All The Ways We Use Essential Oils Every Day In Our Household

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When I began using essential oils three years ago, I never imagined how many ways they would help my family become healthier. People who have not yet been introduced to essential oils often ask me what I use them for. Sometimes, I’m a bit at a loss for words because they’re so integrated into our daily lives.

For this post, I tried to think of the main ways we use oils in everyday life, as a family. I’ll include links to recipes and other posts so you can learn more if you’re interested.

First, I think it’s important to point out that all essential oil companies are not created equal. There are a lot of choices available and many of them are diluted or contain added fillers and artificial chemicals. Be careful to research your essential oil company for ethical, sustainable, and quality practices before you buy.

Check out the primary ways we use essential oils in our house every day that I’ll cover in this article!

• Natural Fragrance & Aromatherapy
• Non-Toxic Household Cleaners
• DIY Personal Care & Beauty Products
• Supplemental Natural Remedies

Natural Fragrance & Aromatherapy

In our home, essential oils have become a replacement for perfumes, pillow sprays, room sprays, scented candles, and air fresheners. Probably the first things that we completely ditched in my home when we started using essential oils were artificial air fresheners and air fragrances. Many years ago, I was guilty of using artificial, aerosol scented room sprays and oil plugin air fresheners routinely in our home. It makes me cringe now to think of all the chemicals I was inadvertently adding to the air in our home! Once I became aware of the dangers of those products, I switched to using scented soy candles and “natural”, non-aerosol air fresheners.

Once I first received my introductory kit and began looking for ways to use the oils, I realized the power I had to make our own natural air fresheners in refillable containers. Now, we save money, reduce our waste, and there are no unwanted, added chemicals in what we use to fragrance our home. These DIY fragrances can be used in a few ways that I’ll tell you about.

Mist Oil Diffuser

One of the ways we use essential oils in the air in our home is with an electric mist essential oil diffuser. These are widely available, and I have ones from dōTERRA, Costco, and Amazon. At night, I diffuse oils in the diffuser that I keep next to my bed, and during the day, in the diffuser in the kitchen.

Here are some of the oils I diffuse together, depending on my mood and my needs.

• Vetiver, lavender, and cedarwood for solid sleep
• Ylang ylang, serenity, and balance for hormonal times of the month
• Immunity blend and respiratory blend for when someone is fighting a bug
• My custom creativity blends for when I’m writing or creating
• Peppermint & lemon (or other citrus oils) for homework motivation, housework, or working from home
• Holiday/seasonal blends-I love diffusing cinnamon, clove, orange, and white fir around Christmas and lighter, flowery blends in the spring, like geranium, rosemary, and ylang ylang.

Reed Diffuser

I also like to use DIY reed diffusers, especially in the bathrooms, to keep things smelling fresh all the time. To make your own reed diffuser, you just need a small bottle with a narrow neck, some reeds that you can buy on Amazon, and your essential oils along with a carrier oil. I like using citrus blends in the bathroom. Safflower oil is a light oil that diffuses well through reeds and serves as a good carrier oil for a reed diffuser.

Room Spray & Deodorizer Spray

If you need a healthy swap for a deodorizing room spray, that’s easy, too. All you need is a spray bottle, distilled water, and your essential oils. For the full how-to, recipe, and specific oil blends, see the post DIY Room Spray. My favorites are the Citrus blend and Sleep blend.

Topical Aromatherapy

My family uses many different “rollerballs” on a daily basis, depending on what’s going on. To mix up a rollerball, you just need a glass bottle with roller top, your essential oils, and a carrier oil. A good go-to carrier oil is fractionated coconut oil, which is simply a version of coconut oil that remains a liquid at all temperatures. My other favorite carrier oil is jojoba oil, because it does not clog pores and is readily absorbed through the skin. Other choices are safflower oil, olive oil, sunflower oil, avocado oil, and many more.

Here are some of my family’s go-to rollerball mixes.

• concentration blend-peppermint & lemon or peppermint & orange
• immunity blend-Immunity blend oil, oregano, & lemon
• cough/respiratory blend–get the recipe here
• calming/sleep blend-vetiver, lavender, & cedarwood
• sore muscle/growing pains blend-Muscle Soothing blend
• energy blend-grapefruit, bergamot, lime, & ylang ylang

In addition to DIY roller blends, essential oil companies make numerous proprietary blends of their own that already come in a rollerball bottle. My favorites of these are:

• dōTERRA Peace-I use this at bedtime or when stressed
• dōTERRA Clary Calm-I like this one for hormonal times of the month
• dōTERRA Cheer-uplifting blend that is great for anytime

Perfume/Cologne

I’m someone who has always been sensitive to artificial fragrance, including perfumes and colognes. I have a tendency to get headaches and feel nauseous in the perfume section at the mall or the candle aisle at Target. Discovering some of the proprietary blend rollers has been really awesome for me because it’s a way to incorporate a little aromatherapy with natural “perfume” that does not make me feel awful. A few of my favorite scents are…

• dōTERRA Cheer
• dōTERRA Whisper
• dōTERRA Peace
• dōTERRA Amavi-this one is made for men, so my husband wears this…it smells awesome

Non-Toxic Household Cleaners

I make the vast majority of the cleaners we use in our home myself. You can check out my post on getting started with green cleaning DIY to learn more about it. It’s super easy and inexpensive, and I’ve been doing it long enough (years) to be able to tell you definitely that yes, DIY cleaners do really work. Oftentimes, they work better than store-bought ones, and they are always safer and less toxic. By adding specific essential oils to these homemade cleaners, I’m able to boost their efficacy.

