Tips for Making Essential Oils

Making your own aromatherapy is as easy as making essential oils from fresh cut flowers, spices or citrus. A safety note is that essential oils should always be diluted when applied to the skin usually in a lotion or oil. Do not eat these essential oils.

You can make a mixture of flowers or citrus or herbs. But true essential oil is usually one scent. If you are a gardener and have lots of roses for example, you can cut fresh full blossoming roses in the mid morning and turn them into essential oils using these steps. Some flowers suitable, but not an all inclusive list is rose, geranium, honeysuckle, hyacinth, jasmine, lavender, violet, rose, orange blossom lilac or lily of the valley.

You can use orange peel, lime peel, grapefruit peel, lemon peel as well. Spices include cinnamon bark, cloves, and vanilla beans. Herbs include basil, borage, chamomile, ginger, lemon Balm, rosemary and thyme. Others can be used. This is a short list.

The basics are for the Floral essential oils and can be adapted to herbal and spices and citrus.

To make floral essential oils take ½ cup cold pressed sweet almond oil and 2 to 3 cups packed of fresh cut, full bloom flowers from the morning. Make sure they have not been treated with pesticides, if you don't have a garden, you can buy them from special natural health food stores and gardens shops.

Put the oil in a glass canning jar and bruise the flowers a little with a mortar and pestle. Add flowers to the oil and cap the jar and shake it thoroughly, this will further bruise the flowers. Leave the jar in a fairly warm temputure. Between 68 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit. For a week, shake it every 24 hours.

Place the jar in a dark place and let it age another 1 to 2 weeks. Letting the oil absorb the flower essesnces. Then bring it out and shake it again. Strain the oil through fine mesh cotton gauze. Gathering it into a pouch, squeeze out the essence and discard the pulp and gauze. Transfer oil to dark colored glass bottle and keep it airtight. Store it in a cool dark place. These will last 12 to 18 moths away from sunlight in cooler than 75 degrees F.

To follow the same idea for herbal essential oils, take ½ cup cold press sweet almond oil and 1 cup fresh herbs, well packed into measuring cup. Then using the same techniques, you can make the herbal essential oils.

Spices can be made with citrus using ½ cup cold-pressed sweet almond oil and 1 cup of citrus peel that has been chopped up into little pieces. For spices, use ½ cup of sweet almond oil and ½ cup dried pieces of spices, not powdered spices. You can use cloves for example. But not cinnamon powder. Using the same procedure for floral essential oils, you can make these wonderful scented oils.