Essential Oil Blends vs. Synergies
Oils and synergies and blends, oh my! Confused about the whys, hows, and wherefores of essential oil blends and synergies? Well, you’re in the right place!
This quick guide will help you understand the difference between the two so you can learn to make your own powerful healing synergies.
You might hear people interchange the words “blend” and “synergy” as synonyms, but in reality, while a synergy is a special blend, a blend is not always a synergy.
NEXT, WHAT IS A SYNERGY?
A synergy is created by thoughtfully and purposely combining more than one essential oil together and allowing them to unite before using them.
EndoFlex, which combines Spearmint, Sage, Geranium, Myrtle, German Chamomile, and Nutmeg, is a synergy, as is Motivation, an atmospheric enhancing blend of Roman Chamomile, Spruce, Ylang Ylang, and Lavender. In both cases, these blends have been formulated intentionally to achieve specific goals — the first thyroid support and the second to boost forward energy and purpose — and then given time to become one synergy before preparation for end use.
What if you took those same oils and added them to your empty water bottle until time to use it and then added the water? Or what if you put the oils you wanted to use in their own bottle to let them synergize and then dropped as needed into your drinking water?
Once it becomes a synergy, the peppermint, ginger, and lemon essential oil blend retains its equality of properties for every use, and the new impact far surpasses any benefit each of these single oils has, even combined. The same goes for any combination of essential oils from the same category such as calming oils, or Ylang Ylang, German Chamomile, Blue Tansy, Lemon, and Rose for facial care.
FIRST, WHAT IS A BLEND?
A blend is when you use more than one essential oil at the same time.
That could be something like putting a drop of Lavender and a drop of Orange into your diffuser and then infusing that throughout the room, or drops of Peppermint, Ginger, and Lemon into your water in the morning. Any time you’re using more than one oil, you’re combining those oils, smelling both their essences together, or putting separate oils on your skin to experience both at once, and that is a blend.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
Well, would you rather drink coffee from an instant pack or from a French press?
Going back to the example of Peppermint, Ginger, and Lemon essential oils in water, this is a refreshing combination that enhances digestion. If you add these oils to your water and drink some right away, you might get a fairly favorable flavor. Pick up your bottle twenty minutes later for a drink, and it will more than likely have a totally different effect with one oil being more prevalent than the other, and changing again with each subsequent sip.
Yes, you added the blend for a specific intent, but the impact is not the same as it could be if you turned that blend into a synergy instead.
WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON HERE?
It’s called teamwork!
Essentially, blends are the essential oils working the same shifts on location, but not necessarily together. They’re each doing their jobs, but their tasks are their own, and if they end up with aligned outcomes, great!
With recognition that each of these oils could be that much more powerful if they could only link up and work together, strategies are set in place to synchronize these individual oils into a single synergy so that all the energies are put into each task simultaneously for guaranteed integrated results.
See, blends break away, but synergies stay.
“Everyone knows how powerful these flowers are when they are together.”
HOW DOES IT HAPPEN?
Powerful as they are, essential oils have super tiny molecular structures with about forty million trillion molecules per drop.
Each blend of three different oils with two to five drops represents approximately one hundred forty-seven million trillion molecules. These also have an incredibly low molecular weight, so just imagine all these trillions of molecules randomly bouncing around each other. With immediate application, it’s anyone’s guess how many of which molecules will present at any given time.
When allowed to steep into a synergy, all those molecules begin to overlap, connect, and coalesce through covalent bonding as they interchange their properties and absorb each other’s personalities via electrons, thereby transforming the interactions of their biological structures into a new entity.
CAN ANY ESSENTIAL OILS BECOME A SYNERGY?
Remember that essential oil synergies are deliberately formulated to achieve particular end results.
Determine what you want your synergy to accomplish, and then choose the appropriate category of oils. Once you have that category, select three, five, or seven single oils that you want to use, and then follow the steps below for creating your own synergy.
CREATE YOUR OWN SYNERGY
Step 1: Choose your oils. In this video I use Orange, Ylang Ylang, and Frankincense for a skin nourishing facial serum.
Step 2: Decide how many drops of oil to use. Adjust the number of drops until you find a scent combination that you like. The easiest way to start is to smell each bottle and see which oil has the strongest, medium, and faintest scent.
Step 3: Add the drops of oil to your bottle. Start with the most aromatic oil. Then add MORE of the medium scented oil and MOST of the faintest scented oil.
Step 4: Let them sit for 24 hours.
Step 5: Add your preferred carrier oil for roller recipes or witch hazel for sprays.
The blends vs. synergies concept also applies for your diffuser.
You can pre-mix your favorite diffuser blends, following the same steps, so that you get to enjoy the same percentages of each essential oil every time you add a few drops to your diffuser.
If you’d like to learn more about creating powerful essential oil synergies for healing as well as how to add crystals for enhanced benefits, check out the Crystal + Oil Synergies Recipe Book.
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