My Oils ....... so far....... ;-)

I thought I would show you what oils I have and how I have organised them, first for the 'Top notes':

Grapefruit (Citrus paradisa)
Peppermint (Mentha piperita)
Ginger (Zingiber officinale)
Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus australiana)
Wintergreen (Gautheria procumdens)
Bergamot (Citrus bergamia)

To make it easier to see I put a label on the lid of each oil colour coded so I know what note they are. These Top Notes are colour coded pink with the beginning part of their name to make it easier to see when they are in their box.

Top/Middle Notes are colour coded orange:

Orange Sweet (Citrus AurantiumDulcis (Orange) Peel)

Rosemary (Rosmarinus 0fficinalis)

Geranium Bourbon (Pelargonium graveolens)

Ylang Ylang III (Canaga odorata)

Mandarin Red (Citrus reticulata)

Lavender (Lavandula Angustifolium)

Clary Sage (Salvia sclarea)

Middle Notes are colour coded green

Cinnamon Leaf (Cinnamomum zeylanicum)

Marjoram Sweet(Origanum marjorana)

Tea Tree (Melalueca alternifolia)

Lemongrass (Cymbopogon flexuosus)

Patchouli (Pogostemon cablin leaf)

Base Notes are colour coded blue

Vetiver (Vetiveria zizanoides)

Carrot Seed (Daucus carota)

Cedarwood Atlas (Cedrus atlantica)

Frankincense (Boswelia thuriferaaa/carteri)

The Frankincense isn't in this photo as it is up in my bedroom I am dabbing it on my neck skin tags morning and night in the hope they'll drop off!

So that's my collection so far but I have more arriving tomorrow, and I think that will be it for a while! One last thing to show you, I picked up this Samsonite vanity case from my local charity shop for £3 (they are £95 new) it makes an ideal home for my oils I am so chuffed with it.

Sleep Potions

It's probably an age thing I turned 50 last year (although why I'm admitting that to you I don't know) my quality of sleep isn't as great as it used to be I wake up a lot in the night and I'm quite restless. My sleep has been better this month and I think that is due to dry January and no alcohol consumed!

Anyway I was keen to find a relaxing potion to help me sleep, I tried a couple of drops of lavender on my pillow and that worked really well the first night I tried it, how do I know? Well I have a Fitbit One which I am wearing all the time at the moment as I'm having a bit of a health kick and trying to lose some weight. The Fitbit also monitors your quality of sleep it tracks how restless you are through night. Not sure how accurate it is but when I look at the stats it seems fairly accurate. The night I put lavender on my pillow I slept solidly only restless on 2 occasions so I was pretty impressed. Consequently though its been a bit hit and miss.

The next recipe I tried was Dreamy Sleep Balm I made 4 pots of this it smells heavenly and I couldn't wait to slather it on my feet at bedtime. I also gave a pot to my son, his girlfriend and a colleague at work and alas, it hasn't made a difference to any of us, well I tell a lie my son reported a great nights sleep but bearing in mind the previous night he had the noro virus and spent all night throwing up I think he was just exhausted the night he tried it.

Here is my sleep pattern from my Fitbit One on the night before I tried the Dreamy Sleep Balm

And here is my sleep pattern for when I wore the Dreamy Sleep Balm the following night

So there isn't much difference really. Maybe I'm expecting too much? On the plus side my feet were nice and soft the next morning.

Potions

My first potion I made was from coconut oil and shea butter, I didn't write down the recipe at the time but I think I added some drops of Patchouli oil, Frankincense and lavender. The smell was heavenly but the big mistake I made was to melt only the coconut oil which I then whisked into the shea butter with a blender.

What I should have done was to melt both the oils and mixed them together as although the smell was beautiful and it moisturised my skin it's very grainy where the coconut hit the cold shea butter and set without combining properly, still lesson learnt.

My next potion was Eczema and Psoriasis cream I followed this recipe for Handmade Healing Cream the only modification was I added a teaspoon of Manuka honey, despite what they say about Neem oil having a pungent acrid smell I found it rather pleasant, to me it smelt of curry powder, and mixed with the other ingredients you couldn't really smell it at all. Neem oil is supposed to have amazing skin healing properties and works wonders on eczema and psoriasis apparently. The consistency of the cream is quite solid I have to scratch up some of the cream with my nails but once it touches your skin it melts really quickly. I used it avidly for a week twice a day and whilst my skin was more moist it didn't address the itching or irritation.

I may not have given it long enough to work I know I am a little impatient so I decided to make it again this time for my boss who suffers from Psoriasis, I modified the recipe and I added a lot more skin healing EO's namely:

5d Frankincense
5d Patchouli
5d Carrot Seed
5d Geranium Bourbon
5d Tea Tree
5d Cedarwood Oil
15g Neem oil instead of 10g

Oh and I left out the lavender only because I had added so many other EO's. Now I have been reading lately that with EO's less is more which goes against my ethos of 'if I add more it must be better' I think that is going to be the difficult part of working with EO's how many drops do you use? How do you know to use more of one and less of another? I suppose it comes with practice and trial and error. I have given this moisturiser potion to my boss so I will check on her progress tomorrow.

