An Interview with Aromatherapy & Essential Oils Expert Michael Scholes From Laboratory of Flowers

A: Well, I'm home. I'm in Virginia, and I am very happy to see you, Laura. We've known each other for a long time. I don't do many interviews, so I'm not really on social media. I am like the owner of the Laboratory of Flowers. I've been in the aromatherapy business, so to speak, for 36 years.

I got involved before there were cell phones, computers, when there were two companies in America that sold essential oils, and they were very small companies. So you can imagine how far we've gone since then, because if you type in the word essential oil now, you'll probably get 200 million pages of information.

My whole premise is the therapeutic aspect of aromatics. I'm self taught, which means that all the pioneers that were involved back in the 80s were my teachers and now I'm part of that pioneer group. So very happy to be here.

A: Yeah, it's been a 35 year journey. I have some oils in my collection that I had from the first presentation I gave with Dr. Daniel Penoel and Pierre Franchomme, who were the leading pioneers in this field from France. I still have some of those in my collection.

So, in the beginning, I was presenting because I was learning, and I always knew that the best way to learn is to teach. So, in my first class, I was terrified. I knew so little, but I knew more than the people in the class, and they were so excited. I don't think I've ever seen crowds that were so excited back in the 80’s about this subject. And it wasn't for, like, maybe 5 years before I decided to sell anything and people kept asking me, what's that amazing lavender? Do you sell it? I said, no, I just really passed it around to show you and my first price list, there were 50 oils on there.

I still have a copy of that. I found it in my archives. And what happened since is I've added, but not just added in terms of specific species, which is I'm always looking I'm a bit of an aromatic hoarder, so I will gather, no matter what I see, no matter where I see it. I'Il connect with it, I will get it. But to recognize there's only so many different genesis or families of essential oils, but there's multiple species.

So, it started off with lavender from France, and, of course, it turned into organic because organic was not really available back in the 80’s. It certainly wasn't certified. Then we start to realize there's not only multiple species of lavender. There's multiple countries of origin. There's multiple altitudes. There's different soils. There's different ways, there's biodynamic, there's wildcrafted, there's organic, there's natural, conventional, and even mixtures of natural components making up lavender.

So my goal was to have a collection of everything. So that was my personal library, of which I think I like 20 different lavenders from around the world, some that really are not available now. I mean, things changed, commerce changed. It was only in the last 5 years I decided, well, I need to offer that to people who were looking for specifics, and also they don't want to have to buy large quantities.

As a library, I'm able to provide very small amounts of certain oils that may tempt you based on what the description is about that particular oil in regards to where it's from and so forth. So the library is really my life's work. The fact that I offered it is just something I thought that would be a great thing for people to get involved because when people buy essential oils, they buy lavender and know where it's coming from, they buy rosemary. But even rosemary has multiple species, some for the lungs, some for the kidneys, some for the digestive system, for the mental capacity and so forth, and some that are highly therapeutic.

A: Well, fragrance is fragrance, and synthetic molecules have been around since the late 1800’s. So this is not a new thing. Now it's highly evolved, like flavorings. Flavorings now you can alter the molecules and you can turn something from tasting like bacon to tasting something sour or savory. So in the fragrance business, it really depends on the raw materials you use. Typically, perfumery used to use the traditional perfumes were 100% natural because synthetics weren't created yet.

But you start talking about serious expense when you talk about making perfumes this way. So, also the policy has changed where in perfumes they use a wider bandwidth, so to speak, in terms of using natural components that are not naturally available, like the metallic fragrances, some of the fragrances that just don't come from nature. But fragrances, it all depends on what you're using. So you can make a natural perfume using essential oils, which is what I do, which I know you do and those fragrances are considered like anything.

A perfume is a perfume, which means it doesn't really matter the source. It depends what you choose to like, what you choose not to like. Most perfumes are probably 90% synthetic. Something like Chanel might be 40% natural. They're the exception rather than the rule, which  is why their eau de cologne costs $4.50 for 9 oz or 7 oz spray. Why? Because there's some natural components in there. There's many variants in there, there's real geraniums in there. So what I like to think of is that forget the natural synthetic, look at what you're trying to achieve.

