Oil Blends and Recipes. How to Make a Dilution Using Essential Oils and a Base Material. Amie's Aromatherapy Encyclopedia. Make Essential Oils » Because They're Absolutely Necessary. How to Make Essential Oils: 20 steps. How to Make Essential Oils. Essential oils can be quite expensive to buy so I though I would cover how you can make many of them at home. Firstly, what is an essential oil? The formal definition for essential oil is that it is a concentrated hydrophobic liquid that contains volatile aromatic compounds from flowers and plants. In pure layman's terms it's the concentrated smelly stuff from flowers! Most essential oils are made commercially by distillation. In this process the raw plant material, which can be in the form of flowers, bark, leaves, stems, roots or seeds, is placed on a rack above the water in a still. When the water is heated, the steam passes through the flowers vaporizing the complex volatile compounds.
Unless you live in West Virginia and have a cousin with a still this probably isn't a practical method to use at home. Enfleurage is the process of placing flower petals or similar plant material onto trays of odourless vegetable oils which will absorb the flower's volatile essential oils.