How to make lavender oil

First off, let me clarify that Lavender Oil is not the same as Lavender Essential Oil.

Lavender Essential Oil is done through distilling of lavender flowers and it requires special equipment in order to do it right.

This blog is about infusing a carrier oil with lavender flowers in order to transfer many of the lavender flower benefits to the oil, that can then be used as a stand-alone body oil, or as an ingredient in other skin care products.

Let’s get started!

About Lavender

The lavender plant produces small purple flowers whole that have anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. Here’s a few examples of how this works:

• Wash your hands with lavender scented soap to help eliminate bacteria
• Use a lotion with lavender on dry or sunburn skin, and you will reduce inflammation
• Diffuse lavender essential oils to improve your breathing when you are congested

Soaps, shampoos, shower gels, lotions, balms, deodorants, body butters, bath bombs are just a few of the many skin care products that can benefit from lavender and lavender oil.

At Better Shea Butter we have a few products with Lavender EO in their ingredient list, like our amazing Better Shea Body Butter with Lavender, Rose and Neroli,  awesome fizzy bath bombs with real Lavender buds, and our Mama & Baby Kit containing a Castor Sugar Scrub and a Belly Butter, both infused with Lavender and Chamomile Oils.

And of course we have dry lavender flowers that are extra fragrant and work great in soap making, oil infusing, and many more DIY projects.

So yes, lavender is all around us, and we like it.

So, how do you make Lavender Oil?

Oh yes, back to the subject of this blog.

Lavender-infused Oil is a simple, straight-forward process that requires the right, high-quality ingredients, and time.

Any herb and flower can be infused in an oil in the same way, so if you do not like Lavender and cannot figure out why so many people love it (just because something is popular, like Games of Thrones for example (eye roll), doesn’t mean you have to like it), you can apply this oil infusing technique with any dry flowers or herbs you’d like.

The essential, basic steps of infusing Lavender in oil are:

1. Use dry Lavender flowers. If you only have fresh flower, you need to dry them out so there is no water present in the flower/herb. Why? Because water + oil = mold
2. Put the flowers in a medium or large glass jar
3. Cover the lavender flowers with oil, leaving about 1 inch from the top of the oil to the lid
4. Put your jar on a window sill and let everything steep for 4 weeks – you can shake the jars gently every few days but don’t sweat it if you forget
5. Using a mesh strainer, coffee filter or other appropriate cloth, filter out the lavender flowers

Your final infused oil will have picked up the natural scent from the Lavender flowers and will smell and feel amazing on your skin. The color of the oil will vary depending on which carrier oil you chose. We used our Almond Oil for this specific experiment, but I can pick up a light scent of almond when I smell the oil and while I love it, if you want to only detect the lavender scent, I suggest you use a completely odorless oil.

Look how beautifully golden the final lavender oil looks:

I hope you found this informative and I would love to hear your feedback in the comments below! Have you infused lavender or any other flowers and herbs before? How did that go and what did you use the final oil for?