be “active healing forces”
(Lee-Treweek 2006: 343), and use the oils, often in combination with
therapeutic touch, as catalysts for emotional release, construed as
intrinsically healing.

Smell as the Animal Sense

A third cluster associates smell with animality, sensuality, and se-
duction. Popular books on smell typically open with examples of
animals’ olfactory prowess: the sheepdog with a sense of smell a
million times more acute than that of humans; the male butterfly that
can detect the scent of a female several miles away at a dilution of
less than one ten-thousandth of a milligram; the fox that can not only
detect the scent of another fox but can tell what it last ate (Trueman
1975: 6–7). Compared to such examples, humans’ sense of smell
seems limited, and so it has often been subtly construed as less
centrally tied to humanness than, say, vision.
Certainly, Freud ([1930] 1973) understood the evolution of the
upright posture in humans, whereby the nose became more distant
from the anus, as a catalyst for the repression of smell and its demo-
tion to one of the lower senses, accompanied by the relegation to
the ranks of the uncivilized of those cultures that centralized smell
(cf. Classen et al. 1994: 91). As vision began to gain ascendance
as the “pre-eminent sense of reason and civilization,” people who
emphasized the importance of smell were “judged to be either insuf-
ficiently evolved savages, degenerate proletariat, or else aberrations:
perverts, lunatics or idiots” (Classen et al. 1994: 4). Those who
valued smell, or were particularly susceptible to its effects, were
feminized by association. In the Freudian tradition, “acute olfactory
sensitivity came to be viewed as an archaic and even pernicious
The Senses & Society

trait” (Le Guérer 2002: 9). The sexologist Havelock Ellis, for ex-
ample, considered that many neurasthenic people were “peculiarly
susceptible to olfactory influences” (1914: 72). Proof of this was the
fact that “a number of eminent poets and novelists – especially, it
would appear, in France” were sensitive to smell (ibid.: 75). Though
this suspicion of nervy, artistic, French-type people seems quaint
nowadays, the fragrance chemist Luca Turin considers that in the
late 1980s and to some extent even now taking perfume seriously as
45

an art form indicated “effete tendencies” (2006: 167).

 Ruth Barcan

Modern people often associate not just acuity of smell but also
the production of smells with animality. Trueman describes human
evolution as the progressive loss of “our original strong animal
odour” (1975: 7), citing anthropologist Louis Leakey’s theory that
humans originally produced a foul-smelling odor that helped protect
them from predators. The idea of smell as a primal, sexual, animal
sense persists in differently gendered forms. On the one hand, there
is the pheromone, popularly imagined (and purchasable) as an aid to
masculine seduction. Perfumes, on the other hand, represent a more
domesticated, more feminized, investment in the idea of smell’s
ability to work beneath the radar of rational control as an instrument
of seduction.
As a plant-based practice, aromatherapy almost entirely repudi-
ates the use of the animal-derived perfumes (such as musk or civet)
that medieval people so prized, and has little connotative connection
with the idea of the animality of smell. It does, however, openly
embrace the sensual. While there may be nothing too sensual about
some of the French-style medical applications – gargling with a
tincture of ginger to reduce throat inflammation or using a sage
suppository to regulate menstruation – English-style aromatherapy
in the therapist’s rooms, the home bathroom, or the bedroom is a
rather different affair. Ritual elements like the lighting of a candle, the
blending of aromatic potions from small dark bottles, the selection
of gentle music, and the dimming of lights are multi-sensory cues
that prepare the scene. Most aromatherapy treatments involve mas-
sage, and hence the pleasures of touch, smell, sound, and vision
intertwine. But the oils are aromatherapy’s sensory heart. Open any
bottle and you are instantly hit by a highly concentrated smell – of
lime, lavender, orange, rose, patchouli. To those who are habitual
sniffers of such essences, these names alone no doubt conjure a
synesthetic web of colors, textures, and associations – the musty
comfort of patchouli, the stridency of lemongrass, the cheerfulness
of lemon and lime, the medicinal potency of thyme, the slightly sickly
sweetness of rose geranium.
For modern consumers, such pleasures are enhanced by the
rarity of deliberate, prolonged, pleasurable olfactory encounters in
modern urban life and the lack of attention paid to olfactory tra-
ditions.8 Owing to the devaluing or ignoring of smell by Western
thinkers, there is, Synnott contends, “no aesthetics of smell in the
The Senses & Society