At my house, there are admittedly still a few cleaners that I have not found a good DIY replacement for yet. But, the majority of cleaners, I do make myself. Our all-purpose spray that I use for bathrooms, the kitchen, countertops (including granite), and stainless steel appliances is probably my favorite. This cleaner uses an immunity blend in order to boost germ-fighting ability.

My other go-to cleaner is a mix of half white vinegar and half water with lemon oil added. Lemon oil boosts the deodorizing ability of this cleaner. I use it for cleaning the kitchen sink, the bathroom faucets, toilet areas, pet stains, and anything needing extra deodorizing or sanitizing.

My hand soap recipe has tea tree oil and lavender oil for skin health and antiseptic properties. Because the base ingredients are castile soap, water, and other oils, it’s more moisturizing and less drying than regular liquid handsoap. You can find the handsoap recipe included in the recipe cards you get when you sign up for the newsletter, along with other recipes like adhesive remover and scouring scrub.

DIY Personal Care & Beauty Products

Personal care and beauty products that I can make myself using essential oils and other natural, safe ingredients are especially empowering in my efforts to decrease toxins in our home. Since personal care and beauty products are applied directly to our skin and typically every single day, I think it’s especially important to make sure these products don’t have dangerous chemicals in them.

DIY personal care recipes are something I’m experimenting with all the time, and when I don’t make my own, I check ewg.org to find the best, safest options that can be purchased. Here are some of the personal care and beauty products that I currently make myself and that use essential oils in the recipe.

• hand soap
• hair rinse
• moisturizer
• face serum
• sugar scrub
• hand sanitizer
• lip scrub
• bath bombs
• bath salts
• foot balm

Supplemental Natural Remedies

I want to first make it really clear that I am a believer in western medicine. We do immunizations in our family, including flu shots each year. That being said, I strongly believe and have seen firsthand the real therapeutic potential that supplemental natural remedies can have. Many of these home remedies incorporate the benefits of essential oils.

Internal Use for Immunity Support

“The Bomb” is something you may have come across on Pinterest when searching for things to help when you’re coming down with an illness. Most recipes call for a concoction that includes oregano, immunity blend, lemon, melaleuca, & frankincense. I use empty gel veggie caps and add each of the oils to the cap, then take it by mouth with water several times a day at the first sign of illness. In my experience, it has helped me win the battle over illness taking hold on more than one occasion.

Here are my favorite 5 Immunity-Boosting Essential Oils

Essential Oil Beadlets

DōTERRA beadlets are a lesser known but truly awesome offering of dōTERRA. They come in both peppermint and OnGuard (the immunity blend). They are teeny little balls of oil contained in a veggie cap shell that you let melt in your mouth to release the oils. The peppermint is great for digestion after a meal as well as breath freshening, and the OnGuard is awesome for when the flu or other ailments are going around.

Insect Repellant

We use the dōTERRA Terra Shield blend a lot during the summer. Terra Shield is the insect repelling blend and it works! My husband, and now two of my children, are magnets for mosquitoes. My husband has tried every solution out there, and while some of the more toxic ones are effective, we would all like it if he didn’t have to spray poison on himself to keep from being eaten alive. Terra Shield does that for him! It’s especially been wonderful for my kids, because I am unwilling to spray them with dangerous toxic chemicals. If you’ve ever purchased a non-toxic, natural bug repellant, the ingredients are very likely similar to the ingredients in dōTERRA’s Terra Shield. But with Terra Shield, you can make your own spray from the concentrated bottle of oil for a fraction of the price you’d spend on a ready-to-go natural repellant.

Along the same lines as bug spray, we use a natural DIY recipe for lice repellant spray. Certain essential oils have the ability to repel headlice. A lice repelling spray for hair is great to have on hand at home during outbreaks at school to help protect your kids’ hair from infestation.

Topical Use for Immunity Support

We pull essential oils out immediately when one of us gets a bad cough at our house. This is most often one of my youngest two, both of whom have asthma and tend to have colds settle in their chests that cause a bad cough. The recipe that I use to create a rollerball to put on chest, back, and feet can be found in the post Essential Oils For A Child’s Cough.

DōTERRA makes an essential oil proprietary blend that addresses congestion, be it from a cold or allergies. Breathe is the go-to oil blend for this. It is what we use instead of using something like Vick’s VapoRub. (VapoRub is petroleum-based, and we avoid this at our home.)

Copaiba essential oil is one that is known for its calming capabilities. I take it internally when I’m feeling stressed or anxious and I find that it really helps ease my nerves and relax me. I usually add my own drops to veggie capsules, but dōTERRA also makes copaiba capsules now if you don’t want the hassle of DIY.

We also use essential oils to help promote good sleep. DōTERRA’s Serenity capsules are a proprietary blend of oils in capsule form to be taken internally before bedtime.

Whenever I feel a migraine or tension headache coming on (I get these at least once a month), I reach for my peppermint oil. Dotted on my temples, back of neck, and forehead, it helps ease my headache quickly. Just be VERY careful not to get it too close to your eyes, and be sure to wash your hands right after applying it in order to keep it out of your eyes. It is very strong and will make you tear up! Ask me how I know.

To Support Healthy Digestion

My family also uses essential oils for digestive issues. DigestZen capsules are the perfect thing to take if your stomach is feeling unsettled. This oil is also available in a regular bottle, allowing you to add a drop or two to a cup of tea or water bottle, or apply with a carrier oil directly on an upset tummy.

The uses of essential oils to take care of your family household are truly limitless!

These are just the main ways we use essential oils in our every day, but we find new ways to incorporate them all the time. If you have some oils but aren’t sure how to use them, hopefully, this post has given you some inspiration to just dive in!