How to Make Essential Oils Explained

Between four kids and thirty chickens, adding “amateur essential oil distiller” to my list of hobbies feels equal parts ambitious and slightly unhinged. How to make essential oils at home sounds like exactly the kind of project I’d start with enthusiasm and finish three weeks behind schedule.

Essential oils have been around for centuries, and people used to make them at home for their holistic healing, skincare, and haircare needs. And while many essential oil companies are available today, that doesn’t mean that you have to rely on them for your essential oil needs.

In fact, if you have the right equipment and a little bit of free time, learning how to make essential oils is easy. What’s more, it can be a great hobby or even turn into a side hustle if you want to sell your unique essential oil products.

Whatever your motivation, we have your back in this guide. Read on to learn more about how to make your very own essential oils.

What You Need to Make Your Own Essential Oils

To make your own essential oils, you need a handful of ingredients and tools to have success. The good news is that once you have many of these tools, you won’t have to worry about running out to the store and buying them again.

To make essential oils, you need the following tools:

• Access to a kitchen with a stove.
• A large stainless steel pot with a lid; deep pots work the best, and for industrial use, you’ll need a huge one.
• Ice cubes.
• Distilled water.
• A heat-safe glass bowl.
• A brick or elevated rack.
• Mason jars with air-tight lids for safe storage.

Once you have these tools, you can begin the oil-making process.

How to Make Essential Oils with Steam Distillation

The most common way to make essential oils is through steam distillation. With steam distillation, you need to follow a few key steps for the process to work. What’s more, it can be a little technical, so keep this in mind.

1. Step 1: Preparation

First and foremost, you need to prep the tools you’re going to use to make essential oils. Place the glass bowl, the brick, or the rack at the bottom of your pot, and add distilled water to the pot. The water needs to sit just below the rack or brick.

Then, add your plant material to the rack or brick and lightly submerge them. From there, you need to place the glass, heat-safe bowl on top of the rack of brick; this bowl functions as your collection tool.

2. Step 2: Create the Condenser

Now that you have your items, plant materials, and tools in place, it’s time to create the condenser. This condenser is what enables your bowl to collect the essential oils.

To do this, you should place the lid upside down so that it forms a bowl-like shape facing the pot.

3. Step 3: Hot and Cold

Next, it’s time to actually begin making the essential oil. Turn the stove on a low simmer and let it pass through the plant material to hit the lid. When it hits the cold lid, this is how your essential oils will begin to form.

To really make the most out of this process, you need to add a little ice into the mix. Place ice on top of the lid to cause even more liquid to condense and drop into your bowl.

4. Collect the Essential Oil

Finally, and the best part, it’s time to collect the essential oil. Once you finish simmering the oil, it will collect in your glass bowl. You can use a dropper to extract the pure oil from the surface of the bowl.

Depending on how much essential oil you need, you may need to repeat this process numerous times.

Wrapping Up

Once you know how to make essential oils, you can make them right at home in your kitchen. Ultimately, all you need are the right tools and a functional stove for the best results.

That said, if you don’t want to go the distillation route, you can also soak plant material in organic castor oil or another neutral carrier oil for around two to four weeks in a sunny window. Then, you can strain the mixture through a cheesecloth and into a bowl to extract some essential oils from the plant material.

This latter method is not as effective as the steam distillation method we covered, but it’s a great alternative.