Bloom [ Persona ] The Sweet Smell of Wellness January 2007

by Dan Shafer
Images by Russell Byrne

Desirée Cromwell has practiced aromatherapy and related healing arts at the same location in Carmel for more than 16 years. Now she's embarking on a new phase of her life: developing and marketing new aromatherapy products

People who are drawn to spend their lives practicing the healing arts, whether conventional Western medicine or alternative forms of treatment, often struggle between the desire to help specific individual patients on the one hand and conducting long-term, large-scale research to help potentially vast numbers of people on the other.

When Desirée Cromwell, proprietor of Desirée's of Carmel, first faced this dilemma, she decided that she would prefer to spend the early years of her career providing hands-on care for patients. At the same time, she wanted to study the effects of her healing efforts on those patients and learn enough that she could one day develop new products and techniques for healing that would also scratch her research itch.

Today, she manages a small but thriving practice while she and her husband build intriguing new products designed to deliver the benefits of aromatherapy to millions of consumers who drink beverages, eat salads, or enjoy giving themselves home spa treatments.

“I've managed to combine the best of both worlds,” she said, a smile dancing on her lips. “Basically, I turned my practice into a living laboratory whose lessons I am now putting into use in the broader community.”

Purifique: World's First Aromatherapy  Beverage
The first new product to come out of Desirée's work with help from her husband, Harvey Kraft, is a line of aromatherapy drinks called Purifique. Based on more than two decades of work with patients and recording their reactions to various aromatherapy treatments, she came up with two initial flavor/aroma combinations with which to launch this new product line. One is called Spirit and is a combination of ginger and mint. The other is called Harmony and contains rose and cinnamon aromas.

People who try these drinks report an immediately detectable lift in their energy levels. The products have been on the market only a few months and only in narrow markets, but they have already garnered serious international attention. It has been selected as “The Next Big Thing” by the Global Bottled Water Congress, as a result of which Desirée and Harvey were invited to speak to the Congress' annual gathering in Bergamo, Italy, in mid-September.

“I spent hundreds of hours trying different combinations of flavors and finding the proper water essence, bottling and even corkage to be sure I would provide a healthful, enjoyable aromatherapy experience with these beverages,” said Desirée. “The early response has been extremely encouraging; now it's just a matter of getting the word to the broadest possible audience.”

One of the lessons Desirée learned from her years as an aromatherapist who incidentally has also mastered massage, herbology, and aesthetics, is that it's often important to tailor treatments to individual tastes and needs. This lesson wasn't lost even as she moved to a mass-produced product like Purifique.

“We recommend people try different dilutions, different times of day and approaches to the use of the product to enable some individualization of the experience,” she said.

The imminent  success of Purifique has encouraged Desirée to try other products as vehicles for delivering the aromatherapy experience in new ways. Her Salad Lover's Blend line of salad dressing sprays includes three flavors: seaweed, basil-anise, and lemon-zest. And she recently launched a home spa treatment line of products called Sea Lotus built around premium and organic seaweed powders mixed with pure organic hydro-essences.

“That line now includes a detoxifying facial that is good for all skin types and an ultra-detoxifying bath soak,” said Desirée.

How She Got Here
Desirée got into aromatherapy when the earliest customers at a boutique she opened in Clovis, California, began coming back and asking for refills of some of the items she was selling. “I noticed that the largest majority of my repeat customers who wanted refills were using aromatherapy products rather than the more traditional compounds I was offering,” she said. “So, I looked around to see how I could learn more about this subject. At the time, there was only one certification program in aromatherapy. It was being taught by a Frenchman named Marcel Labare, but I couldn't take his classes because I wasn't a certified health-care professional.”

To satisfy that requirement, Desirée went to school and became a licensed massage therapist, “even though I wasn't all that interested in massage,” she remembered. But it was during that training that she became aware that “I had a calling to use my hands in healing,” a calling to which she remains true to this day.

With her license in hand, Desirée returned to look at the field of aromatherapy and ended up taking courses from Susan Leigh Beatty, who was director of Marcel Aroma Vera, a major provider of such products and services in the United States.

