Understanding Essential Oils Blends
There are hundreds of different kinds of essential oils, each with it’s own unique properties, benefits and potential uses. By blending more than one type of essential oil together, limitless combinations of unique benefits can be combined together in a single bottle.
Essential oils are best known for their aromatic qualities and fragrance. Creating essential oil blends for their aroma or “perfume” constitute most of the blends you will find in the market. Fewer essential oil blends are created to obtain an oil with medicinal properties.
The Fine Art of Blending Essential Oils
There are varying opinions and philosophies about how essential oils should be blended and for what purpose. There are also many safety, effectiveness and quality implications based on the type of blending performed and how well it is done. The focus of this website is predominantly on producing the highest quality oils for medicinal uses.
The following are some ways in which essential oils can be blended.
- Perfume notes. Essential oils are most often blended together to achieve a desired bouquet or aroma. This method of blending is used in the perfume and mainstream aromatherapy industries.
- Medicinal effect. Blends are made to provide optimal combinations of desired medicinal properties. This is the way almost all therapeutic essential oil blends are made.
- Frequency. Essential oils of the same MHz frequency range can be blended together to provide complementary energetic effects to specific acupuncture meridians or to the chakra system.
- Constituent blending. Essential oils can be blended to achieve a particular blend of individual constituents unavailable in any single oil.
Therapeutic Essential Oil Blends – Best Practices
The best way to make essential oil blends for therapeutic use is to employ both medicinal effect and constituent blending philosophies. Blending solely for medicinal effect is very common, however, there are three drawbacks to it’s exclusive use in making therapeutic blends.
Blending for constituents as well as a medicinal or therapeutic effect has the following advantages:
- Some essential oils simply do not ‘mix’ or work well together in the same blend, despite their individual usefulness.
- Multiple essential oils containing a common constituent or ingredient may lead to an unsafe or otherwise detrimental level of that constituent in the final blend. The contribution of each major oil constituent, not only the oils themselves, must be taken into account.
- The proportions of the constituents can be tailored to achieve a synergistic effect.
- The order of addition can be very important. For reasons not fully understood, the order with which oils are blended together can affect the properties of the resulting blend.
