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When you want to use essential oils for a massage, you don’t want to use the essential oils “neat” (full strength). Many of them would irritate the skin if they were used full strength, and you’d spend a fortune on essential oils!

Instead, massage therapists who use essential oils use a carrier oil or a base oil and add a small amount of essential oil to the carrier oil. They can do that because one drop of an essential oil is very powerful, and can go a long way.

There are many carrier oils to choose from, and I’ll talk about the ones I’m most familiar with. Here are the most common carrier / base oils:

Grapeseed oil: Grapeseed oil is a favorite of many massage therapists. It is light green and odorless. Grapeseed oil does not leave your skin feeling greasy! And very few people are allergic to it.

Jojoba oil (pronounced hoe-HOE-bah): Jojoba oil isn’t really an oil. It’s a waxy substance from the beans of the plant simmondsia chinensis. But it looks and feels like oil. Jojoba is usually my carrier oil of choice, because it doesn’t leave any oily residue or sticky feeling at all on the skin. Also, the best thing about jojoba oil is that it doesn’t go rancid! Because it’s not an oil, it doesn’t go rancid like oils. So if you make up a mixture of essential oils and jojoba oil, it will stay good practically forever. Jojoba oil is also really good for your hair and scalp.

Olive oil: If you’re going to use olive oil, try to buy cold-pressed extra virgin oil. My favorite brand is by Spectrum and I get it in the supermarket. Olive oil is wonderful for your skin and its moisturizing abilities are beyond compare. However, it does leave your skin feeling a bit greasy, and it has a distinctive smell. So many people dilute olive oil with a lighter oil, such as grapeseed oil.

Sweet Almond Oil: Sweet almond oil is one of the most commonly used oils in massage and in other skin applications of aromatherapy. It is known for its ability to soften and smooth the skin. I usually use sweet almond oil undiluted.

Vitamin E Oil: You really can’t use vitamin E oil undiluted, because it is very, very thick and doesn’t spread out across the skin as smoothly and as rapidly as other, lighter oils. However, Vitamin E oil is great at keeping other oils from going rancid, and it’s a great anti-oxidant. So I usually add a few drops of Vitamin E oil to any massage oil mixture I’m going to store for a while, especially if the mixture isn’t made with jojoba oil.

Have you ever smelled a Patchouli plant? It smells heavenly. Just like the essential oil, but less over-the-top. All you have to do is touch one of the leaves and you smell great!

Last spring, I bought a tiny Patchouli plant at my local nursery. It was so small, I was going to plant it in an oversized teacup. My husband thought that was too small, and suggested I plant it outside in a 10” pot.

That Patchouli plant grew like crazy! When I think back to my plan to put it in a teacup, I laugh. It doesn’t get terribly tall (maybe 12” or so), but it bushes and branches like wildfire. Pretty quickly, I had this monstrous plant in my pot, with 3/4” thick stems! And oh, every time I walked by it, I could get that great Patchouli essential oil smell. I instantly felt calm and relaxed. Who says aromatherapy doesn’t work? LOL

Patchouli isn’t winter-hardy, so we took some cuttings before it got too cold. I couldn’t find too much on the internet about propagating them, but figured it probably wouldn’t be too hard, given how much Patchouli loves to grow.

We used some rooting hormone (like Root-Tone) and planted 4 cuttings in a small container filled with half perlite and half sphagnum moss. We punctured some holes in the bottom of the container to provide drainage and put the container inside a saucer to catch any water.

We moistened the soil thoroughly and then made a “tent” by putting a plastic bag over the container and its saucer. We used an old plastic chopstick to keep the tent from collapsing in on the plant.

Here’s what the Patchouli tent looked like:

The great thing about the tent is that it keeps moisture in, just like a tiny greenhouse. By the next morning, we had condensation on the inside of the tent. And for this plant, at least, we didn’t have to water it again until we were ready to plant. We checked the cuttings at one week, but didn’t see any roots through the semi-clear container we had planted them in.

At two weeks, we saw roots curling out the bottom, through the drainage holes!

We knew we had a winner. And by then, it was obvious that they were actually growing taller in there, not just setting roots. The plants were actually getting considerably taller! Look at how healthy they were:

At three weeks, we uncovered the cuttings and planted them in Miracle Gro potting soil. When I pulled the cuttings out to transplant them, you should have seen the roots they had created in just 3 weeks! It was amazing. They were absolutely healthy and thriving. I’m sure they’ll do great in their new pots. The only problem is that I’ll have to keep trimming them because they can’t grow into giant bushy plants on my kitchen counter. Here’s one of them in its new home:

I’m pretty much convinced now that we could have (a) rooted them in water; or (b) stuck them directly in their new pots right after we dipped them in the rooting hormone. Patchouli just seems to love to grow. I’m looking forward to smelling that calming scent in the dead of winter. I wonder if they ever bloom? Ours never got around to blooming outside, but they must bloom at some point, because I know you can buy Patchouli seeds. Maybe I’ll find out this winter!

