Blending your own essential oils can sometimes be quite an art and it’s always fun to experiment. Whether or not you’re familiar with making your own essential oil blends, you’ll only improve with practice.
If you’re new to aromatherapy your stock of essential oils will be much more limited than if you have been collecting them for years. Personally I have built up my aromatherapy stock of around 70 essential oils for over 20 years but when I started out I just had the bare minimum that I could afford at the time.
A good base to start from could include Rosemary, Lavender, Orange, Eucalyptus, Geranium, Cedarwood and Bergamot. You can build on these over time and as a suggestion try to include an oil from the various aromatic families such as woody, citrus, earthy, floral, herbal, medicinal, and spicy. This gives you a greater variety of which to base your essential oil blends.
Examples of each of these families are:
- Woody – cypress, juniper
- Citrus – mandarin, grapefruit
- Earthy – patchouli, vetivert
- Floral – rose, ylang ylang
- Herbal – clary sage, basil
- Medicinal – tea tree, pine
- Spicy – ginger, coriander
It’s also good to have a variety of notes – top, middle and base notes. There is more information about these and aromatherapy blends here.
Depending on the mood you’re in when making your own essential oil blends, this can also have an impact on the outcome. It may sound a bit odd and it’s difficult to explain but blends can turn out very different for each individual, even if you use the same essential oils. I like to think that each oil has it’s own personality, just like we do!
Often when I want to make a new blend I’ll open my cupboard where I keep my essential oils and use my instinct to choose the first one. Once I’ve chosen the first oil, I then either instinctively know the next two or three I’m going to blend with it. If my ‘gut’ isn’t working too well that day, I’ll take inspiration from the list of essential oils I know to work well with it.
As an example, if I choose Frankincense as my first oil, I can see which other oils will blend well with it from its profile page. Also taking into account the top, middle and base notes, from the list I would then choose as my final blend Frankincense, Black Pepper and Orange.
If you’d like to share your blends or ways you like to blend, please leave a comment below.
Ive made 2 perfume blends now! one was orange, rosemary and cinnamon… the other is grapefruit, tea tree and patchouli. I think Im hooked! ohh! my! goodness!
Good for you Natalie, that’s awesome. It’s very addictive isn’t it!