Why would you use natural in the first place? Because the natural molecules, they trigger something in us based on nature, not something that's going to trigger the smell of gasoline or the smell of something that may be appealing to you. Some smoky fragrance, some leather fragrance.

It may be appealing to you. But the nose knows and the mind knows something real from something synthetic. The reason is you might get a headache with one and maybe you'll get a therapeutic experience with the other. It's subtle and the idea is that we want to change the plasticity of the brain. We're looking to keep putting inputs into the brain where the brain will change and expand due to the stimuli that you put in.

And that's not to say that synthetics are bad or not so good, but I think that nature was created by the creator. It was done exactly the way it should be done. It was done with perfection, and therefore it was put there as a counterbalance for the way we live our lives. If you want to change the way you live your life, that would be the place to go. Going somewhere else. That's a modern day creation that was not based on the creative idea..

A: Well, essential oils are essential oils. They're all therapeutic, some are less expensive, which is why they end up in the diffuser. Some are more expensive, which end up in a perfume. Somewhere in the middle are your therapeutic benefits, which come from multiple species, which typically when you start talking about them are precious, whether it's neroli  or blue lotus or osmanthus , or even some of the lavenders, I have a lavender that is like ten times more expensive than my least expensive lavender. Then that becomes a whole kind of plant medicine. But the difference is that why would we want to go organic?

Not that anything's completely organic. Because organic is the way it was intended it to be. As soon as you start adding things or distilling or extending or mixing or you're adding pesticides and herbicides, it will affect to some degree. Most of those things are not carried over in the distillation process, but they're still part of the energetics. That's the reason why I want to go for organic and the reason why I love the fact that you support the organics as well as the oils.

All the oils you purchase are organic, and they're all the highest grade. I have six different blood oranges. The one we give to you is the blood orange from Israel. It's the sweetest orange from the promised land, of course, that you'll ever find. Now, are there other oranges that are sweet? Yes, but not quite as full. If you have an experience by smelling something, you go, this is full body. This is like complex bandwidth, it's very wide in therapeutics. When you put that together, you create not only alchemy, you create magic.

And when you smell that, the nose knows, the brain knows that it's receiving something the way that nature intended it to do and will it be more therapeutic? I can't say yes or no. All I know is that when I eat organically and I make my own food, I always feel better than I've eaten in a restaurant, that I can't trust where the supplies are coming from and I put my own energy.

I'm the one who does the formulating. Every single thing I do, I blend. I don't have people working, doing that. That's my responsibility. So I mean, every oil and every blend, which means that any formulation I made has 35 years and 100,000 hours of my personal experience having chose this path for myself in terms of a life career, and something that I wanted to make. I wanted to be the absolute best you could possibly get anywhere and that's my creed.

It's true. You said something this can only be done with small batches. Small hand poured, no machinery, no conveyor belt, hand kept, hand labeled, hand boxed, and put in the mail. It has to be done that way and every single oil I have of all those I have over 700 essential oils in my collection.

I chose every single one of those and it's not like I didn't have choices. Sometimes there's only one source. I have many sources and many samples that I received. And at this point in the game, I absolutely know which one has a vibrancy of what I could use for this and what I use for that.

So, for instance, if I'm using lavender, and I'm going to use my highland organic lavender now, it's cultivated and that's okay, because cultivated means it's not wild. It's been planted. It's truly organic. I visited the place where it comes from. It's outstanding. There's only one oil better than that, and that's the wildcrafted, and that's the one that grows by the roadside, and it grows randomly, hand picked, hand distilled.

The challenge is it's not certified organic, which is insane when you think about it. You can't make something that comes from the wild certified organic, so you don't have the paperwork and that means the paperwork sometimes doesn't match what I'm smelling. The profiles don't match. I've got lots of oils that are conventional, that smell way better than the organic. So what do I look for smell, or do I look for quality or a mixture of the bowl?