Western [philosophical] tradition” (1993: 185). No doubt this chance

to indulge in smells and play at potions is one of the things that
contemporary consumers value in aromatherapy.
Indeed, aromatherapy elevates such sensory pleasures, connect-
ing them back to ancient ritual and healing uses of smell, many of
which were repressed or marginalized as Western culture evolved.
Though incense and the sacramental use of aromatic oils, for exam-
ple, have persisted in some Christian ritual (Catholic, “high” Anglican,
46

Greek and Russian orthodoxy), by and large smell is devalued in

 Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

Christianity, especially, but not only, in the Protestant tradition. Even

the early Church Fathers of the second century banned perfumes
and roses because of their idolatrous and sensuous tendencies
(Classen 1993: 19). Today, the intertwined forces of consumerism
and the New Age have produced a cohort of people who are keen
to embrace the spiritual without renouncing the sensual pleasures
that consumerism has taught them to enjoy on a daily basis. For
such a cohort, spirituality entails the “development” of the self rather
than its restraint, and pleasure and the sacred often pull together.
Aromatherapy, at once sensual, sacred, and commodified, fits the
bill.
Thus, the “hedonic” drives of consumer culture (Turner 1996: 3)
provide a cultural climate in which sensory pleasure can be valued
both for its own sake and as a pathway to knowledge. For aro-
matherapists, aromatherapy should be valued as an opportunity
to revive (or (re)invent) the ritual and sacred uses and meanings of
smell and to give therapeutic weight to many of smell’s otherwise
denigrated properties, including its power, subtlety, and connec-
tion to emotion and memory. A practice derided by its critics as a
sensual consumerist indulgence is understood by its advocates as
a pathway to higher awareness, one in which the “lowly” sense of
smell’s ancient connections to the divine are reinvigorated and its
connections to femininity, emotions, and the unconscious revalued
as important properties.

Feminization as a Double-Edged Sword

Despite the fact that aromatherapists value many of the traditionally
feminized attributes of smell, aromatherapy must still work with the
ambiguity and paradoxes associated with the feminine. Feminization
is a source of both value and ridicule. Thus, for some, the very
term “aromatherapy” implies all that is weak, soft, inauthentic, de-
graded, or frivolous in alternative medicine. If someone wants to
ridicule alternative medicine, they may well leap to its more feminized
forms – such as angel therapy, crystal therapy, or aromatherapy as
their exemplary instances – since the cultural associations with the
feminine make the derision commonsensical. For example, when an
Australian Federal Minister for Education, himself a former president
of the Australian Medical Association, wanted to ridicule universities
for pursuing populist agendas, aromatherapy was one of his chosen
The Senses & Society

targets. In a critique that combined condemnation of the soft, the

popular, and the marketized (ironically enough, given the role played
by his government in furthering the marketization of the Australian
higher education sector), he lamented:

[Universities] pass the soul from one generation to the next,

and my concern is that – and I say to the universities – why is
it, in a country where we are bleeding in physics and chemistry
47

and biology and humanities and social science, why are we

 Ruth Barcan

running courses in golf course management, surfboard riding,

paranormal scepticism, aromatherapy? You can do make-up
application for drag queens at Swinbourne [sic] [University].
(“Interview: Dr Brendan Nelson” 2005)