The other day, my husband was complaining that his neck felt stiff and it was painful for him to move around. I felt his neck with my fingers and I could feel some stiff, knotty muscles. So I put together an aromatherapy massage oil combination:

2 drops Lavender essential oil (lavandula augustifolia)
2 drops Rosemary essential oil (rosmarinus officinalis)

Add the essential oils to 1 teaspoon (5 cc) carrier oil of your choice. You can double, triple, quadruple, etc. the recipe if you need to massage a large area of the body.

To use, dip1 or 2 fingers into the essential oil/carrier oil mix and gently massage into the affected area until the skin is not oily any more. You’ll notice that the skin gets pretty warm with this combination of oils.

My husband said it helped a lot, and I repeated it 2 more times that day. By the next morning, he said his neck felt a lot better.

A little of this oil goes a long way. I still have plenty of it, and I only made up 5 cc of the mixture. An added bonus is that this combination smells great!

Here’s another aromatherapy recipe for stress relief and relaxation. I put this one together myself, by going through my “happy box” of essential oils and sniffing. You should try doing that; you never know what you’ll come up with!

Here’s the recipe:

2 drops Bay essential oil (laurus nobilis)
2 drops Vetivert essential oil (vetiveria zizanioides)
2 drops Bergamot essential oil (citrus bergamia)

Diffuse in your favorite diffuser.

Because of the Vetivert essential oil, this recipe is very grounding. The Vetivert is extremely long lasting, and this is one scent I have found will last for the entire time the tea light candle burns. It creates little brown globs in the water of my diffuser, and it actually stained the inside of my ceramic diffuser. The stain was easily removed with some Brillo. I think the smell of Vetivert is heavenly, and a little stain removal is a small price to pay for it!

As an aside, if you don’t like Patchouli essential oil, you probably won’t like Vetivert essential oil. Like Patchouli, Vetivert is dark and Earthy. I think both essential oils are sensual, but some people have a strong negative reaction to Patchouli essential oil. I feel sorry for them!

I put together a great aromatherapy recipe for stress relief. It is very Earthy, grounding and calming, which exactly what you need when you’re stressed. Especially if you get that feeling, like I sometimes do, that you’re about to “go into orbit”!

Here is the recipe:

3 drops Sandalwood Essential Oil (santalum album)
2 drops Patchouli Essential Oil (pogostemon cablin)
2 drops Cardamom Essential Oil (elettaria cardamomum)

Diffuse in your favorite diffuser.

A couple of notes:

1. I was surprised at the way the Cardamom essential oil dominated the mixture. I really expected the heavy, heady fragrance of the patchouli essential oil to dominate, but I was wrong. If you don’t know what Cardamom is, you may recognize it from eating at an Indian restaurant. Many Indian restaurants put Cardamom seeds in the rice. The seeds are those big green or black pods in the rice.

They don’t taste particularly great when you bite into the seeds, but the taste and smell of Cardamom left by the seeds really makes the rice taste great.

2. The character of the aromatherapy mixture changed over time. The tea light lasted about 6 hours, and over time, I could get more of the scent of Patchouli essential oil. I’d say for the last 2 hours of diffusion, the Patchouli was more detectable.

3. Sandalwood is a tough essential oil to bring out in a diffuser. Its individual scent gets a bit lost among other essential oils, but it harmonizes and blends wonderfully, adding its scent to the aromatherapy mixture in subtle ways.

Owwwww! I did the dumbest thing today. I was handling an essential oil – thyme essential oil, I believe – and after I was done, I didn’t immediately wash my hands like I usually do.

Then, in a moment of distraction, I rubbed my eye. Shriek! Ouch! What was I thinking??

Fortunately, I didn’t get any thyme essential oil on my eyeball. It just got rubbed on the corner of my eye. I immediately rubbed some olive oil on the skin to dilute the thyme oil, and that worked pretty quickly to get rid of the burning sensation. By the way, never use water on skin that is burning from exposure to essential oil. The water just spreads the oil around to more places, just like an oil slick gets bigger and bigger as it floats along the coastline. At least I knew that much.

So, for safe handling of essential oils, always wash your hands with soap and water after you handle any essential oil, even the safer essential oils, like lavender and tea tree. If you can tolerate it, you can try working with exam gloves on, but I find that to be a bit clumsy. If you do that, don’t use latex exam gloves. The oil will break down the latex and you’ll have a hole-y glove!