I want to get the highest frequency possible for the blend. So when somebody uses it, they don't go, wow, they feel it, and they just go, I'm not sure what happened, but I just feel something different. You don't need anybody to focus. As soon as you focus on the product, you lose the attention of what the product is supposed to do.

If the product is supposed to calm you down, it's supposed to be good for the root chakra, and you feel grounded, forget the product. Focus now on feeling that you reintroduce the aspects of feeling earth bound and grounded, and you're now at the source of your own power, so to speak.

A. Correct. And that purity, if you look at the amount of people involved in getting an essential oil from India or getting something from Indonesia or Madagascar, the amount of people it takes to collect the plants, distill the plants, to package them, store them, ship them, and for that product to be authentic, at the other end.

So a lot of people are involved, and a lot of people are proud about that involvement. If you're not dealing with something, I can't guarantee that every single thing I have is 100% pure because the world has so many hundreds of thousands of chemicals in the process of being alive.

Something is stepping into something somewhere. But if you're aiming for a high frequency and vibration, that's the place where God lives. That's the place where we want to align with the purest. It's not about the expense. If you look at the vitamins and you realize that you can get synthetic vitamins for $4 on Amazon, you can get maybe natural vitamins, you can get food based vitamins. You can get organic food based vitamins.

The difference in price is probably fifty dollars to four dollars. But in fact, you take one of the $50 and it's equivalent to the entire bottle of the $4. Now, when you think of it from that point of view, take less, use less, use often.

The whole aspect of change, and we know this with people with dementia, the whole reason why people change and you can avoid dementia is repetition. Repetition. Whether you're doing crossword puzzles, whether you're in conversations, whether you're connecting with people, keep that connection. It's the same thing with essential oils. It doesn't matter about the quantity. It matters that it made an impact on you because the energetics are 100 times greater than what you smell.

But it's not a one time application. It's something you apply to the point where eventually it becomes part of you. You've shifted it and therefore you now move on to something else, perhaps. Once you've made that shift, you're already evolving.

A. Well, I think about the thing of liking and disliking, because maybe it's a yes or no, and it's not really a yes or no. I'm not there yet.

When somebody doesn't like something, it really indicates that you're speaking from a very low level of energetics. For instance, if you are drinking fine wine, you may not like it, but you can appreciate it. Eventually you may get to like it.

I had a story about 30 years ago, maybe not 35, maybe 30 years ago, where I made a perfume for a lady at a conference where I was an exhibitor, and I made perfumes, and she put this perfume on that I made based on what she told me. And she said, that is the most disgusting thing I've ever smelled in my life. She was very vocal about it. This is awful.

I was at the beginning of my career, so I didn't really take that as a positive. I like wanted a pack of leaves quickly. And it was shocking the way she said it, because it was so lauded, the response, how could you dislike something so badly that it would create that reaction? And about six months later, I get a call from her and she said, "Listen, I think you may remember me. I was in San Francisco at the venue there, and you made me a perfume, and I knew who it was right away. And she goes, and I want to let you know that I want to apologize first of all for my response. And secondly, that's my favorite fragrance of all". Wow. So how did that shift?

First of all, you've got to give people time. You don't start your aromatic world by going to the super expensive oils that you can't even process that in your own bandwidth because it's so subtle.

You have to build your aromatic world from the ground up, like you do with the chakras. You have to build it up, and with repetition, you keep moving up the spectrum. So eventually somebody said to me, what is your favorite oil? I will go all 700. I don't have to, I mean, I can appreciate everyone because otherwise I have to judge one versus another, this quality versus that quality. At this point in the game, all those molecules are inside me, so I'm no longer responding from that place.

A. It's learning. Remember, we are the perfume. I mean, each one of us has our own invisible notes that are a part of sexuality and attraction and so forth. Now, something in the aspect of being human, especially in the 21st century, causes that essence to either be blocked or withheld. Maybe it's not safe anymore. We're in an unsafe world in so many ways. I can understand why people wouldn't want to emit something, but the purest fragrance is inside us.

