essential oils: not just irritating
and, often–in almost all cases, in my personal experience–sensitive-unfriendly. There’s another reason to avoid them.
At least, so thinks the Daily Telegraph:
Women buying ‘essential’ oils blamed for rise in house fires
Women buying fashionable essential oil burners are being blamed for a growing number of house fires, authorities have warned.
Fire chiefs are investigating a spate of unexplained fires thought to have been sparked by towels and linen covered in scented oils Photo: ALAMY
Well now. This is the DT. And it is the silly season (or one of them–there seem to be at least four a year). Now, Britain doesn’t have the same scary massive forest-fires that large swathes of the rest of the world are currently enjoying. But still: that’s no excuse for this sort of hyperbolic silliness.
Those “essential” oils–I guess in quotes, as a rhetorical device playing with expectations of audience expectations. And some comic effect. As some readers might be surprised to find that these oils aren’t “essential” in the same sense as, say, “cooking” or “heating” or “combustion-engine-fueling” oils. This being the Daily Torygraph, “suprise” might be expected to translate as “apoplectic rage.” Veritably “incensed.”
There’s a neutral but all-embracing “blamed”–including everyone, and you and me? or possibly just non-women? It turns into “authorities.” Which of the two is more worrying, serious, and sinister? That lurking echo continues to run through the article, though, that all right-thinking people ought to be a-blamin’ .
Ladies: turn in your EOs before the Forces of Law and Order bust you, confiscate the lot, and disappear you. Maybe boil you down and make you–including your very own “essential” oil–into soap. Who knows.
Later, we get an alternation of “fire chiefs” and “officials.” Ah, but then again, turns out this is just Wiltshire (for those unfamiliar with British geography: non-big non-major kinda place). And our “authority” is Julian Parsons, from the Wiltshire Fire Service’s technical fire safety department. Who has, presumably, gone underground by the time of publication, with a new identity, under police protection, to protect him from hordes of rampaging angry housewives whose husbands take the DT. Armed with scented sprays. I expect to see sales of antihistamines soar in the next few days. Time to buy some shares.
Further comment on Jezebel, and DT link c/o them too: “Your Essential Oils Are Leaving The World In Ashes.”
who, me? a dangerous fire-starter? little sweet and innocent innocuous me?
The Praise of Folly 