Essential Oil Making 101

Cleverly disguised as flowers and fruits, barks and leaves, Nature’s healing essences live and thrive all around us.  The more we learn exactly how Nature has the power to correct of mankind’s ravages, the more we appreciate plants’, fruits’ and herbs’ miraculous curative, restorative, and preventive powers.  Just about everything that makes a tree or plant delicious or delightful draws attention to the medicine locked inside: find essential oils locked inside flower petals, juicy fruit, and the leaves of your favorite herbs.  All of them run full speed as essential oil making factories.  At first, you probably will want to purchase essential oils already extracted and bottled for easy use; you easily can find and inexpensively purchase the most popular essential oils at your local retailers or online.  As you become more devoted to do-it-yourself naturopathy, however, you inevitably will want to cultivate your skill with essential oil making.

Essential oil making often outstrips the ordinary do-it-yourselfer’s expertise, patience, and tools.  Distillation, the most popular and prevalent method of essential oil making, requires a still; and running the still requires time and attention.  The second most popular method of essential oil making—cold pressing—does not require an entire science lab, but it does require patience and precision—also not the easiest process to manage around chasing toddlers and pets, working the snack bar at little league games, and deciding what to wear your evening out.

The other three methods of making essential oils—enfleurage, solvent extraction, carbon dioxide extraction, and hydrofusion extraction: well, you may consider them as exciting, revealing and dramatic entries in the eighth grade science fair; but you will not get the precious essences from your lavender blossoms in one long weekend afternoon.

Despite all that daunting and discouraging facts-of-life discussion, thousands of devoted amateur naturopaths insist, vehemently, the risk-reward ratio comes-out on the side of your own do-it-at-home essential oil making.  They point out the process yields as many rewards as the products, and the combined sense of accomplishment and joyful wonder at the results more than compensates for all the must and fuss.  One devotee explains, “Especially if you grow the flowers, fruits, and herbs in your own garden, making essential oils from them seems naturally like the next step in the process.  Skilled hands complement green thumb.  Besides, essential oil making is not really that difficult.”

Absolute beginners in the delicate art and science of essential oil making  probably should learn the fundamentals by cold pressing fruits.  When you see how essential oils separate from fruits and flowers, and when you discover how they float on or precipitate out of the solvents you use to extract them, you will easily graduate to simple distillation.

Choose citrus fruits for your first venture into cold pressing: The vast majority of essential oil recipes call for lemon, grapefruit, or orange; and the thick peels make your raw materials a lot more manageable than most of your other choices.  To make the process especially easy and convenient, buy a cold press from your favorite purveyor of all things kitchen.  You will recognize it by its sharp points and trough for collecting the juices from your fruits.  Rolling your oranges, lemons, or grapefruits over those sharp points, you pierce the pouches containing the essential oils, releasing them into the trough.  After you have turned your once-an-orange into a pin-cushion, squeeze out all the remaining juice, watching the essential oil rise to the top of your mix.