Making Good Scents

How to Create Your Own Pure Essential Oil Blend - Part One

When we consider the additional benefits of using pure essential oils to create our own scented blend for skincare, emotional and physical well being, it becomes a unique and hard to resist opportunity.

In using gentle essential oils, even when your primary goal is to create a beautiful scent, you are bound to reap the healing and stress reducing benefits of the essential oil blend as well.

Scent can be an extremely powerful mood enhancer, often used to calm and relax or to uplift and invigorate, there are even some that do both.

As stress is one of the major contributors to disease in our society today, the art of creating scent through essential oil blends in our environment... aromatherapy... is a gentle and enjoyable wellness tool.

If you are looking at skin care benefits only, you should decide what exactly you want and research the best oils to use, then choose from them, being careful to follow dilution rates and safety guidelines. As a matter of fact, creating a blend according to it's beneficial properties is a whole other topic!

If you are going for scent, both of these still apply, but you are free to follow your nose.

Blending is something that doesn't necessarily take experience to begin, but must be experienced to accomplish, if that makes any scents :0)

You can learn methods and get ideas from a book, but you must do it to do it.

Do It Your Self is always more rewarding, and it is fun and freeing to use our own creativity when developing unique scents for our personal care needs.

Using pure essential oils to make your own scented blends doesn't just make good scents, it makes good sense too!

GET TO KNOW YOUR ESSENTIAL OILS INDIVIDUALLY AND ON A FIRST NAME BASIS!

Many pure essential oils are beautiful as they are. Take a sniff. Let the essence filter through the air and into your nostrils. It lingers and becomes you. Try it!

TIP: Never sniff a pure essential oil straight from the bottle, hold it away from you or put a drop onto a piece of paper or a q-tip, or put it in a bit of carrier oil).

Essential Oils are potent in their pure form - it's the lingering essence that you are after.

Sniffing essential oils straight from the bottle can damage your sense of smell and/or give you a headache. But it won't give you a true sense of the particular essential oils scent, many are much different and sometimes more pleasant when diluted.

Become familiar with your oils. It will be easier to know just the right one to use when you are looking for something to complete your new essential oil blend and will give you a good variety to choose from when you are in the planning stages of creating your blend.

It is said that scent will help you to retain memory as that particular scent will be "linked" to the memory, so upon smelling it, you will remember what you where thinking at that time. We've all experienced this in one form or another as a familiar scent takes us back to a certain place and time.

I believe that we also retain the memory of each essential oil's nuance so that when we are playing with ideas, a blend of sorts will come together almost automatically if you have decided what end result you are looking for.

Much like when we remember things like phone numbers and passwords directly through our fingers, on autopilot... but if we are asked to remember what they are, we can't (been there, done that with my van security passcode, bad scene jellybean!)

So it is important to get to know your scents by enjoying them individually first. Then you will have a much better idea how to create your own essential oil blend from the oils that have become familiar.

If you are on a budget, or would like to start by focusing on one area of scent, research oils in that category and purchase a small sampling of these oils to play with.

You will need to decide what you'd like to start with.

If for example you would like to make a light floral using oils such as rose, lavender or chamomile, or a heady intoxicating blend with oils such as jasmine, sandalwood or oak moss, or an invigorating citrus blend using oils such as grapefruit, orange, lemon or lime.

That's just for starters, the possibilities are endless. That's the fun of making scents!