I’m here to teach you how and when to use essential oil diffusers, what the best oils are, and
where to put the diffuser in your home. By the time you’re done reading this guide, you’ll know which is the best — and most beneficial — spot for it.

How Essential Oil Diffusers Work

By using a process called permeation, diffusers basically break down the oil and water particles inside. Then, they distribute those particles into the air.

In essence, using these devices is the easiest way to enjoy the soothing benefits of aromatherapy.

Having diffusers in your home has a ton of benefits. For example, most people get diffusers in order to purify the air in their homes a bit. What’s more,  you can use them to reduce your stress and anxiety levels, as well as create a calming environment.

Types of Essential Oil Diffusers

There are four types of essential oil diffusers you can currently buy:

• Ultrasonic
• Nebulizing
• Evaporative
• Heat

Ultrasonic Essential Oil Diffusers

Ultrasonic or cold-air diffusers are the most popular type because they produce an incredibly fine mist. Instead of heat, these use electronic frequencies to create vibrations. Those vibrations bring the oil to the surface and then diffuse it into the air.

Since they don’t need heat, ultrasonic diffusers can even double as humidifiers. Also, as someone who has been dabbling in aromatherapy for a while, I think using them is the best way to experience all of the benefits of essential oil healing.

Nebulizing Essential Oil Diffusers

Nebulizing diffusers don’t need heat or water to work. Instead, they use atomizers to create a thin stream of airborne particles. Then, using a built-in fan, the diffusers spread those particles all around the room.

However, nebulizing essential oil diffusers are pretty powerful, so you shouldn’t be using them without a timer. In fact, I’d only recommend getting one if you’ve been practicing aromatherapy for a while.

Evaporative Oil Diffusers

Evaporative diffusers are the easiest to set up and use compared to any other diffuser. All you need to do is put a few drops of essential oil on a pad — the fan under it will do the rest of the work.

But because of the way they are built, you need to put a lot more oil than you would in any of the two previous types. Also, the oil you put inside might dry up faster, so it just won’t have all of the healing properties it usually does.

Heat Diffusers

Heat diffusers are the least powerful type of the bunch, as they aren’t as effective given that they use electricity or a candle to heat the oil and diffuse the vapor.

On the other hand, buying a heat diffuser might be a good choice if you’re just starting to dabble in aromatherapy. They’re cheap, silent, and don’t need a lot of power to work.

How to Use Essential Oil Diffusers

Essential oil diffusers are extremely easy to set up and use.

You should start by pouring the recommended amount of either tap or distilled water into the tank. If you’re using tap water, you’ll have to clean your diffuser often because the minerals in it can cause buildup.

Once you have your water just at the indicator line, it’s time to put the oil in. Now, most diffusers require around three to 10 drops of oil for 100 ml. At the end of the day, how much oil you pour in will depend on your personal preference. Also, remember to use only pure, diluted oil to avoid clogging up your diffuser.

Now that the water and oil are inside, it’s time to plug the diffuser in and enjoy all the soothing benefits. And, if your diffuser has a timer, make sure to turn it on at this point.

If it doesn’t, a good rule of thumb is to leave the diffuser on for 30 to 60 minutes, and then turn it off for the same amount of time. Otherwise, your diffuser might overheat. Also, the strong scent of the oils might give you a giant, throbbing headache.

How to Clean Your Essential Oil Diffuser

After each use, pour the excess water out of your diffuser and clean it with some natural cleaning products. I recommend using natural liquid detergents or dishwashing liquids for the job. Also, make sure to clean your mist chip with a bit of rubbing alcohol on a cotton swab.

To avoid getting a mineral buildup, you have to deep-clean your diffuser at least once a month. Also, before you start cleaning it, check the user manual to see if there are any precautions you should take.

First, start by pouring water into it until the tank is half-full. Then, add about ten drops of pure white vinegar and turn the diffuser on.

The vinegar will help remove any mineral and oil buildup that’s been stuck inside. To get the best results, you should leave the diffuser on for about three to five minutes.

Once enough time has passed, turn the diffuser off and drain all of the water out. If you still see some buildup, you can take a cotton swab dipped in white vinegar to clean it.

As soon as you’ve made sure there’s nothing stuck inside, rinse the diffuser with water. Finally, you can either let it air-dry or use a clean cloth to wipe it down.

Essential Oil Recommendations

Now, before you run out to the store to get some essential oils, you should first consider what you’re using them for. Do you just want your apartment to smell nice, or do you want to take advantage of the oils’ healing properties?

If you want to use them for healing, there are a few types to consider. For example, peppermint essential oil works great for headaches, while chamomile oil can help you get a good night’s sleep. Also, if you want to use essential oils to help reduce your stress levels, I recommend getting frankincense oil.