In my quest to find an anti itch cream I tried another recipe from Pinterest which was Homemade Natural Skin Cream I thought I'd give this one a go as it included Oats and I've heard good things about oats and soothing eczema. The cream again was quite a solid consistency and all the oats settled to the bottom but that's fine because the goodness had seeped out of the oats into the cream. I used that for a few days and to be honest I felt a bit itchier than usual not sure if that was just my stress levels or the cream but it certainly didn't ease my itching although my skin was softer.

Let's be clear I am not for one moment criticising these recipes or their claims they just haven't worked for me although I desperately wanted them too, I guess I just need to keep trying. :-(

Onwards and upwards as they say!

DoTerra - Do one!

In my research especially on Pinterest I keep coming across DoTerra, at first I was happily pinning the recipes I found, a lot of which actually took me to dodgy sites or no such page, when I tried to click through later. It wasn't long before I became very suspicious of them and also Young Living EO's.

From what I can make out they are more interested in signing up members to sell on their oils almost like a pyramid scheme, the members then need to sell their oils on to you so I suspect all sorts of false claims are made from people with very little experience. Also and much more worryingly they openly advocate taking their essential oils internally which is against all the advice of UK EO sellers. EO's by their very nature are extremely concentrated so taking even a drop internally is in my opinion ,unless you have the advice of a qualifed aromatherapist, very irresponsible and potentially dangerous. I have had this opinion reinforced by comments on blogs and posts by experienced EO users.

Apart from these concerns their oils are ridiculously expensive! There are much cheaper better quality oils out there from smaller passionate companies who really care about this stuff. So now when I'm researching blends and recipes if it mentions DoTerra or Youngs I go to the next link.

If you want my advice I would give DoTerra and Young Living Oils a very wide berth!

The beginning

For Christmas 2013 my little sister bought me this beautiful handmade note book made with recycled paper which she got in a shop in Brighton and until now I hadn't known what to use it for. I think it's the perfect partner for my EO's and I have started documenting the oils I have so far and the components of the recipes I've tried in the hope that one day one of the recipes will work!

 

A couple of months ago I downloaded The Encyclopedia of Essential Oils book onto my kindle, it is a great resource for anyone interested in EO's it has a comprehensive list of EO's with their general uses, principal constituents and latin names. It also tells you about the history of oils their various extractions methods tips on 'creative blending' and much more. My only disappointment was although they talk about the different 'notes' of oils, being Top, Top/Middle, Middle and Base in earlier chapters it doesn't classify the oils in the oils section. The 'note' of the oil is important when you are blending. As I understand it a top note is the first aroma you smell in a blend but fades leaving you with the base note which comes through last and the middle note oil pulls them all together in a blend. That's a rough interpretation remember it's my first month! lol.

I have been purchasing a lot of oils from a local company Calmer Solutions Ltd they have an A-Z of the oils they sell on their site with lots of information on the components of the oil and what they are used for AND they tell you whether they are Top, Top/Middle, Middle or Base notes, which I think being new to the scene is immensely helpful. Their prices are really reasonable and their oils are 100% essential oils I would thoroughly recommend them. I think I may be their biggest customer this month! Gulp!

Why? Well why not!

It's dry January - no alcohol for a whole month and with the focus being on 'health and diet' I got drawn into looking at EO's (essential oils). Not the greatest reason I admit, there was no great revelation or lightening bolt from above I just felt like giving it a go. I have been dabbling for a couple of weeks now but so far I have had fairly disappointing results with EO's even though I desperately wanted them to work so I have decided to document my 'trials and tribulations' (although alas there aren't many of the latter so far) in the hope that A) they might be of use to someone else and B) some diehard EO users may be able to tell me where I am going wrong.

I did buy a couple of essential oils two years ago, some lavender, grapefruit, rosemary, lemongrass and sweet orange, I didn't know or pay any attention to what I was buying at the time, I bought them based on their smell because I wanted to make a body scrub from coconut oil and sugar. The body scrub was a great success not only did it smell amazing but my skin was beautifully soft too. After this little experiment I promised myself I would make home made body scrubs for my friends and family for Christmas but I never got round to it so my oils stayed in their dark little box in the cupboard.

Last December my chocolate Labrador had some health problems and had to attend the vets for a serious of appointments and she completely freaked out, she was uncontrollable and petrified, an old family friend of mine on facebook had just started her own homoeopathic site for dogs and she recommended to me to try some very diluted lavender on the tips of Coco's ears before we visited the vets next time and I must say I think it helped, a little anyway. After that I purchased a bag of homeopathic goodies from my friend at 'Mr Slobberchops' in which I got some lavender essential oil, cloudy cider vinegar, slippery elm powder, coconut oil and other stuff and after researching some of these products and reading how much additives and bad stuff that are in our everyday products I got interested in making my own human 'potions' which is where 'My oil trip' begins.

Over the last few weeks I have been buying a steady stream of EO's and butters and pinning EO recipes madly on Pinterest and looking for recipes for skin problems, I haven't mentioned that yet have I? I have a couple of really irritating dermatitis/eczema patches, one under my right arm, one on my lower back and the other on the palm of my right hand They are not a huge big deal but they flare up when I'm stressed or hot and itch like buggery!. I have had various steroid creams in the past but nothing has worked so I thought I would make my own eczema cream.