This easy denigration of aromatherapy targets the English style,

which is specially feminized by dint of its gentleness and its links to
beauty practices. It also targets aromatherapy’s embrace of spiritual
and esoteric concepts. This approach is especially strong in the
USA, both as the heartland of the New Age and as subject to strict
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules prohibiting the sale of
essential oils as therapeutic or medical substances, treating them
merely as fragrances. Just as British regulations prohibiting nurses
from prescribing them for internal use pushed Marguerite Maury
towards massage, so these rules have help push US aromatherapy
towards the esoteric. Such a feminization opens it to rationalist
ridicule, but some aromatherapists value the enforced non-medical
approach. Salvatore Battaglia, for example, considers it a happy
paradox:

In America more than anywhere else you will find all these
incredible goddess blends and so on to nurture your femininity
and so on. And I actually think that’s really good, because I
think it’s gone back to a grass-roots understanding of wellbe-
ing – that it isn’t just managing a disease. So [the FDA rules
have] almost forced people to look at a different aspect.

His description of the situation clearly characterizes US aroma-

therapy as “feminine” as a result of its spiritual emphasis:

So by doing that it’s forced us to go back to our origins and get

in touch with what the medicine woman – the traditional medi-
cine person who looked at the essential – you know looked at
the remedies at a more – at a much more spiritual aspect, an
esoteric way … [I]t’s primarily women that have been involved
in that area compared to men. And this is interesting: I’m
seeing far more women who want to do aromatherapy from a
professional point of view than men.
The Senses & Society

So for some, aromatherapy’s connection to “feminine” values and

practices is precisely what makes it valuable.

Radical Holism and the Politics of Feminization

In 2004, Lisa Basso claimed that aromatherapy was at a “challeng-
ing juncture” (2004: 176), in that it needed to embrace scientific
research in order to move forward, yet few of its practitioners had
been trained in research methods. Aromatherapists are certainly
48

divided about which discourses and practices the profession should

 Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

embrace in order to promote their discipline. Some characterize the

discipline as “a rigorous medical modality” (Webb 2003: 111) and
see its future as inevitably dependent on scientific validation (Basso
2004). Others, like Salvatore Battaglia, voice a degree of reservation
about this pathway. While he is an unequivocal supporter of scientific
research (he argues that “Working within the scientific field to pro-
duce results is the only way aromatherapy can be incorporated into
mainstream psychotherapy” (1998: 4)), he is also concerned that
this strategy could become quite “self-limiting” because an overly
scientific paradigm might ignore the personal and cultural dimen-
sions of smell and the esoteric dimension of aromatherapy – the
potential for the oils to work at a “more vibrational, energetic, subtle
level.”9 As a successful businessman, Battaglia is obviously comfort-
able with (genuine) aromatherapy’s presence in the marketplace, but
others lament what they see as aromatherapy’s corruption by the
forces of the market (e.g. Webb 2003: 111) and the beauty industry.
Medical herbalist and self-styled “hype-buster” Martin Watt (n.d.), for
example, lambasts aromatherapy for its involvement with the beauty
industry:

In reality, it is the beauty therapy trade that underlies much of

aromatherapy teachings to this day. This means that the beauty
trade, which is and has always been, packed to bursting with
hype and lies, has placed a huge burden on aromatherapy.

He does this, though, not in the name of a simplistic opposition

between aesthetic and medical aromatherapy, for he attacks the
French medical tradition as not based on empirical science. And yet
for others, this French tradition is an important intellectual and politi-
cal resource in contemporary aromatherapy’s attempts to legitimate
itself.
There are, however, some aromatherapists who embrace their
discipline in all its varied faces. Indeed, much aromatherapeutic dis-
course – be that popular New Age texts, handbooks to the English
style, or the canonical writings of French medical aromatherapy
– is characterized by a radical holism. This holism entails an all-
embracing inclusiveness (essential oils are understood as capable
of anything from curing flatulence to accompanying the dying to
the other side); a metaphysical proposition, in which the material
The Senses & Society

