There are people who choose a profession because they know exactly where they want to end up. They have a destination in mind, they work towards it with determination, and one day they arrive. Looking back over my own life, I realise I was never one of those people. I never chose aromatherapy because I wanted to become an aromatherapist. I chose it because I met an essential oil, and from that moment on I just couldn’t stop asking questions.
The only way I have ever been able to describe that first encounter is that it felt like coming home. It wasn’t excitement in the usual sense, it felt more like recognition, as though I had stumbled across something I already knew but had somehow forgotten. Even today, after thirty-five years, I don’t feel as though I have spent my life learning about essential oils. Much of the time it has felt as though I have been remembering them.
Perhaps that sounds romantic, but my response to that feeling was anything but romantic. It made me study, it pushed my hunger for knowledge.
As a child I had already been fascinated by plants. I remember trying to make a perfume from roses when I was only 9 years old. I was on the right track…how did I know?
Nature always felt alive, intelligent and generous, as if all the answers were hidden just under the surface. It is magical and fascinating. I always had an intuitive understanding of what a plant could do and I wanted to understand how plants could influence us in so many different ways. When I discovered essential oils in 1988, while pregnant with my second child, that curiosity suddenly found a direction.
Aromatherapy, at least as we know it today, barely existed in Sweden. There were very few people working professionally with essential oils. Finding genuinely pure oils was difficult, and most people regarded aromatherapy as little more than pleasant-smelling nonsense. In England pioneers such as Robert Tisserand and Shirley Price were establishing a professional foundation, while France had preserved the medical tradition of René-Maurice Gattefossé, but in Sweden there was very little to follow.
So I started where I always start; I went looking for information.
I bought books.
Robert Tisserand’s The Art of Aromatherapy became my companion because every reference led me somewhere else. Before long I was searching for the work of Gattefossé and Marguerite Maury, reading everything I could find about the plants from which the oils came, and spending more hours in libraries than I can remember. This was long before the internet put the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, so every piece of information felt like a small treasure waiting to be discovered.
When I wasn’t reading, I was experimenting.
I have always learned by doing. If I came across a new plant, I wanted to understand how it grew, how it could be extracted, what chemistry it contained, how it behaved in different concentrations, how it interacted with other oils and, perhaps most importantly, what happened when it met a human being. I filled notebooks with observations because I learned very early on that we don’t remember as much as we think. Experience becomes far more valuable when we take the time to document it.
That way of learning has never changed.
Even today, if someone handed me a plant I had never seen before, I know exactly what I would do. I would take it home, identify it, read everything I could find, examine how it could be extracted and then begin experimenting carefully, asking the same questions I have always asked. What does it do? How does it feel? What changes with dosage? Where are its strengths? Where are its limitations? Every answer would create more questions.
Somewhere along the way I realised that I wasn’t really studying aromatherapy, I was studying plants; and essential oils was a language they spoke.
After completing a professional training in Sweden based on the British model, where we studied anatomy, physiology, chemistry, massage and medicine alongside essential oils, I opened my first practice believing I had found my profession. Looking back now, I smile at that younger version of myself because I had no idea what was waiting. I thought I was opening the door to a treatment room when, in reality, I had stepped into a landscape so vast that I am still exploring it today.
The more I understood the oils, the less willing they seemed to stay inside the neat little box called aromatherapy.
One question about emotional wellbeing led naturally to chemistry. Chemistry led to medicinal applications and a much deeper respect for safety, dosage and the extraordinary complexity of these botanical extracts. That, in turn, led me into skincare because it felt so yummy to create. (I remember being fascinated by the pots and jars on my mother’s vanity.) And it is a great way to use essential oils. Skincare opened the door to formulation, formulation led me into perfumery, and back into chemistry. Before long I found myself walking through worlds that had seemed completely unrelated when I first uncapped that tiny bottle.
I have often been asked how I ended up working in hospitals, speaking at universities, collaborating with the automobile industry, developing skincare, teaching professional aromatherapy, chairing the Swedish Aromatherapy Association and working with colleagues across Europe on educational standards and labelling.
