Make Your Own Essential Oil Blends
Monday, November 12th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
One of the more enjoyable aspects of aromatherapy is playing with new scents by blending essential oils. This process of blending essential oils to create scents can be a hobby or a serious pursuit in your aromatherapy life. After all, this is the same process that perfumeries do to create expensive bottles of scent and perfume. Making your own essential oil blends is easy and enjoyable.
There are a few things you need to make your own essential oil blends. These are an eye dropper, the bottles of essential oils that you will be experimenting with. You will need some empty bottles to mix and store the new blend. You may also need an aromatherapy reference book to help choose your oils and get ideas on interesting mixtures. Make your own essential oil blends on newspaper or something you don’t mind accidentally ruining. Essential oils can sometimes leave a permanent stain.
If you are planning to use the new blend as a massage oil for the skin then you will need a carrier oil or base oil to mix with the essential oils. Undiluted essential oils are too harsh for the skin and will irritate it. They need to be diluted in some form. Useful carrier oils are jojoba, apricot kernel, grapeseed, coconut, sweet almond and olive oil.
Detecting The Notes
For best results, you need at least one drop of oil from each of the three “notes” assigned to scents. Notes means how they hit the nose. Top notes are what you immediately smell, but they soon fade away. Base notes last the longest and are usually the strongest scent overall. Middle notes are exactly that – they can be scented longer than top notes, but usually not as long as middle notes. Some oils like patchouli are assigned different notes depending on who you read. In that case, use your own judgment.
Making A Blend
Choose which empty bottle is to have the blend. Then, fill with an eyedropper from the other essential oils. If you want to make a pure essential oil blend, then you need twenty drops of middle and top noted for every ten base note oils. If you are making a massage oil, then for every ten drops of essential oil, you need 90 of the carrier oil. Don’t worry if you loose count. Near enough guess is usually still good. If you are unsure, then do a patch test. Put a drop of your new blend on your arm, leg or wrist and see if there are any adverse reactions after 24 hours. If not, your new blend is safe for you. After you make your own essential oil blend, store it out of sunlight in a cool, dark place.
As you become more experienced with essential oils and aromatherapy you can start to experiment on all sorts of different blends that might produce mood altering scents, have healing qualities or simply make the room smell nice. Once you are comfortable blending you can then start to make essential oils from the source ingredients.
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January 6th, 2008 at 4:52 am
You can also make your own therapy-grade essential oils — steam distilling is fun and you can grow your own organic herbs and flowers if you like to garden. I use a steam distiller from HeartMagic — the basic kit is made from Pyrex glass and holds 2 L of plant material. Their site is http://www.heartmagic.com/Essent…lDistiller.html — good luck and have fun with essential oil!