How to Extract Essential Oils and Scents from Flowers

It's fun to extract essential oils and scents from flowers.

Flowers yield beautiful fragrant essential oils, and although they are quite expensive to buy, it isn't that difficult to extract the essential oils. It does require some time and attention, but nonetheless can be done with relative ease at home without a distiller. It won't take long before you are a dab hand at extracting essential oils and will be able to delight friends and family with fragrant gifts.

Things You'll Need

• Trivet
• Large (15 L) Copper Pot
• Heatproof glass bowl, which fits inside copper pot
• Ice
• Distilled water (8 L)
• Flower Petals (2 Kg)
• Glass Bowl (optional

Instructions

1. First of all, you need to place the trivet, clean of course, in the bottom of the copper pot. There should be a little space left around the trivet when you put into your copper pot. This is crucial, or your petals won't have enough room to move.

2. Next, you need to place the heatproof glass bowl on top of the trivet, hence the need for it to be heatproof. The bowl will serve as the collection point for our essential oils.

3. Now, fill the area around the trivet with petals. You want to use two kilograms of flower petals.

4. The next step is to pour your distilled water over the petals. This should just cover them.

5. If you have a glass bowl which fits snugly into the top of the copper pot, leaving some room between it and the glass bowl, place it on top and fill it with ice. If not, inverting the lid will suffice. Whatever you use, it is important that it fits tightly or the volatile essential oils may slip out the gaps instead of dripping into your glass bowl.

6. Place the whole contraption on the stove-top and simmer for around three hours. It is vitally important that you do not boil the water as this will destroy the volatile oils we are trying to extract. You need to keep an eye on the ice and refill it if it is getting low as it is helps to speed condensation.

7. Once done, you can simply pour the liquid in the glass bowl into an airtight container. Because the oils are fragrant they need to be stored in the fridge.

Tips & Warnings

• If you cannot get hold of a fifteen liter copper pot, adjust the amounts of water and petals you use to maintain the ratio of a 15 Liter pot with 2 Kg of petals and 8 Liters of distilled water. For example, if you have a 10 L copper pot, you will need 1.33 Kg of petals and 5.33 Liters of distilled water.

• To help speed up the extraction process, you can chop or crush the petals.

• This method works with leaf matter as well, so you could try extracting say some rosemary oil too.