The Best Essentail Oil Blends Recipes For Soap Making (2024)

I’m honestly not a very imaginative person, so it was really hard to come up with essential oil blends recipes when I first started my homemade soap making journey. But essential oils are important ingredients in handmade soap.

So I would group up all my little glass bottles, into bottom, middle, and top tones, and gather up a bunch of q-tips, sit at the table, and try to pairings that smelled amazing together.

I think I nearly burned out my husband’s nose while trying to figure out base notes, middle notes, and top notes. One thing’s for sure, we came away from these sessions with clear sinuses! 😉

I love to use essential oils, but I just don’t have a lot of creativity. It’s really easy to just pour lavender essential oil into a batch of goat milk soap and call it good – let’s be honest, lavender’s a great scent!

Despite my lack of creativity, we eventually came up with some very simple blends that we absolutely loved! And I have to credit our all-time favorite to Gabriel.

When to add essential oils to your batch of soap.

This is going to depend on whether your soap recipe is for cold process, or hot process soap.

For a cold process soap making, you’ll add your oils when your soap reaches a trace.

For hot process soap, you’ll add it at the end, right before you pour the finished product into the mold.

How much essential oil should you add?

The amount of oils, again, is different depending on the type of soap you’re making.

Here is the general guideline:

• For cold process, you’ll add about .7 oz. for each pound of soap.
• For hot process, or melt and pour, .3 oz. per pound.

Source

The measurements for these recipes are given in “parts” because I can’t tell you how much oil you’ll need in your particular batch of soap. You may like a strong scent, or you may like it a bit more mild. You’ll need more in cold processed soap, because the curing process “eats away” some of your essential oils, or if you’re making hot process soap, you’ll need less, because the curing is done before you add oil.

See what I mean?

Update: I’ve been asked by several people how much a “part” is, so here’s a simple breakdown: one part, is a fraction of a whole. You can measure in drops, teaspoons, cups, etc. So 4 parts of one oil, can be four drops or teaspoons, and one part of the second oil, would be one drop or teaspoon. Together, they make a whole of five drops (or teaspoons).

Essential Oil Blends Recipes

Spearmint Patchouli

• 4 parts spearmint
• 1 part patchouli

If I only had on blend for the rest of my life, this would be it. Spearmint is so sweet, so soothing and mild.

Patchouli is earthy, musky, and gives this blend a slightly more masculine scent than spearmint alone would. I think that’s why we both love it so much.

Orange Vanilla

• 2 parts sweet orange essential oil
• 1 part vanilla oil

I admit that sometimes I like this blend as much as the spearmint-patchouli mix.

It’s so sweet, so clean and homey. It’s orange creamcicle – my favorite ice cream treat ever as a child. (Also, orange essential oil is really cheap as essential oils go, so I like to use it a lot!)

I also think other citrus oils would be great in this, and cinnamon might also be a nice addition. Spices are always a nice addition to orange-scented soap.

Lavender Peppermint

• 1 part lavender
• 1 part peppermint

Separately, these are two of my favorite scents, and together, they’re just phenomenal! It may seem like an odd pairing, but the calming lavender, and invigorating peppermint go strangely well together.

The Man’s Man

• 1 part patchouli
• 2 parts bergamot
• 1 part cedarwood

This blend is 100% masculine. It’s perfect for the boy’s bathroom, or a hunting cabin, and for once, you could even give homemade soap to a guy as a gift and he won’t mind!

Orange-Mint

• 2 parts orange
• 1 part peppermint or spearmint

This is a mild, sweet, clean smelling blend, that’s so inoffensive, it’s a pretty safe bet when you want to gift someone who’s preferences in scent you’re not sure about. Tea tree, or eucalyptus might also be nice here.

These are some of the best essential oils blends, but Beyond these five delicious smelling blends, I’m a big fan of keeping things simple by making small batches of soap, and using a single oil in each batch.

One of my favorite things in the world is a strongly scented bar of rosemary soap. Or the deliciously clean smell of lemon or lime. One of our favorite essential oils for soap is lemongrass The possibilities of single scents and blends are truly endless. But that’s okay – it just means we get to make more soap!

Be aware that essential oils are not the same as fragrance oil, which can interact with your soap in a way that makes is sieze.

P.S. In the past, I have used several different essential oil brands in, and often use Now Brand essential oils for soapmaking (with the exception of the vanilla oil), because they are by far the cheapest that I could find, and seem to be fairly high quality.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to use oils to scent your soap. One of our favorite non-scented soaps is coffee scrub soap. It fills you with so much energy, and is great for waking up in the morning!

Summing Essential Oil Blends Recipes

While general guidelines exist, such as including a base, middle, and top note, The main takeaway here is to use these blends as a starting place, but don’t be afraid to branch out and do your own thing too. Make your soap uniquely you, whether you pour a soap base you bought into molds, or making it from scratch with lye, milk or water, and a custom blend of fats.

It’s natural to feel intimidated if you’ve never done it before, so feel free to start with small batches, or divide your batches to test several different blends at once. But just get started and don’t worry about what happens.

You really can’t mess this up.