Other popular essential oils include:

• Lavender
• Tea tree
• Wild orange
• Eucalyptus
• Cinnamon
• Patchouli
• Cedarwood
• Rosemary

Essential Oil Combinations

If you’re tired of the same old oil smell, you could always make your own custom blend. For example, if you have allergies, you can mix three equal drops of lemon, lavender, and peppermint oil. Not only will your home smell amazing, but you’ll also breathe and sleep better because of it.

On the other hand, if you need help falling asleep, I recommend putting three equal drops of lavender, wild orange, and chamomile oil in your diffuser. It’ll relax you and put you in a good mood before you go to bed.

Finally, if you need a pick-me-up when you get up in the morning, I love mixing four drops of peppermint oil with four drops of wild orange. The scent is refreshing, and it will help wake you up as well as prepare you to conquer the day.

Where to Put Essential Oil Diffusers

There are so many factors that determine where you should put your diffuser. For example, do you have a nebulizer or an ultrasonic? Also, which room do you spend most of your time in?

Let’s see where the best spots for your diffuser in your house are. I’m even going to show you how to make sure you’re getting the most use out of it.

Living Room

When looking for the best place to put your diffuser, the first thing you should consider is putting it below eye level. If you put it on a high shelf, you will weaken the oils’ potency and won’t be able to enjoy their soothing properties. Also, I wouldn’t recommend putting it on your windowsill because sunlight can damage it.

For example, I keep my diffuser on my coffee table, far from the walls and the ceiling. Since I have a wooden coffee table, I’ve had to put a placemat under my diffuser so that it doesn’t get ruined by the steam.

For my living room, I love making a unique blend to keep me calm all day. To create a cozy atmosphere, I take three drops of wild orange oil and three of copaiba, with just a drop of peppermint.

Bedroom

The most important thing to remember when using your diffuser in your bedroom is to keep it away from your nightstand. By placing it there, you risk knocking it over while you sleep. Also, the scent of the oils might be too strong and may give you a headache. So, I recommend keeping it a few feet away from your bed on a different table.

For the bedroom, I love making an oil blend with chamomile, ylang-ylang, and a bit of eucalyptus. I have found that this mix helps me relax before bed and creates a soothing atmosphere.

Bathroom

Keeping a diffuser in the bathroom is a great way to get rid of any unpleasant smells. Just make sure to put it far away from your shower or any other appliances, like washing machines.

My favorite mixture for the bathroom is a blend of tea tree, spearmint, and lemon oil. It is the perfect scent to banish any bathroom odors and make your bathroom feel like a spa.

Safety Precautions

Even though there are plenty of health benefits to diffusing essential oils, you still need to be careful when buying them.

To start, when looking for some nice oils, make sure to buy organic, diluted ones. Also, remember not to run your diffuser all day and night to avoid giving yourself a massive headache.

Finally, don’t try to replace your diffuser with a humidifier, unless you have an ultrasonic one. These two devices have totally different components. By putting essential oils in your humidifier, you run the risk of damaging it or hurting yourself.

In Conclusion

Playing with different essential oils can be really fun. If you’re new to it, I recommend just using one to see which scent works best for you. Once you become a pro, try making different oil blends for different rooms in your home.

The two most important things to remember when considering the location is to place the diffuser on a sturdy, non-porous surface and below eye level. Also, if you can, put it as close to the center of the room as possible. By doing so, you’ll be able to enjoy all the soothing benefits of essential oils. More importantly — the strong scent won’t give you a headache.

The post Best Places to Put Your Essential Oil Diffuser at Home appeared first on HomelyVille.

Our sense of smell can sometimes have a profound impact on our emotional well-being. Some people find scents to be highly therapeutic.

Besides that, essential oils are also a great way to keep your house smelling amazing. But before I get to that, let’s go back to the basics:

What Are Essential Oils?

Essential oils, also called ethereal oils and volatile oils, are concentrated liquids containing the fragrance essence of a certain plant. In addition, they’re highly volatile, which means they evaporate quite easily.

Throughout history, people have mostly been using them for medical purposes. The practice of using essential oils to treat various illnesses comes from the Arabian peninsula. Ibn al-Batair, an Andalusian physician, introduced the practice to Europe.

In addition to their medicinal properties, people have also been using essential oils to create perfumes, incenses, flavorings, massage oils and so on. In more recent times, they have gained massive popularity amongst practitioners of alternative medicine and aromatherapy.

How Essential Oils Are Made

Chemists use distillation to extract essential oils from the raw plant material. Once the distillation process has been completed, they mix parts of the plant that contain the oils with water and put it into a distillation vessel. As the vessel is heated, the oils evaporate with the water vapor.

Then, the steam is cooled and it reverts back to liquid state. For most plants, one extraction process is enough to extract all the oil. However, tropical plants like ylang-ylang require a special process known as fractional distillation in order to get the oil.

On the other hand, some people use traditional expression and cold-pressing techniques to extract essential oils. The main advantage of such traditional methods lies in the absence of heat used in the process. Everything is purely mechanical, so the oils remain as natural as possible.

