Hello everyone, I am Melani, Dropsmith’s founder. My last (a bit over a) decade was dedicated to teaching and advising aromatherapy to many different profiles – aromatherapist, pharmacists, nurses and therapists, cosmeticians, distillers, essential oil sellers as well as common people who would like to use aromatherapy to support their family. It is my students who have inspired me to develop Dropsmith and in the next few blogs, I will share my story of how that came about along with a short introduction and a thank you note to some of my colleagues and friends that supported me on this long journey and have been extraordinarily supportive of my devotion to teach and connect people in the aromatherapy world.
Because there is so much going on in aromatherapy it is sometimes impossible to keep everything on one track. I’ve always had an idea to make an online platform, which would make it easier to follow and stay up-to-date. But from an idea to the final realization I had to “run” a few more miles.
My life completely changed when I moved to Slovenia and decided to quit my regular job as a designer to do and develop what I love, aromatherapy. That was over ten years ago. Since then I have spent countless nights sitting before my computer, preparing pie charts and graphs for my students, smelling rosemary to stay awake, reading endless articles, books or blogs with highly questionable information on the use and safety of essential oils.
There are many different collectives of people who work with essential oils out there. People who distill, people who actually work and do therapies with essential oils, people who research essential oils, theoretical pharmacists and chemists, who do the analysis, etc. And you know what, they use a completely different approach and language, have a completely different viewpoint on the oils as well as different information. Working with all of these different profiles gave me a deeper understanding of what I wanted to do and develop. That is to bring all these people together so they would better understand each other and share their experience as well as information for everyone grows and to benefit from it. From that confusing time I decided to try and bring it all together as well as give it some comprehensive structure that would be simple enough for everyone to follow but at the same time professional enough to bring quality to anyone working with essential oils. Because I also have an IT background I knew how to make it happen.
It was around 2010/11 when I started my first app with a colleague, but we never finished it because, you know, life is full of surprises. I became a mother and my colleague was going through some life changes as well at that time so I gave up the Idea. During that time, I was hired by an essential oil company Favn to teach pharmacists and started lecturing more and more health professionals. Because I am a perfectionist I do not teach what I do not understand so that is when I really started studying chemistry. The more I knew more complicated it became. I saw all these gaps in aromatherapy, not just with the lack of consistency in the use of essential oils, but also with a lack of communication between different researchers and users. My students had more and more questions, so my scripts kept growing. Basically, I came to the point, when I was questioning everything I have learned. And I did not want to just give up on the online platform, but also on aromatherapy as well. It simply became tangled with too much contradictory information. However, my students kept on asking me, when will my platform launch and because I like to get to the bottom of things I started to reconsider the online platform.
