so, I’ve been selling smelly things for about a decade now (which is crazy, but there you go), and I get super wired whenever I see people using essential oils for witchcraft/devotional perfumes/what have you. I also get worried sometimes, because some of what I see people doing - particularly on tumblr - is kind of dangerous. (sometimes in a low-key way, sometimes seriously.) use essential oils for devotion and witchcraft because essential oils are awesome, but be careful with them, because plants are assholes and want to kill you sometimes.
Check out the contraindications before using anything. There are basically no essential oils that are 100% safe to use in every single situation. It’s important to double check even if you’re healthy, but particularly if you have a medical condition or are pregnant. (If you’re pregnant, be really fucking careful. Seriously. Essential oils are a minefield for you.)
Don’t give yourself a fucking chemical burn. One of my favourite party tricks (I am so boring at parties) is to put a few drops of something like peppermint oil on a thin plastic take-out container. If you wait a couple of minutes and then poke it with a fork, the plastic will have melted a little. EXCITING. A lot of people seem to think that essential oils are ~~natural and gentle~~, but fuck, a lot of them are used by the plant to get rid of insects/fungi/etc. All essential oils need dilution before using them (okay, sure, tea tree and lavender are generally safe, but otherwise), and some shouldn’t even be used on the skin in normally-safe levels of dilution. If you have sensitive skin and put some cinnamon oil lotion on it, you’re fucked, you’re going to be red and sore and pissed off at cinnamon, which is a sad state of affairs.
Related note: don’t try to dilute with water. Essential oils aren’t lipids, but they’re still hydrophobic. Want to use essential oils in your bath so that you can focus on shit that isn’t all the stuff you have to do at work tomorrow? Awesome! My favourite is spruce, clary sage, and myrrh - that one’s fucking great. Dilute it with bath oil or some salt first, though. Being super focused on how sore and itchy you are isn’t ideal.
Related note: citrus oils are assholes. You know that whole ‘use sun and lemon juice to bleach your hair!’ deal? That totally happens to your entire body if you use too much citrus oil in something that’s going on your skin. Bergamot is one of the worst, but all of them are guilty as hell. Dilute well, don’t slather it on before going out in the sun, and keep an eye on how your own body reacts.
Remember that essential oils are super concentrated. I fucking love putting essential oils on charcoal. Sometimes I mix them in with dried herbs, but sometimes I just drop them on the charcoal directly - too many drops and you’ll just have a hunk of sad wet charcoal, but it’s worth it for the billowing smoke that flows out over the rim of my charcoal-burning bowl and drifts along my altar. (SPECIAL EFFECTS FOR YOUR MAGIC.) Whenever I do that, though, I have to remember to be careful about how much I use, and how much of the smoke I breathe in. Inhaling ten drops of peppermint essential oil all at once is like eating more peppermint than anyone should or would want to eat, just fucking… bowls and bowls of the stuff. When I used clove oil on charcoal to get rid of a plague of flies, it worked magnificently, but then I also had to air everything out and ended up googling the effects of clove oil overdose. I had one customer who accidentally dumped a bottle of lavender oil on their head; they washed it off, but still had some fun hallucinations (this is sarcasm) and spent a while at a walk-in clinic. Don’t let that be you.
Essential oils go bad. This isn’t a safety tip, exactly, unless you’re dealing with an oil like jasmine that will make you cry and hate your life and the world if you smell it after it’s gone bad. Those oils are rare, though - your sadly ruined oil isn’t going to stink, it’s just going to stop smelling like anything and become an expensive bottle of nothing much. Store your oils in a cool, dark place - don’t set them out on your altar or shrine if that’s on a sunny windowsill. Most oils will eventually lose their potency anyway (citrus oils continue to be assholes and only last about a year even in the best conditions), but some oils, particularly resins, will keep for decades and just get better with time if you’re nice to them.
Be careful. Don’t burn yourself. Don’t overdose. That’s about it, really.
ETA: Be careful about pets and other animals. This needs a whole post of its own, honestly, but if you have pets (particularly cats or birds), read up on how they react to essential oils. This shit is important. Essential oils can be deadly to some animals.
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