Understanding Aroma Notes for Essential Oil Blending: Base Notes
The art of essential oil blending is a delicate and thoughtful process that I often compare to the individual layers added to a painting. Just as each brush stroke on a canvas gradually builds on the layer of paint underneath to create a harmonious result, crafting essential oil blends applies the same principle. In the world of perfumery and essential oil blending, the three commonly recognized “paint” layers are known as fragrance notes, which encompass top notes, middle notes, and base notes. At the foundation of these blended layers, you will find base notes.
Also referred to as the fixative note, dry out note, or bottom of the aroma, base notes are the rich scents that linger the longest in an essential oil blend. Typically, base notes make up between 5% and 20% of a blend. Although this percentage may sound small, base notes truly make the age-old saying “a little goes a long way” live up to its name.
Exploring the Senses Through Aromatherapy
Our senses tell us about the world around us. One of the most interesting sensory explorations is smell because our olfactory system sends signals directly to our brain and is one of the most immediate ways to trigger emotions. As you may have seen in the “blind tea tasting” video we shared a few weeks ago, blind tasting and smelling offers insights into how we can connect with plants before putting a label or perceived function on them. With that in mind, we’re excited to share this video of our friend, Erika Gentian of Sovereignty Herbs. Erika recently visited our headquarters in Eugene, Oregon to show us how blind hydrosol smelling can help us get to know our herbal allies. Learn more about how the power of smell can help you work with hydrosols for gentle, effective support.
Lemon Essential Oil: 5 Ways to Clean Your Home Naturally
We love lemon essential oil for its wellness benefits, its bright and sugary citrus aroma, and its uplifting and energizing constituents. It’s a wonderful oil in skin and hair care formulas and for diffusing in homes and offices. We also love that this cost-effective oil makes an excellent cleaning agent and leaves our homes smelling deliciously like freshly cut lemons. It’s the 76% (=)-Lionene in lemon oil that makes it so good at polishing furniture and cutting grease and sticky residues. We’re revisiting five of our favorite lemon oil-based cleaning recipes that are easy to make, safe to use, and leave our homes smelling citrus good.
What is a Hydrosol? + 10 of Our Favorites
Herbalists love hydrosols for their ease of use and versatility in aromatherapy, body care formulations, therapeutic applications, cosmetics, and more. They add variety and scope to our herbal practices and we appreciate the added safety they give us when working with children, elders, and pets. But what exactly are hydrosols, is one as good as another, and how do you use them? We’re excited to tell you more about these distilled botanical extracts, plus we’ve got good tips on best uses and some suggestions about which ones you might like best.
Citrus Essential Oils: How to Choose the Right Citrus Oil
Citrus essential oils are bright, sweet, and sour and are known to bring a smile to your face. They are energetically uplifting and engaging and pack a punch in DIY cleaning products. But which one should you use?
Organic citrus oils are cold-pressed from the fruit peel of various citrus trees. These lovely essential oils are mostly made up of the same constituents but vary in the amounts that they contain. (+)-Limonene is the primary monoterpene in all of them and contributes to their use in surface cleaners, room sprays, and soaps.
Best Essential Oils for Winter + Diffuser Blend
Now that winter is here, we’re all thinking about cozy comfort and holiday cheer. We love our fuzzy blankets and immune-supporting teas, of course, but we’re also big fans of the soothing comfort and gentle uplift that aromatherapy brings to our wintery days.
Buchu Leaf: A Complex Aroma That Herbalists Are Divided On
We all know some herbs that are good for us but don’t necessarily smell or taste appealing. Sometimes we have to get past an unpleasant smell to get the desired benefits we desire. We asked a few adventurous Mountain Rose Herbs Mercantile staff to take a quick break to smell one of our botanicals with a hard-to-describe aroma! Buchu leaf may not be anyone’s favorite smell, but it has a lot of uses. Around the world, you’ll find it in the perfume industry, as a component in artificial fruit flavors, and in alcoholic beverages, frozen dairy desserts, candy, condiments, and relishes. Buchu leaf can also be combined with other herbs and ingested as a healthful tea or tincture.
Hemp Essential Oil: What Is It, What Does It Smell Like, & Why Organic Certification Matters
Recently we had the opportunity to visit SunGold Botanicals in Philomath, Oregon. The brainchild of Isaac Daniel and Josh Gulliver, SunGold Botanicals was created to address the lack of infrastructure to process hemp into certified organic full spectrum oil and other products. Today SunGold Botanicals plays a central role in the organic hemp community here in our home state and is one of the first Demeter-certified Biodynamic hemp processing facilities in the nation. We love that they champion third-party certifications to promote transparency and integrity in an industry that was once the wild west. Turn on your diffuser, sit back, and take a trip to this organic farm to see the botanicals they grow and hear about the wonderful aromatic qualities of their certified organic hemp essential oil.