The honest answer is that I don’t know. I never set out to do any of those things. They just sort of happened. I simply kept following the plants.
For each question that arose, infinite possibilities opened. And for each knowledge I gathered, the amount of questions grew, constantly leading me forward - like Alice going down the rabbit hole.
When I became interested in medical aromatherapy, I wanted to understand the chemistry well enough that I could formulate with intention rather than hope. That curiosity eventually brought me into collaboration with doctors. One case in particular was so amazing that it has stayed with me all these years: a thirteen-year-old girl with an antibiotic-resistant infection in her cheek. Despite repeated surgery and high-dose antibiotics, the wound refused to heal and the expectation was that she would eventually require plastic surgery.
I truly believed that I could help her, I felt it in my bones. But I refused to become involved without the doctor’s knowledge because I knew that it could get me into some serious trouble. I always believed that aromatherapy should work together with mainstream medicine and when the doctor agreed to see me I was so excited! We sat down together, went through her medical records, discussed my proposed treatment and agreed to proceed. Using carefully constructed blends based on the chemistry of the oils rather than folklore or wishful thinking, I treated her over the following months. The wound healed completely, leaving only a small scar and no need for reconstructive surgery.
And that was it, nothing remarkable happened afterwards…
There were no newspaper headlines, no referrals from the hospital and no sudden acceptance of aromatherapy. In those days the profession was still regarded with considerable scepticism and, if anything, both the doctor and I had to tread carefully. I handed him my formulations and treatment notes, and life moved on.
What did happen was deeper; word spread and I was trusted.
People began arriving through recommendations, carrying stories from neighbours and friends who had experienced my work. Looking back, I realise my practice was never really built through marketing. It grew because people talked to one another.
As my world continued to expand, so did the opportunities.
I studied with people whose work I had admired for years, including Shirley Price, Dr. Daniel Pénoël and Jan Kusmirek among others. Not because I wanted another certificate to hang on the wall but because each of them saw essential oils through a different lens. Every teacher added another piece to the puzzle, and every time I returned home I experimented with what I had learned until it became my own understanding rather than someone else’s opinion.
Years later, quite unexpectedly, a conversation with an engineer at a party led to one of the most unusual chapters of my career. Aromatherapy had entered the public consciousness and people were beginning to appreciate that fragrance could influence attention, cognition and behaviour. Years earlier I had been contacted by the automotive industry, but nothing came of it. Now it was time to dust off that experience. Together, the engineer and I developed active fragrance systems for the automobile industry, work that remains protected by confidentiality agreements, but the experience reinforced something I had suspected for years.
Essential oils don’t care about the categories we place them in.
They are no more interested in being called medicine than they are skincare, perfumery or engineering. Those are human distinctions. The plants simply express their nature, and if we are willing to listen carefully enough they will continue teaching us in every environment we are prepared to explore.
People sometimes describe me as a pioneer, and perhaps that is true. I certainly helped put aromatherapy on the map in Sweden. I worked for many years as chairwoman of the Swedish Aromatherapy Association, helping establish professional standards, working alongside colleagues in other countries to discuss education, ethics and labelling, and contributing to the recognition of aromatherapy as a serious discipline rather than a passing curiosity.
But when I look back, those achievements feel less important than the thread that connects them; I was never chasing a title or trying to build an impressive career.
If anything, I probably made life unnecessarily difficult for myself because I have always been a student and a creator before I have been a businesswoman. Mine was a journey of passion and curiosity. During my work with the automobile industry, my business partner looked after everything I wasn’t naturally good at. He once said he wanted to leave me to my genius, I really loved having a manager…
And he understood something about me that I hadn’t fully recognised myself; I have always been happiest when I am learning, experimenting and creating.
Sometimes that meant walking into rooms where I wondered whether I knew enough. The doubt was certainly there, but my curiosity was always stronger. If I didn’t know something, I said so, then I went away and found the answer. I have never felt embarrassed by not knowing, I can always learn.
When people ask me what I do, I still find it difficult to answer because aromatherapy has never felt large enough to describe the landscape I have spent my life exploring.
The truth is that I followed the plants, and they took me further than I could ever have imagined.