All the natural molecules do and when I say natural molecules, I mean typically perfumes are not always synthetics. They can make them with natural absolutes. So you got to be careful with the language. But when I'm talking about pure essential oils, it's the whole oil. It's not an isolated component. I'm not only helping people rebuild their immune system or bring back their sense of smell or their memories or broaden their horizons in the way they look at things and how they see themselves.

The goal is to restore the original blueprint of who we were in the beginning that got lost along the way with trauma and synthetics and bad habits and addictions, where we lose ourselves. This is a process that you cannot guide somebody through. It's an individual journey where you're attempting to help somebody reawaken their possibilities. Not that they don't have to do the work. You can't just sit there thinking, well, I'm going to make a million dollars now, or I'm going to write a great book.

You've got to put that essence of you into whatever you do. And when you do that, you bring something that's alive to the world, not something that's going to be forgotten five minutes later. Fragrance is all we've got. Who we are as individuals is really based its not just based on our thoughts, it's based on our fragrance. And the smell is ours. It's not for ours to give to somebody else and other people will smell you without knowing and be attracted to you.

Not based on a smell, but based on frequency that you now recovered yourself. The recovery world is a crazy recovery world. It's to go to rehab for a month and then you're recovered. Recovery is for all of us, and we do that. We have to rebuild ourselves. So who we are is the authentic version of ourselves.

A. Yeah. This is an adjustment now to seeing that I recorded every single thing I did in 30 years. I don't know, 200 pounds of audio cassettes and videotapes and so forth. And I've given up on the idea that there's something in there that I could recapitulate. It's inside me now.

So I want to keep the Laboratory of Flowers as a library and keep adding content in terms of my personal reflections on those oils, because you can look in any book and the endless list of what people say this oil will do may not be my interpretation.

So I want to put down my interpretation and then of course the idea is to offer that and then in that a bunch of blends that I formulated over the years. I've got blends that I made 30 years ago that they've proven and proved themselves once and again and again and again by the fact that people still want them and then also complex blends for the body, the bath skin and hers based on the elements.

I want intelligent products. I want them based on our energy and of course, our latest thing is we have another site called rollonremedy.com which is really the top 100 fragrances from my 1750 formulas. And what are those hundred? They're the 100 for everybody. Involves detoxification, respiration, passion, recovery, addiction, calming, stress relief, anything that would cover what I consider to be the medicine that we really need.

And if you were to put those oils on a table end to end, it would be your complete recovery, except your recovery would be different than mine, say, they are in roll ons that you can put on. So that's very appealing for me because it enables people to go beyond this single nose into more complex formulations delivered in an easy, simple, easy to carry.

In terms of education. I'm going to do more podcasts, more individual presentations on one off events. I'm going to do an event in July in Houston on recovery. Because recovery, we're all recovering from something. So instead of now focusing on distillation and that's a whole different world, or the chemistry or the botany, or the application, I want to put that on one side. What did I learn? And I learned it based on my own model.

My own recovery is at the center of why I got involved in what I do to start with. And it's a continuous journey, and there may be things I've learned along that path, aromatically and non aromatically, that helps people recover. I'm not talking about taking people who just went to rehab for drug addiction.

That person needs to do a lot of work before they come back to a place where they will be receptive to not use this as another addiction. The idea is that to really take all that information I've got, I am the diffuser, I am the perfume. I have absorbed, and hopefully help people to get on certain path to their own recovery. Which, by the way, is difficult, because, as you know, people use something once they don't get something out of it and they come back.

Okay. Recovery is an ongoing, consistent, daily application where you do something every single day. I take my aromatic bath every day. I put something on my wrist every day. I put something under my nose before I go to bed. Yes, I burn a candle when I'm at work. I want sensory, aromatic information coming to me daily and after 30 years, if I stop it, it won't be 2 days before I almost forget that I do what I do and I am constantly reminded.

