11/08/2026
This is well worth a read if you use essential oils. Essential oil safety is a priority. I cover this at each of my regular Aromatherapy groups and also at my workshops.
A key factor in essential oil use is BE SAFE ♥️♥️♥️
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After years of writing about essential oil misinformation, particularly essential oil safety, I think we need to firmly contextualize what we see too often in aromatherapy spaces.
Misinformation spreads in the name of safety all the time.
Sit with that a minute but keep an open mind to what I'm about to share. Chances are likely that you've come across this yourself. And due to this prevalence, you may currently have certain beliefs about essential oil safety that are actually misinformation.
That's not your fault. Like any field, aromatherapy suffers from flaws in research communication, a process by which evidence is pushed out into the public and shared. But to understand the issues, you need to also understand the chain of evidence.
Today, the majority of essential oils safety is predicated on Tisserand & Young's work, Essential Oil Safety (2nd edition). This is for a good reason. The authors put dedicated effort and time into synthesizing the available research on essential oils and translating that evidence into practical information that aromatherapists and other professionals can utilize in applied practice to ensure appropriate precautions are observed.
But sometimes aromatherapists and others draw conclusions beyond the boundaries Tisserand & Young established as evidence in their work.
This is called overextrapolation.
We'll go back to carcinogenic essential oils as an example. Often, when a potentially carcinogenic substance is present as a constituent for an essential oil, we'll find a few things recommended in their safety information:
1) Specific dermal limits to prevent a dangerous dose.
2) Recommendations about which route of use (oral, topical, inhaled) is or is not okay to mitigate problems.
3) Outright avoidance of the essential oil's use—sometimes, not all the time.
As stated, not all of these are automatically recommended. What comes recommended depends entirely on the essential oil being examined. But what we sometimes see in essential oil safety recommendations today is that a "better safe than sorry" approach is taken and gets translated into these essential oils not being able to be used at all.
In the case of essential oils with dermal and route limits, jumping from those to "don't use" is a leap in logic. The often offered rationale is the slippery slope fallacy in action, folks. And it is often the mechanism by which overextrapolation occurs. That being said, this overextrapolation of evidence is usually well-meaning—but still misinformation at the end of the day. And I will argue that it does nothing to actually teach aromatherapists and essential oil users to understand and critically apply reasoning to how they use essential oils.
This is especially concerning for aromatherapists who should be domain experts in this kind of nuance and mitigative understanding.
But I want to return to Tisserand & Young for a moment and point something out that I think people need to focus on more closely. Remember how I said they synthesized the available evidence. They did the knowledge translation work to establish the guidelines we largely rely on today.
So when you see conflict over what it is they said? You always need to return to their work. And if the claims you are coming across assert ideas beyond what they actually said?
Remember that safety only goes as far as the evidence does. Anything beyond that is an assumption, and assumptions are not evidence.
By all means, challenge what researchers say. But do it with evidence, not speculation or opinion you present as fact. 💙