Some other, lesser-known processes used to extract essential oils include solvent extraction and florasol extraction.

Types of Oils

Essential oils can be broken down into two major categories — true oils and plant water essences. While my article is focusing on true oils, I think it would be important to mention plant water essences as well. They’re becoming more and more popular in the cosmetics industry, and you’ve most likely at least heard of them.

Here you can find the most popular types of true oils:

• lavender oil
• tea tree oil
• patchouli oil
• eucalyptus oil
• peppermint oil
• lemon oil
• orange oil
• cedarwood oil
• clove oil
• anise oil
• cinnamon oil
• rosemary oil

And a couple of the most popular plant water essences:

• rose water
• lavender water
• orange blossom water
• lemon balm
• Clary sage

Diffusing Essential Oils

As I previously mentioned, there are a few different methods of using essential oils. Still, using a diffuser is your best option. It ensures that you’re using the least amount of oil possible, and still getting the desired effects.

Essential Oil Diffusers

Following the aromatherapy’s rise in popularity, essential oil diffusers have become more affordable, more available, and much more effective than they were before. In addition, you can find them in every color, shape or design.

Not so long ago, the only way to diffuse essential oils was to put them in a container, most commonly with a flame burning under it. Heated oils get even more volatile than usual, but you don’t have any control over the amount of oil diffused. Such devices can easily produce too much scent, thereby making everyone around it nauseous.

Types of Diffusers

Today, we have two distinct types of essential oil diffusers — ultrasonic diffusers and nebulizers. They both have the same effects, but there are a few key differences between them.

Ultrasonic diffusers use ultrasound to disperse the oil into the air. The sound disperses the combination of oil and water from the reservoir.

The great thing about ultrasonic diffusers is that you have complete control over how much oil you disperse. It’s usually somewhere between 2 and 10 drops of oil per reservoir, depending on its size. In addition, ultrasonic diffusers are quite cheap and readily available.

Nebulizers are not that popular today, although they were once considered medical equipment. These devices use electricity to disperse the oil, not even needing water to operate. However, they use about 3ml of oil per hour, which can be a bit overwhelming. Still, most people who use oils for medical purposes actually prefer nebulizers.

How Long Should You Diffuse Oils For?

One of the most common mistakes that people make with essential oils is turning on their diffuser for the first time and running it for hours, or even overnight. Even if you don’t have sensitive senses, you might feel nauseous, maybe even vomit or faint.

Keep in mind that these oils are highly concentrated, so you shouldn’t put too much in. Five drops for a six-ounce water tank is the optimal amount.

If you think you need to kick it up a notch, feel free to do so. However, keep the diffuser on for one hour max. 20 minutes should be enough, but if you feel like your room could use some more essence, wait for an hour, then run it again for 20 more minutes. That’s enough to give your room a pleasant scent that isn’t too overpowering.

Honestly, the only time you should up your oil dosage is when you’re dealing with high temperatures. Oils evaporate more easily when the air is hot, so you’ll need more oil to achieve the same effect.

Safety Precautions

When using essential oils, you have to be careful with how much oil you’re using, as well as how you’re using it. For starters, you should use one of the aforementioned devices to disperse the scent. Never put oils in a humidifier.

Also, internal ingestion of even the slightest amount of oil can be highly toxic. For example, ingesting more than 4ml of eucalyptus oil can be fatal. On the other hand, some essential oils can cause skin and sinus irritation.

For example, tea tree oil and lavender oil can disrupt the hormone balance in prepubescent boys. If you use too much of it too often, that can cause the development of gynecomastia (male breast growth). So, you should be very careful when using essential oils near children.

What Are They Used For?

Nowadays, people use essential oils for all kinds of purposes. For starters, they’re the bread and butter of the perfume industry. Similarly, the cosmetics industry heavily relies on essential oils. Why waste time creating scents in a lab when you can take what you need from nature itself?

On the other hand, recent studies have shown that essential oils can also be effectively used as natural pesticides. For example, you may already know that lavender and eucalyptus oils work great as mosquito repellents.

Although they lack the strength of classic pesticides, the ecological benefits of using natural pesticides are huge. You can cover vast areas, while negatively affecting only the unwanted pests.

In addition to the perfume, pesticide, and cosmetics industries, essential oils have worked their way into the food and drink industry. About 100 different types of oils are currently approved by the FDA as flavoring agents.

Aromatherapy

Over the past few years, a branch of alternative medicine known as aromatherapy has gained a lot of traction. It uses essential oils and other aromas to cure different conditions.

Aromatherapists use the oils in a few different ways — vapor inhalation, massage, etc. The method usually depends on the condition that needs to be treated.

Even though many people practice aromatherapy, scientists are still having trouble proving the efficiency of the medical use of essential oils. For now, aromatherapy can surely improve your emotional state, as well as help with postoperative nausea. All other claimed benefits of essential oils remain scientifically unconfirmed.

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