How To Make Lavender Oil (Infused Oil Method)

Learn everything you need to know about how to make lavender-infused oil at home, including what kind of lavender and carrier oils to use, and tips on harvesting homegrown lavender. It’s easy to make, and though it doesn’t smell like lavender essential oil, it has many therapeutic properties for the skin and overall health. Once made, you can use it to make skin creams, lip balms, salves, soap, and other skincare recipes.

Lavender is probably the most well-known and widely used medicinal plant, and for good reason. It grows right across the temperate and semi-arid world, is safe, and is a soothing treatment for anxiety, insomnia, headaches, and even depression. It looks and smells incredible, too! People have been growing and harvesting it for thousands of years and using it for all manner of things. Food recipes, insect deterrents, decorations, and scenting the home, to name a few. We can also use the fragrant flowers for health and skincare.

Lavender flowers contain natural components that can help heal burns and soothe skin. It’s also antibacterial and could help with skin conditions such as acne. However, using the flowers directly on your skin isn’t the most efficient way to use them. Instead, we use water, steam, alcohol, glycerine, and carrier oils to extract the active constituents from the plant material.

The easiest and most versatile way to do this is to use a carrier oil, such as olive or sweet almond oil. The oil pulls the active constituents from the flowers. This essence is then free-floating in the lavender-infused oil, which you can then use as an ingredient to make salves, creams, lip balm, and massage or bath oil. Many more skincare recipes, too!

Benefits of Homemade Lavender Oil

Lavender has been cultivated for at least 2500 years, and in recent times, it’s mainly been grown in France for use in perfumery. It was there in 1910 that a chemist named René-Maurice Gattefossé invented aromatherapy thanks entirely to chance. He badly scalded his hand and, having no water around, plunged his hand into lavender essential oil. It could have gone so wrong if it were anything else. However, his skin healed cleanly and quickly, without scars, and that happy accident led to the modern use of lavender oil in alternative medicine.

Lavender essence contains many active constituents that can benefit our skin and health. According to the Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine, lavender flowers contain up to 3% volatile oils containing over 40 plant chemicals, including linalyl acetate, cineole, and linalool. It also contains flavonoids, tannins, and coumarins.

This blend and balance of active constituents give lavender its beautiful scent and healing properties. It’s antiseptic and antibacterial, helping heal bug bites, stings, acne, burns, and sunburns. In skincare, lavender is a calming herb and can help treat inflamed skin and rashes. It can also affect your mood and mental state. While English lavender is calming, lavender varieties high in camphor can be energizing.

Lavender Essential Oil vs Lavender-infused Oil

The lavender oil that most are familiar with is lavender essential oil. It’s a high concentration of the plant’s volatile oils, including the aromatics that smell so good! Making essential oil requires distilling the lavender flowers, capturing the steam, and cooling it. The result is lavender floral water (hydrosol) and lavender essential oil. It’s a challenging process to do at home, even if you buy a still. It also requires about three pounds (1.36 kg) of fresh lavender to get just 0.5 fl oz (15 ml) of essential oil.

The other type of lavender oil is lavender-infused oil, which I will show you how to make. You don’t need expensive equipment or ingredients to make it – just lavender flowers, carrier oil, a sealed jar, and a few everyday kitchen utensils. Homemade lavender oil, made using the oil-infusion method, is not as potent as lavender essential oil but still contains many skin-soothing properties. Its main ingredient is carrier oil, though, so choose wisely. You want it to have a good shelf life and stability and be suitable for your desired purpose.

Choosing a Carrier Oil

Carrier oils are any vegetable oils that are liquid at room temperature. They include olive oil, apricot kernel oil, sunflower oil, rice bran oil, and much more. Though it’s best to use high-quality oils from a cosmetic supplier, you can also use common oils from the supermarket. Just ensure the best-by date on the bottle is at least a year away. But which type of oil to get? The type you choose for your homemade lavender oil will be dependent on what you’d like to do with it.

