70% of the people who read the title probably rolled their eyes.. and I get it. There's a lot of woo associated with essential oils.

Aside from lavender helping my daughter and keeping a kennel full of dogs calm, aromatherapy is a load of shit. Even with lavender, you have to use a ton to get any sort of effect. To get any effect (not counting psychological/placebo effects) from simply breathing it, you'd have to use enough to where it's pretty much physically offensive to your nose.

There's a lot of mental claims with essential oils that I really don't see more than snake oil and placebos.

I will say that I find it annoying when someone discredits essential oils completely due to the woo.

As with when someone says they don't want to ingest manmade chemicals, we respond with "everything is chemicals".. essential oils are just chemicals.

Speaking from experience.. they will leave chemical burns, take skin off, they can catch fire, eat away concrete, kill bugs, and clean wounds. They really are chemicals.

I too can't stand a lot of the woo surrounding essential oils. They're not going to cure cancer, magically make your depression go away, you can't treat autism with it.. There are a lot of bogus claims.

I do like essential oils though. I like to experiment with them. I have been doing so for over ten years now. That's how I learned they can burn the hell out of you.. and dissolve concrete. How I learned some can clean a wound while others can make them much worse. Why I am now 99% sure that mosquitoes are adapting to use citronella as a beacon to find humans rather than be repelled. Which ones ignite and which ones don't. I tried a lot of different oils for a lot of different stuff and even tested a lot of bogus claims.

My problem is, most of the essential oils sold are ones marketed for aromatherapy. I want essential oils from shit you can't find, at least easily. Grass, garlic, actual peppers, uncommon fruits, and even some insects like worms and stinkbugs. You can capture the "essence" of a lot of living things.

Little known fun fact.. while maybe not as common today, a vanilla like substance used to be extracted from a gland around the butt of beavers.

Anyway, there's a lot of chemicals that can be extracted from things that were alive.. and I want to do that. I want to create new mosquito repellants. I want to see if the essence of worms would attract birds.

Then I got to thinking.. if I'm going to come up with a plan to make my own, why not think about making and selling them?

There are a few big essential oil companies that are billion dollar industries, mostly because they take advantage of the woo.. and I wouldn't want to do that.

So my question is this, as most of us are skeptics, what is something that you would want to see from a company/person that sells essential oils? What could be said or shown to you to get you to look passed all the bullshit that comes with essential oils to at least get you interested in looking at them as a volatile chemical?