After several years of training, she emerged with a certificate as a holistic aesthetic aromatherapist. She has continued to study with many of the world's leading aromatherapists over the years.

From the beginning, though, Desirée noticed that she was often pulled between providing hands-on care and research to understand why aromatherapy worked.

“I did a lot of case studies in my practice early on,” she recalled. “I would try different formulations and keep track of what worked and what didn't. I was particularly interested in phytonutrients (plant compounds thought to have healing effects). I wanted to experience the energetics of the healing process.”

In the late 1980's, Desirée relocated to the Monterey Peninsula from the Yosemite Valley as her then-husband was reassigned to this area.

She started her aromatherapy practice at home but soon out-grew her house and moved to her present location in downtown Carmel. She's been in that location for 16 years.

“I picked the location carefully,” she said with a sly grin. “Feng Shui told me it was a corner where people would meet and share healing experiences.”

She has had some of her clients for the entire time she's been practicing in Carmel, or nearly so.

She has also taught dozens of people the principles of the ancient art of aromatherapy, in which she offers certification.

One of the most interesting incidents she recalls took place when a somewhat elderly gentleman came into her office for a massage.

“He was a strikingly tall man with a regal bearing,” she recalled, “but I didn't think anything special of it.”

While she worked with him, the man expressed keen interest in the bottles and potions, the essential oils with which she worked in her aromatherapy practice. She asked him the source of his interest. Was he perhaps in her business?

“After a fashion,” he replied gently. “I'm William Mennen. My wife and I own the Mennen Company,” which was then one of the largest consumer pharmaceutical companies in the world.

“He and his wife, Audrey, became clients. They were the most unprepossessing people you'd ever want to meet.”

On another occasion, her ceiling mural — which exists to this day — played a central role in a mini-drama.

“It was a warm afternoon, so I had all the windows open,” she recalled. The mural is an outdoor floral setting which Desirée had enhanced by using some essential oils in the creation process.

“Suddenly a hummingbird flew into the office and went to the flowers on the ceiling, trying to get the nectar it could smell but not sip.”

Aromatherapy as Ancient Art
Many people are skeptical about the claims of aromatherapy, as Desirée knows only too well.

“I'm quite accustomed to controversy, having been a pioneer in this field for many years,” she said.

But the principles of the use of essential oils and other aromatherapy ingredients to treat various human conditions and illnesses go back to ancient recorded history.

“We know for sure that it goes back at least to ancient Egypt,” Desirée points out. “When King Tut's tomb was opened, among other artifacts discovered were a number of alabaster jars which had held aromatic oils. In many cases, the aroma — and the associated healing properties — were still intact after all those thousands of years.”

Ancient documents dating back to Hippocrates, the “father of medicine” in Greece, attest to the widely held belief that aromatic herbs and the oils extracted from them held important and unique healing properties.

An ancient book of internal medicine created by the Chinese and written nearly 3000 years before Christianity, contains information on more than 300 plants and their medicinal properties, much of which is still in use and considered valid today.

Drinking a Smell?
So how did Desirée get from aromatherapy — which is typically administered by inhalation or through the skin — to the idea of creating Purifique, an aromatherapy drink?

“I've enjoyed the holistic idea of the body in the environment and the notion of cooking and nutrition as parts of that experience. It occurred to me that drinking a liquid involves both taste and smell and that perhaps I could formulate a combination of essences that would taste wonderful and be beneficial as an aroma,” said Desirée.

So, she began trying out the idea, starting with the palette of aromas she enjoys and thought might work well.

After going through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of combinations, she began hitting on some that really seemed to resonate.

“I started trying it out on guests we had over for dinner,” she said. “Based on their reactions, I'd try changes in the formula.”

One night at dinner on their patio, her husband Harvey, a seasoned senior marketing executive with a background in branding, paused for a long while after tasting her latest concoction.

“This just has to be bottled,” he said simply.

“I thought, OK, sure, let's do it,” she said. “He's brought my dream into reality by believing in me.”

And now Purifique seems poised on the brink of worldwide acceptance and success, bringing to fruition Desirée's desire to combine hands-on health care with thoughtful research. °