Iceland review - 2019, Qupperneq 32

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Iceland Review
around 1,500ml (50.7oz) of oil and is visibly excited
by the prospect.
She proudly shows us her distiller, fashioned from
an old milk silo and other items she ordered on eBay,
as well as her well-worn chair next to the gear where
she sits as she waits for the very last drop of oil to
leave the material. She then connects a hose that
emits steam to the distiller, and we wait.
“The process can take up to seven hours, so it’s a
great excuse to sit down, relax, and watch the action.
My grandchild loves helping me with the distillation
process, and when it’s all over and I open up the dis-
tiller, everything fogs up and it smells great and we
feel like we’re in some mystical universe.” It’s easy to
believe her, as the place is already smelling great, the
air thick with a steamy fir needle note that will only
grow more pungent as the distillation progresses.

Lost in scent
We also pop into an adjacent room where Hraundís
lets me smell her various products and experi-
ments. There, I become transfixed as I take in the
unadulterated luxury of her essential oils: the musky
earthiness of her angelica archangelica seed (a plant
that’s grown in Iceland since before settlement
and was, and still is, a popular medicinal herb); the
fruity otherworldliness of her Sitka spruce (“I use it
to make an oil for swelling and aches, it’s my most
popular product,” she says); the sweet anise smell of
cicely (sometimes called garden myrrh); the cedar-
like sensuality of Russian larch. All of these smells
are so sultry and amazing and speak more loudly to
the attraction of essential oils than any words can.
I’m suddenly reluctant to continue the interview,
and would rather overstay my welcome, silently
smelling Hraundís’ products.
But Hraundís is pleased with this, and even com-
ments on how attentively I’m smelling her oils. She
knows better than most just how all-encompassing a
smell can be. In fact, our sense of smell does not fol-
low the same routes in our brain as the other senses.
Whilst other sense information initially comes in
through the thalamus, scent is first processed by
our limbic lobe, one of the oldest, most primal parts
of our brain and hugely important to our sexual and
emotional responses. This is why nothing can jostle
an old memory quite like a scent, and perhaps why
certain oils are deemed potent aphrodisiacs.
This might also be why the philosophers of the
Enlightenment turned their noses (pun intended) up
at our sense of smell. Immanuel Kant once famously
decreed our sense of smell to be the most base and
animalistic human sense. Perhaps it is, but our
nose is also the most honest sense organ we have.
It affects us directly. Our preconceived notions are
powerless against the spell of scent, our emotions
easily manipulated by its chemistry. Indeed, after
I awaken from my scent-induced trance, Hraundís
tells me how effective essential oils are in modu-
lating her mood. “Some oils make you perk up and
go ‘Yes, I’m gonna go do something,’” she says,
“whereas others calm you down and inspire total
relaxation.”

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