Refreshing Chemistry Part 2 - Essential Oil Chemical Families
12 sessions building up the chemical families from monoterpenes, sesquiterpenes and benzene rings, showing you how they all interrelate.
Enroll in Course
This 12 session course takes you through the chemical families found in essential oils, starting with their carbon skeletons, and sequentially adding on, and modifying different functional groups. Dr Joy shows you how the different chemical families are related to one another, and how essential oils depend on the different types of molecules for their therapeutic function in the body. If you loved Dr Joy's book "The Chemistry of Aromatherapeutic Oils", you will love this course, because it goes into more dynamic detail, with Dr Joy's explanations and quirky humour helping the facts stick in your mind.
The course will give you a basis for understanding what the different functional groups are, and the properties they confer on the molecules they are attached to. Course topics include:
- How plants make essential oils;
- what isomers and enantiomers are;
- types of molecules with hydroxyl groups;
- the difference between primary, secondary and tertiary alcohols and phenols;
- what carbonyl groups are;
- how esters are related to alcohols;
- how oxides and lactones are formed from alcohols.
Your Instructor
Dr E. Joy Bowles is an author, educator and researcher, best known for her contribution to the understanding of essential oil chemistry in the aromatherapy community. After completing her Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Organic Chemistry and Cell Biology, she developed the first course in essential oil chemistry in Australia in 1991. In 2007 she gained her PhD on the effect of essential oils on cognitive function in dementia, but her academic career went on hold for a period of motherhood and working for 10 years in chronic disease management, Joy returned to share her chemistry and pharmacology understanding with a new generation of essential oil enthusiasts, aromatherapists and health practitioners. A more detailed biography can be found here https://ejoybowles.com/bio.html#/
Publications
"The Chemistry of Aromatherapeutic Oils" (Allen & Unwin, 2003, Routledge 2020) is still used in many aromatherapy courses around the world, and is being translated into other languages.
“Dr Joy’s Aromatherapy: Use essential oils with confidence for psyche, skin, medicine and health” (Diem Capta Books, 2020) is her current statement about the three main ways of using essential oils, and the different quality of education, research and evidence required to safely use them.
Journal articles in Aromatherapy Today magazine and International Journal of Professional Holistic Aromatherapists.
Academic publications here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joy-Bowles-2