A. Yeah, the fragrance is a reminder of your greatness. In the 3D world of to do lists, we often forget and I'm also part of that equation, too. I forget my source. So doing something as a ritual reminds you of your wholeness and the center of that is your peace.

Where is your peace at this moment and behind the peace is where am I not grounded? Where am I not? In the next cycle? Where am I not in my creativity? Where am I not in my personal power? Where am I not in my love? And where am I not in my self expression? Where am I not able to see?

The pineal gland is purely in the middle of your eye because it regulates the light that comes into your body and when they say, if you see the light we're living in these compartments, in these boxes, away from the sunshine. I want earth that we're going to feel the light and then of course, we are divine consciousness. That is what you need to go through to get to the place where anything coming out of you would be valid. Because anything you do from stress is never clear.

I got to create this. I got to do by tomorrow because I got to make this much money in order to do this and therefore, before you know it, you've created something that may not be relevant. It's something that consistently you do in order to get to that place where you can then say, I'm free today. I do whatever I want.

That's my goal as I'm coming up to retirement age, my goal is I want to feel free. That doesn't mean I'm not responsible. I don't want to work on that model where I'm literally pushing and pressing and criticizing and constantly fighting myself. And then where's my purity? Where's my faith? Where's my peace in that place, gone? Can I create something if I'm not centered? That's why I blend every single day. Why? Because when I'm blending, I am 100% present with the fragrances that are helping me maintain that place.

A. No, I agree. If I'm at peace, what's my goal now? Am I just going to sit here like I'm in India, sitting on a pillow? Am I just sitting here in a Zen state? No.

I take my piece and then want to connect physically with people and also emotionally with people through touch, through relationship, through conscious connections through whether it be the phone, but making those connections clearly.

My mother's, like, in the final days of her life at this moment and I just was in England with her and she suffers from dementia and it's really amazing to see how inside she knows what she wants to say, but when it comes out of her mouth, she's missing sometimes a couple of words that I can't understand you may come to the conclusion she's not making sense, but she's making sense inside herself.

So what I did when I was there is I made a conscious connection to take my peace and grab her hands and hold her hands and touch her and to speak only to her greatness. To appreciate her and after ten days of going there, or actually twelve days of going there every day, when I walked in on the 12th day, she had her arms open. What happened before that? An institution is not of course, you, you can't expect somebody to do that in an institution. They don't have the time. But our elderly need connections.

Our spouses, our family need to be touched with honor and with conscious connections to the heart. People need to be told what to say. But this is a whole different thing. Fragrance changes the way language happens in your brain. It enables you to speak clearly and speak concisely about what it is. So when somebody says, how do you feel? And you go, I don't know. How do you feel? I'll tell you exactly how I feel, because I've got my clarity in terms all the chakras are kind of in alignment, and I've got my clarity. But if it's not to stay home and sit on a pillow, it's to go out in the world and connect with everybody.

A. No, I agree. The purity factor is that as soon as you go from small batches to major production, compromise will have to take place and that's why some of the larger companies who sell essential oils are compromised already, because there's not that much quality all available. The price that you can afford. I know because I know what it costs to buy essential oils and so on.

But coming back to that aspect of I don't know much, I let the oil speak for themselves. I let my blend speak for themselves. Because words can't empower you. They can't. You have to empower yourself. But how do you do that?

Not listening to what the mind says, because ten minutes later, the mind says, okay, we're done with that now. You build it up from the beginning and the fragrances are really unique in the fact that they change the way you perceive yourself, the world. They change how you look at yourself. They change how you feel about yourself.

They don't do anything but remind you and wake up that part of you that for some reason got shut down and therefore, my goal moving forward is say what I'm doing continue what I'm doing. I do not work a business. From a profit point of view, profit is important to keep my business running, but I'm not working it to the point where it becomes I become self absorbed in my own importance. I want to make sure that I can't reach people. I could not reach enough people. It wouldn't matter if you had a million followers if the individual journey has to be individual. You're better off having one person in your life that's successful in the aromatic model.

Watch Laura's live interview with Michael- check it out here.