Scenting Your Home With Essential Oils

One of the first things we notice when we walk into a new space is the smell. We register the aroma without thinking because our sense of smell is designed to let us know of anything we should avoid. Musk could mean mould, sour could mean rotten food, and a funky smell could mean poor hygiene.

It also affects our mood and creates ambience in a space. It adds to the feeling of being home. This is why we all aspire to a deodorised, pleasantly scented space.

Why Essential Oils?

Unfortunately, commercial fragrances designed to deodorise can sometimes do more harm than good. Especially for people who are sensitive to smells. This can be true for the fragrances given off by essential oils too, but the issue with synthetic products is that they often don’t specify every ingredient. This means that you don’t know exactly what you’re smelling, so if it irritates you won’t know to avoid it.

In Australia, fragrance manufacturers are only obliged by law to list aromatic ingredients under vague umbrella terms like ‘fragrance’ or ‘perfume’. Of course, some companies are transparent about fragrance ingredients, but most of the time it’s difficult to know for sure.

Scenting with high-quality, single origin, pure essential oils means that you know exactly what you’re dealing with. If you know that lemongrass gives you a headache, you can avoid it! Plus, when you scent with essential oils, you get the mood shifting benefits that come with them.

A home fragranced with essential oils is a double win – and here’s how you can start.

First, Get Rid of the Source

If something smells particularly funky, you’ll need to get rid of that smell, rather than masking it. Baking soda is a great natural deodoriser because it reduces unpleasant odours by absorbing them. It does so by bonding to most of the common (acidic) molecules that responsible for bad smells. Leave a few bowls filled with baking soda in the fridge or around your home to help catch the stink before it makes it to your nose.

Scenting a Room

To scent a room or space with essential oils, we recommend using an ultrasonic diffuser. Candle diffusers will disperse the scent but come with the risk of a naked flame and loose liquids which can be an issue for people with young children or pets. Reed diffusers disperse essential oil scent by evaporation, but it’s more difficult to regulate. Ultrasonic diffusers give you more control and peace of mind. They work by creating a fine mist using the vibrations of a disc at a frequency that we can’t hear. This breaks essential oils down into tiny micro-droplets of water vapour without heating the water and disperses the scent through the air.

Scenting a room with essential oils and an ultrasonic diffuser also gives you the flexibility of scenting to your mood. If you feel like you need a pick-me-up, add a few drops of the Double Happy Blend to your diffuser. If you need to relax, a few drops of lavender can work wonders. You can also adjust the amount of essential oil you add to the diffuser to control how subtle or strong you want the scent.

The Bin

Household bins are usually the source of funky smells in a home. To keep strong smells at bay, make sure you wash your bin whenever it gets soiled or if you see that it’s wet. Add a few drops of essential oil to the bottom of the bin before you replace the bin liner. That way, you’ll get a nice waft of scent each time you put something in the bin.

Be careful what scent you choose. Our sense of smell is thought to be closely linked to memory, so you may start associating the oil of your choice with the bin! Keep your thoughts and the smell clean by choosing something that already reminds you of ‘cleaning’, like Lemon, Lime, Orange or Tea Tree.

Your Pillow

Keep your bed and bedroom smelling fresh by adding a few drops of essential oil to your pillow. Lavender and Chamomile are widely believed to induce calm and relaxation. If those smells aren’t up your alley, try the slightly floral and sweet scent of Ylang Ylang or Marjoram Sweet Oil which has more of a herby aroma. Both are also believed to promote relaxation and calm and are popular in sleep blends.

If you like the smell of essential oils in your bedroom, but find that they are too strong when you lay on your pillow, add the drops to the mattress underneath your pillow or to your doona towards your feet instead.

The Front Door

Make the first aromatic impression a good one by dotting your indoor welcome mat with a few drops of essential oil. This can also work for outdoor mats with some sort of fibrous component that can absorb the oil, but the smell is less likely to linger. Sometimes undiluted oils can stain or discolour fabric, so we would recommend adding a test drop to the underside of the mat first. 

Another great thing about adding essential oils to your doormat is that you can enhance the feeling coming home to your space. You can choose any scent, but our recommendation would be the Home is Here blend that celebrates our home in Australia with Eucalyptus, smokey-forest wood and fresh floral notes. As soon as you smell your welcoming fragrance, you’ll instantly feel relaxed, safe and at home.