and the symbolic are not ontologically distinct; and a vision of the
human as comprised not of disconnected segments or parts but of
interconnected and communicating dimensions: mind, body, spirit,
and emotions. So while, as we have seen, the different traditions
and orientations of aromatherapy present it with professional and
strategic dilemmas, they are nonetheless part of its popular appeal.
Aromatherapy can appeal to the scientifically minded, to consumers
of beauty products, and to those with an interest in esoteric mat-
49

ters. And its radical holism works well in the marketplace because
 Ruth Barcan

it does not present luxury, indulgence, healing, spirituality, science,

and medicine as inherently contradictory. Consumerism, after all, is
about “having it all” – and not only in a material sense. Its systemic
willingness to embrace whatever works in the marketplace – its
philosophical agnosticism, if you will – makes it an accommodating
vehicle for the widespread contemporary desire for wholeness and
connection. Thus aromatherapy provides, for some consumers, an
opportunity for a whole host of longed-for and pleasurable recon-
nections, reconciliations, and conjoinings: of past with present;
masculine with feminine; science with art; medicine with pleasure,
recreation, or ritual; and consumerism with spirituality. In Valnet’s
version, medicine and folk traditions converge. In Maury’s version,
beauty and health, cosmetics, and medicine conjoin. In Battaglia’s
vision, science and esotericism are equally valid.
In sum, aromatherapy presents one interesting window into the
politics of alternative medicine. Scientific, medical, therapeutic, and
spiritual discourses and knowledge converge, compete, and con-
flict, making aromatherapy an interesting study in the political pull
of different discourses and practices. And, as I have argued, the
pushes and pulls that characterize aromatherapy – between popular
acceptance and biomedical skepticism; spirituality and science;
beauty, recreation, and therapy; medicine and the marketplace – are
inseparable from the ambiguities and ambivalences surrounding
ideas of the feminine.

Notes
1. Interviews for this larger study were carried out as part of a
project funded by The University of Sydney. I would like to thank
both of the participants quoted here, Salvatore Battaglia and
Catherine Bird, for their time, generosity, and insight. Quotations
from Salvatore Battaglia come not only from our interview, but
also from his published work, which is cited in the normal manner.
2. Its fortunes differ in different contexts. A midwife who has worked
in both the UK and Australia reported to me that it is widely used
in midwifery in the UK but much less so in Australia. When I was
due to give birth in an Australian hospital in 2004 I wanted to use
an aromatherapy burner. The midwife told me that they had lots
of them but they were very rarely used these days.
3. Turin, like Gattefossé and Valnet, could be considered an empiri-
The Senses & Society

cist. Turin concedes that the scientific jury is still out as to whether
his vibrational theory of olfaction is correct, but he notes that he is
now employed to design new perfume molecules, which involves
“predicting odour from molecular structure” (2006: 7) and which
he (seemingly) successfully does using his theory.
4. For example, a few years ago there was a website colorfully titled
The Bollocks Page, which was not, as one might expect, a set of
critiques of aromatherapy by skeptics, but rather a furious indict-
50

ment written by aromatherapists of the “errors of fact, dubious

 Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

statements and sloppy science” that “riddle[e]” aromatherapy

literature (Burfield n.d.).
5. Turin, for example, describes how even a tiny amount of some
molecule unrelated to a principal component can affect the smell
of the whole thing (2006: 140).
6. “[T]he inmost parts, the ‘entrails,’ of every soul are physiologically
perceived by me – smelled” (Nietzsche [1967] 1989: 233, original
emphasis).
7. By this she meant that unlike people, horses do not feel they have
to perform for the therapist.
8. Aspects of the phenomenology of smell may also limit our ten-
dency to pay attention to smells. The anthropologist Alfred Gell
claims that smells are always linked to contexts and experiences,
and hence rarely experienced or attended to in their singularity:
“olfactory sensations are in the main only tangential to the busi-
ness of living” (1977: 27). I am arguing, though, that this general
phenomenological propensity is subject to a degree of historical
and cultural variability.
9. These latter comments come from my interview with him.

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