If you’d like to use it to make lavender body balm (lavender salve), any skin-nourishing oil with a good shelf life will do. Most people use extra-virgin olive oil as their carrier oil for making salves because it lasts a long time and is relatively inexpensive. It can be heavy on the skin and have a distinctive scent that some might not like. On the plus side, that heaviness can be helpful if you’re making a salve for treating eczema and dry skin.

If you plan to make lavender soap, use a liquid oil that is part of the original soap recipe. It could again be olive oil, but it could also be sunflower or even canola oil. I include homemade lavender oil in the lavender soap recipe in my book.

For lavender skincare and moisturizers, stick with light-feeling oils that won’t clog your pores. They include grapeseed oil, sweet almond oil, or apricot kernel oil. For bath oil, you could use fractionated coconut oil, avocado oil, or any of the other oils previously mentioned.

The Best Lavender to Use

Not all lavender is equal when it comes to making homemade lavender oil. The best lavender to use is English lavender Lavandula angustifolia, and many cultivars are available. I grow Hidcote and Munstead, both beautiful English lavender varieties that produce sweet lavender oil.

However, many lavender essential oils are made with a hybrid lavender (lavandin) variety called Grosso. It’s a large plant with flowers that contain more oil than other lavender varieties. Grosso, like other hybrid lavenders, has a high camphor content, which can change the scent. I think when people say that lavender gives them headaches, they’re referring to hybrid lavender rather than true English lavender.

Hybrid and Spanish Lavender

When choosing lavender to make lavender oil, the best choice is English lavender. If you don’t have it or are unsure, use a Lavandula x intermedia cross like Grosso. It’s sometimes hard for people to tell these two apart when they grow lavender, but there are ways to tell them apart by looking at the plant and flowers.

English lavender tends to bloom earlier in the summer, and the plants and stems are smaller than those of hybrids. Their stems and flower heads are more petite and less pointed than those of hybrids. Also, being more vigorous, hybrids can have side branches with flowers coming off the main stem of lavender. You don’t see that in English lavender.

One thing that both English lavender and Lavandula x intermedia have in common is that they form lavender buds. They appear at the end of long stems, and each bud will eventually bloom into a tiny individual flower. Spike lavender, also called Portuguese lavender, has lavender buds and can be used to make lavender oil. It looks different from the other two and is less common in gardens.

French lavender Lavandula stoechas (also called Spanish lavender) is a lovely tufted lavender popular in warmer regions. They don’t survive cold winters, but are attractive, pollinator-friendly plants in gardens. Although they are used to make essential oils, they have inferior medicinal properties to English lavender. So if your lavender has a little tuft at the top, like feathers, and no lavender buds, leave it in the garden and instead search out English lavender to make lavender oil.

What Part of the Lavender Plant is Used for Oil?

Before we jump to how to make lavender oil, you may be looking at your lavender plant and wondering just how to harvest it. What parts do you take? Where do you cut? I tend to take a handful of lavender stems and make a sweeping cut just above the first leaves. Although lavender leaves have the same beneficial properties as the flowers, they are in a much smaller quantity, so it’s not worth harvesting them.

Most of lavender’s active constituents are in the flowers, flower buds, and topmost part of the stem. Though you could just cut off the flowers, cutting the entire stem length has benefits. It makes the lavender easier to dry in bunches, and removing them will save you time pruning the plant later.

How much Lavender does it take to Make Oil?

As mentioned, you need a still and a lot of lavender to make essential oil, but that’s not the case with lavender-infused oil. Good news if you only have a single plant to harvest from! When making lavender-infused oil, you need enough to fill a jar.

The jar size depends on how much lavender oil you need to make. For soap, use a jar that can hold at least double the amount of oil required for the recipe. With the lavender and its tendency to absorb oil, you should get enough at the end for your recipe. If you want to make just a little lavender oil for use in the bath or to make lavender bath fizzies, choose a smaller jar. What you don’t want to do is make way more than you can use before the oil goes off.

