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I just realized I’ve been babbling about essential oil aromatherapy diffusers without telling you what kind I use!!!

I’ve never been a fan of the electric diffusers that require you to put some essential oil or oils on a pad and then a fan blows the scent around. They’ve always seemed like high maintenance to me, and I like things simple!! Any of you have experience with that type of diffuser?

Anyway, a while back I bought one of those tea light candle diffusers specifically made for aromatherapy. It had a small glass bowl perched a few inches above the candle. You filled it with water, added a couple of drops of essential oil, lit the candle and waited for the scent to fill your house. The problem with that diffuser with it was that the water would run out before the tea light finished burning. Those suckers can go for 6 hours!! How do they get that much burning power out of a little teeny tea light? I gave up on this diffuser when I added water to it, and the darn thing cracked. Scared the daylights out of me when it made that cracking sound. (Note to self: Adding liquid, even hot liquid, to a hot glass bowl will make the bowl crack! Duh!)

So I hunted around my house and came up with a potpourri diffuser that also uses a tea light candle. The cool thing about potpourri diffusers is that they are ceramic and they use a larger amount of water. Well, I guess that’s two cool things about potpourri diffusers. Mine holds about 3/4 of a cup of water and has a little cover with a steam vent on it. I usually light the tea candle and get some water warmed up in the teapot. I don’t let the water get to boiling, just pretty warm (like when you can see tiny bubbles in it). This “jumpstarts” the aromatherapy diffusion process.

Then I add however many drops of essential oil to the water, put the cover on, and it diffuses away. I leave my diffuser on the stove, out of the way and safe from the dogs! I don’t have to add water, which is great.

This is a great method for enjoying the aromatherapy effects of essential oils in a very pleasant way. Like if you’re feeling nervous or upset, just put some lavender or rose essential oil in your diffuser!

But I’ve read that to get the full therapeutic effect of an aromatherapy essential oil, you should use a nebulizer diffuser. Boy, are they weird looking!!! But they don’t use heat, and supposedly heat can change the nature or qualities of some essential oils. So if you have a bad cold and want to diffuse, say, eucalyptus oil, you should use a nebulizer, or so I’m told. I don’t own a nebulizer yet, but I’m gonna get one for this winter for sure. If any of you have experience with nebulizers, I’m dying to hear about it!!!

I read that peppermint essential oil and lavender essential oil are both good for headaches. So when my hubby got a headache this weekend, I decided to try the aromatherapy combo in the diffuser. Here’s what I used:

Headache Essential Oil Aromatherapy Recipe

3 drops Peppermint Essential Oil
3 drops Lavender Esssential Oil

Within a few minutes of putting them in the diffuser, the room smelled great! I have to say, the lavender essential oil scent was more overpowering than the peppermint essential oil scent, but both scents could be smelled.

Best of all, my hubby said they helped his headache! Yeah! I’ve also read that you can put a couple of drops of peppermint and/or lavender essential oil on a tissue and then inhale the scent from time to time, but I haven’t tried this yet.

I think I read somewhere that you can also rub a drop of the oil into your temples if you have a headache, but I’m not sure if the peppermint would irritate the skin. Anybody have any experience doing this? Always so much to learn where aromatherapy is concerned!!!

I don’t know about you, but I love the smell of orange essential oil (citrus sinensis). Its smell is calming and refreshing at the same time and smells just like oranges. Just waving the bottle back and forth under my nose makes me happy.

So this weekend, I thought I’d try some orange oil in an aromatherapy diffuser, hoping it would perfume my kitchen with that great scent. I put one drop in the water and waited, thinking it was maybe like rose essential oil, where one drop is almost overwhelming!

Nothing happened. I couldn’t smell anything. So I added another drop, and then another drop, and so on. I finally got it up to 6 drops of orange essential oil. By then, I could smell it if I stuck my nose right over the diffuser. LOL!

I gave up after 6 drops and chalked up orange oil as “wimpy” in the diffusion department. I wonder why that’s so? Why do some essential oils diffuse great, and others disappear? Ah, the mysteries of aromatherapy…