Home made essential oil fail

I promised that I had an essential oil experiment in the works, and I did. That all came to a crash today. Let me start from the beginning.

I found a link on Pinterest on how to make your own lavender essential oil. It appeared to be very simple. You take some lavender flowers, crush them up a bit, and then let them soak in vodka for a week or so. Then you remove the flowers and allow the vodka to evaporate and what you are left with is essential oil. Since I already have a vile of lavender oil I decided to try my hand at eucalyptus oil since I've been wanting some and there is a eucalyptus tree around the corner from my house. I did a little good research and found the method was the same. So I went out and gathered a decent amount of new leaves (they seemed to be way oilier) and set out to give it a try.

I cut up the leave in to small is pieces and let them soak in the cheapest vodka I could find, >6 bucks for a fifth. I let them soak for about 9 days, mostly because I forgot what day I started. I removed the leaves and left the jar open to the air to allow the vodka to evaporate. After about 3 days of very little evaporation I got impatient and had an idea. I decided it was a good idea to heat the eucalyptus vodka over the stove to speed up the evaporation process. This worked somewhat.

I kept the solution over the lowest heat setting; there were no bubbles what so ever. It worked very well for a while. The vodka slowly evaporated and the mixture was reducing. Unfortunately, the eucalyptus seemed to react to the heat and the jar of liquid that was a dark amber color turned a darker and darker brown. After about an hour there was about a teaspoon left of black looking liquid that I poured back in it's original mason jar. It smelled pretty good, not like what I was expecting though. I was going to take a picture to post, and try adding it to a bath or something, since I went through all the trouble, but while I was out somebody mistook the jar as dirty and threw it in the sink and filled it with water. Well....so much for that. I'm tempted to try it again but buying eucalyptus oil seems much easier and not to mention quicker.

If any of you are interested in trying your own experiment with making and essential oil, here's the link to the original post I saw about lavender oil http://www.condoblues.com/2011/07/how-to-make-lavender-essential-oil.html

Also I found a great website that has tons of uses for various essential oils, which I think is pretty awesome. http://thecoconutmama.com/2013/10/50-uses-for-essential-oils/

Essential oils are the perfect alternative to the ever vague and extremely toxic "fragrance," or "parfum" ingredients found in cosmetics. If you start looking up the toxicology of your regular products you'll find that one of the most toxic ingredients in most things is "fragrance."

I also found another great site that has a list of chemicals you'll find in different cosmetics and why they are bad. http://www.purezing.com/living/toxins/living_toxins_dangerousingredients.html. It's pretty shocking the kinds of things that we put on our bodies, and in turn release back into the environment.