Lavender is truly an amazing plant, not just for its beauty and scent, but for its amazing versatility. You might have always just thought of lavender as a purple flower, and a scent that people use in their bathrooms through air fresheners, but you must understand that there is a lot more to this plant than meets the eye.
Below are just a few of the amazing ways that we can use lavender to enhance our lives.
1. Bath Salts
Lavender bath salts are among the most popular ways to make use of the many soothing properties of this amazing flower and scent. Bath salts in general are supposed to help add a more noticeable relaxation and soothing effect to the bath, and the addition of lavender is meant to help enhance that.
Research has helped to show that lavender can indeed help with pain such as headaches, inflammation, improvement of overall mood, and reduction in stress, anxiety and depression. It’s even been seen to help women by giving them relief from menstrual pain. Before we invented modern antiseptics, lavender was used to clean medical spaces owing to its natural antimicrobial and antiviral properties.
2. Lavender Soap
Lavender is hardly in short supply, which means we can use it for even the most basic daily needs such as soap. The lavender scent adds a gentle but pleasant aroma to soap that refreshes and cleans, while not creating such a harsh or clinically sharp aroma as some modern soaps tend to do. As we touched on above, as well, lavender works well in soap because it has natural antibacterial properties.
3. Garden Pest Control
Pest control is a key positive feature of lavender that has helped to make it a popular go-to substance for many years. The linalool that you find naturally occurring in lavender is the key to this property. It’s actually extracted from the plant and used in many commercial pest control products. Growing lavender in the garden can therefore help greatly in being able to repel the likes of mosquitoes, ticks, spiders, ants and fleas.
If you have lavender oil, it too when applied to the skin can make an excellent mosquito repellent, while also making you a far from attractive target for the other pests mentioned above.
4. Essential Oil
In the world of essential oils, lavender is one of the most popular and widely used ingredients. The naturally soothing and relaxing qualities of lavender make it ideal for use in aromatherapy, for example. As we have touched on above, it is also believed to be helpful in easing people’s anxiety and stress, not to mention as an aid to treating real medical conditions like fungal infections, allergies, and eczema. This makes lavender essential one of the most diverse out there.
5. Moth Protection
Further above we outlined the use of lavender to deter a number of insects. One other household pest that it can work to deter is moths that can otherwise be the bane of those with a lot of clothing and fabrics stored in wardrobes and cabinets. Dried lavender placed in sachets inside wardrobes can provide the perfect layer of protection for clothing. The key to its anti-moth abilities are the cineole and camphor content.
6. A Sleep Enhancer
Finally, lavender placed at one’s bedside, or at least around a bedroom or other sleeping area can help create a soothing and relaxing atmosphere that is conducive to more sound and relaxing sleep. People who have been suffering from an irregular sleep cycle, or for whom stress and anxiety have been keeping them awake, lavender is one of the best ways to fix the issue.
Image: https://pixabay.com/photos/lavender-flowers-field-sunrise-6398415/
