13/03/2016
VOGUE MAGAZINE - BEAUTY HEALTH & FITNESS
Are Flower Essences the New Prozac?
Inside Fashion’s Far-Out Healing Craze
FEBRUARY 4, 2016 10:15 AM
by EVIANA HARTMAN
If you’ve scanned the supplements section at Whole Foods, you’ve seen them: 38 small, slender glass bottles, each promising relief from a specific emotional problem. Sweet Chestnut: “brings optimism and peace of mind when anguish overwhelms you and you can find no way out.” Wild Oat: “helps you to determine what to do with your life, when you are undecided about which path to take.” Larch: “instills a greater sense of self-esteem when you feel inferior, fear failure, or lack confidence.” With promises like these, one might wonder, who needs Prozac?
Flower essences—widely distributed by Bach, the company best known for Rescue Remedy, a ubiquitous blend of five of them—are not, despite popular belief, a type of herbal supplement, though they’re not entirely unrelated. Both involve the age-old principle of healing through plants. With flower essences, though, the idea is not to ingest the powder or extract of the actual plant to absorb its phytochemical compounds, but to consume doses of water it’s been steeped in to benefit from its frequency—the invisible waves of energy with which proponents believe all living things and objects pulsate. In other words, the flower’s vibes.
Far-out as this concept may sound, it’s catching on fast; seemingly every fashion designer and stylist in wellness-mad Los Angeles—and an increasing number of the sort of clued-in New Yorkers who dine at Dimes and practice yoga at Sky Ting—are talking about, or using, flower remedies. (And yes, so is Gwyneth.)
Though it was first developed commercially in the 1930s by British doctor Edward Bach—who turned to the study of homeopathy after recovering from a purportedly incurable illness—the concept may, in fact, be much older: “Indigenous people used to collect the dewdrops off flowers as medicine,” points out Liz Migliorelli, the Northern California herbalist behind Sister Spinster, one of a new wave of artisan-crafted flower essence brands, who uses the formulas to treat clients with issues ranging from emotional unease to menopausal discomfort.
Western scientific literature on the subject, however, is sparse. Of a handful of papers listed by the National Institutes of Health’s U.S. National Library of Medicine, some deem flower essences to be safe and potentially helpful as part of a treatment plan, while others declare them no better than a placebo. Then again, the placebo effect isn’t inherently bad. “Think of it this way,” says Jessa Blades, an herbalist and makeup artist whose online store, Blades Natural Beauty, does a brisk business in the formulas. “Do you like looking at flowers? Do you feel better in nature?”
That principle seemed to be at work the first time I tried the essences in November, when I visited my friend Alisa Gould-Simon at her home in Venice. After leaving her job as a fashion tech CEO last year, Gould-Simon studied plant medicine on three continents and began making flower essences—by the light of the full moon, which she says increases their potency—under the label Flora Luna. “They really work,” she told me that evening. “The rational part of my brain has trouble grasping the whole concept, but I’ve seen firsthand enough instances that I don’t question it anymore.” Two hours after I sampled and then left with her rose (Healing) and angel’s trumpet (Release) formulas—and absolutely out of nowhere, after the worst year of my life—I met the man I’m now dating. Could the flower essences have had something to do with it? Happenstance aside, might the invisible energy of plants be able to achieve what therapy and medication, with their reason-based methodologies, can’t—fixing a person’s juju?
To learn more, I visited Alexis Smart—a self-described “spiritual shrink” whose targeted multi-flower formulas (My Personal Assistant, Peaceful Worrier) are stocked by such beacons of the new New Age as Los Angeles’s Moon Juice—for a personal consultation and custom formula. We spent two hours together inside her eucalyptus-shaded Echo Park bungalow, during which she gently probed my personal history and emotional state. Smart determined I was still holding unprocessed grief, for which she prescribed star of Bethlehem; my “lack of self-love” would be counterbalanced by a course of pine. And she declared me “a classic heather,” referring not to the cult teen film but to the type of person who needs the flower—someone afraid to be alone. In total, she combined seven different essences (plus some brandy as a preservative) in the bottle, which she told me would last about a month. “In three days, you’ll feel a difference,” Smart said. “In three weeks, you’ll feel like a new person.” In a small way, I already did.
Two and a half weeks later, I’m still in my chrysalis, but I can’t complain. For a while, I noticed a surge of productivity and social energy, though lately—and perhaps this is the heather talking—I’ve felt with unprecedented clarity that I need to slow down, stay in, be alone. I finished and turned in the ballsiest thing I’ve ever written. I had a couple of long-pent-up cries and felt lighter afterward (thanks, star of Bethlehem). And I’ve slept soundly every night.
The fact that I’m paying such careful attention to the feelings and behaviors targeted by my formula hints at one reason why flower essences might be helpful: Pinpointing the source of a problem is usually the first step toward solving it. “I think that intention you set—even just talking about what you need and hearing that this thing could possibly do that—is powerful,” says Blades. And whether or not it can be proven in a lab, the concept calls to mind something that even the most empirically minded scientist knows: There are some phenomena we simply can’t explain. “A lot of people don’t feel very well and are looking to feel better,” Blades continues. “Whether it’s a placebo effect or it’s really working, does it matter?”