Preparing the Lavender

It’s easy to make homemade lavender oil using the cold infusion method. All you do is loosely fill a clean glass jar halfway to all the way full with lavender flowers. You can use just buds or entire lavender flower heads. They can be used as is or lightly crushed in a mortar and pestle to open them up and increase their surface area.

Dried lavender is best for making lavender-infused oil. It contains all the active constituents you’re after but none of the microbes or moisture that can cause issues in infused oils. If you use fresh flowers, ensure that all the flowers remain submerged under the surface of the oil at all times. Using a preserving weight and keeping the flowers attached to the stem helps to keep them under. If they float to the surface, they’ll mold, rot, and introduce microbes into the oil.

Infusing the Flowers and Oil

After you’ve filled the jar with lavender, top it up with your choice of carrier oil. Fill the glass with oil to within an inch (about 2.5 cm) of the lip of the jar. Oxygen and oil aren’t great companions, so reduce the air in your jar while still giving room to shake the contents. Seal the jar with a tight-fitting lid and label it.

After that, the lavender flowers and oil need a full month to infuse. Store the jar in a warm place out of direct sunlight, such as in a kitchen cupboard or a shelf in a dim room. Light and air can cause oil to go rancid, so avoid storing oil in containers that expose it to too much of either. If you‘d like to infuse the oil in a warm windowsill, you can place the jar in a thick paper bag before. It will warm up inside, but it will block out the UV light.

When using dried lavender flowers, it’s worth shaking the jar every now and again. You could shake every day if you remember, or a couple of times a week if you don’t. Don’t worry about regularity too much. With fresh flowers, leave the flowers and oil alone. You don’t want to knock the lavender out from under the preserving weight or damage the jar.

Straining the Finished Oil

After a month has passed, strain the oil from the lavender. You can use a fine-mesh sieve, a cheesecloth, or both. The benefit of using cheesecloth is that you can bundle it up and squeeze a lot of oil from the lavender. A sieve on its own works fine, though, too. Leave the lavender in it for half an hour, and much of the oil will drip through.

After this, you discard the lavender flowers. Their goodness is now in the oil, and they are now spent. If they’re relatively well-squeezed of oil, you can put them in your compost pile or bokashi bin. If not, throw them away. As for the finished lavender oil, the carrier oil wouldn’t have changed much in color if you used dried lavender. If you use fresh, it can have a greenish hue.

In the photos for this recipe, I used sweet almond oil as a carrier oil, which is pale yellow. By the end of the process, the lavender-infused oil looked as green as avocado oil.

Storing the Oil for Optimal Shelf-Life

Pour the finished lavender oil into dark glass bottles or clear glass containers and store in a dark place. Keep it at room temperature and use it by the best-by date on the bottle of carrier oil that you used. If you’re unsure whether it’s still good, smell the oil. A faint (or strong) scent of oil paints means that it’s unfortunately gone rancid, and you should discard it. If not, the oil is good to use.

Lavender oil made with dried flowers has a shelf life of 1 year, or the best-by date of the carrier oil you use to make it. Shelf life can be much shorter when fresh lavender is used to make lavender oil. Unfortunately, the tiny amount of water in the flowers can cause carrier oils to oxidize (go rancid) prematurely. Keep an eye on your infused oil and smell it regularly. Also, aim to use it up within six months of making it.

Ways to Use Homemade Lavender Oil

There are many ways to use lavender oil in skincare. Aside from salves, creams, and soap, it makes an excellent massage oil that can soothe muscles and reduce tension. You can also use it in lip balm recipes to help treat chapped lips and cold sores.

Lavender-infused oil even has edible uses. You can use it in salad dressings, cake recipes, or lavender cookies (replacing some of the butter). If you use lavender oil in food, make sure that the lavender flowers you used to make it were dried. Fresh flowers can inadvertently introduce botulism to the oil.

Here are some ideas that should help inspire you to use DIY lavender oil in your home and beauty regimen:

• How to Make Lavender Soap
• Natural Lavender Body Balm Recipe
• How to Make Herbal Lip Balm