Last question about dilution....

[PattiMcW]

Hi,
So, why do you need to dilute your essential oils? Can't you just blend all of the oils together and then dilute the entire blend in your carrier? Do you dilute just to see what the smell may be like in a final product? I guess I just don't know whether to dilute each essential oil/absolute first and then blend them together or blend them at full strength and then add them to the alcohol or oil. Thanks so much.

patti

[Roy]

Ingredients that usually compose a large percentage of the final product, like greater than 5%, I leave as is. Products that are solids, or that usually consist of a smaller than 1% amount of final composition, I will dilute so I can put fractions of percent in the fragrance. Pre-dilution for the purpose of evaluating different ingredients is a good exercise in seeing how they smell over time at a percentage (5-10%) that they will be smelled in the final fragrance, and also for overpowering ingredients that may smell different at low concentrations rather than overpowering at higher ones. The raw ingredients in the animalic family, indole, civet, castoreum, ambergris reconstitutions often smell different and are easier on the nose at concentrations of 1% and below, whereas diluting orange or lemon oil is largely unecessary since they tend not to overpower.

[Doc Elly]

What Roy says. I make up a concentrate using ingredients that are pure or diluted as necessary. I can then dilute the concentrate in carrier to make any desired concentration: perfume, EdP, EdT, etc.

[ECaruthers]

Also, I find that 30-60 ml is a convenient quantity to deal with. Smaller lots require measuring out fiddly-small quantities of some component. Larger quantities tend to be wasteful. Making up 30-60 ml of a mixture without diluting the components first wuold quickly use up all my half ounce bottles of essential oils. I wouldn't be able to do as many experiments.