There’s nothing like a hot, steamy shower to take your worries away. Or a cold, refreshing one to awaken your senses. The only thing that can make a shower better is incorporating essential oils into your session.
In addition to making you smell amazing, essential oils offer an array of benefits for your physical and mental wellbeing.
Read ahead to learn what exactly essential oils are, why you should use them, and how to use them in the shower.
What are essential oils?
Concentrated into small quantities, essential oils are potent extracts of beneficial plants. Examples of essential oils include:
- Peppermint essential oil
- Lavender essential oil
- Tea tree essential oil
- Bergamot essential oil
- Eucalyptus essential oil
- Cedarwood essential oil
- Lemon essential oil
If you’re looking for one of these, BodyRestore is a good place to start.
Why should you use essential oils in your shower?
Essential oils have long been used in aromatherapy, ingested, or applied topically for their many health benefits. Research has shown that essential oils may:
- Improve hair and skin health
- Address sleep issues
- Reduce anxiety and stress
- Relieve headaches and migraines
- Act as antiseptics and aid wound healing
- Reduce pain
- Calm inflammation
Showers are one of the best ways to relax, and adding essential oils will help amplify the experience through their delicious smell and remarkable impact on your wellbeing.
How can you use essential oils in the shower?
While most people use essential oils while taking a bath, not everyone has a bathtub or the time to take a bath. Many people simply prefer showers over baths, but that doesn’t mean they should remain deprived of the spa-like experience that essential oils offer.
To incorporate essential oils into your showers, you can:
1. Use hot water and a cup
All you need for this method is a cup, hot water, and the essential oil of your choice. Simply add hot water in a cup and add a few drops of your favorite essential oil into it. Put the cup somewhere safe so it doesn’t break.
The hot water will slowly evaporate, causing the essential to diffuse throughout your bathroom.
2. Make a shower steamer
A shower steamer or melt is much like a bath bomb but designed for the shower instead. Shower steamers are made using baking soda and cornstarch and are super simple to make at home.
To make a shower steamer, add 10 to 15 drops of your preferred essential oil to 1 cup of cornstarch or arrowroot powder and half a cup of baking soda. Mix the ingredients, spraying water as you go along to reach a consistency that you can press into a mold. Lastly, freeze the mold until solid.
To use your steamer, place it at the opposite end of the shower where water barely touches it so that the steam from the shower and droplets of water slowly diffuse its aroma.
3. Employ a wet washcloth or cotton pads
You can use a wet washcloth or cotton pads as easy makeshift aromatherapy oil diffusers. Just add several drops of essential oil to a wet washcloth or a few cotton face pads and place them on the shower floor.
Be sure to place the cotton or cloth in a place where it is not directly under the water, but is hit by drops and splashes of water, so that the oils can gradually release their aroma.
4. Repurpose a tea ball
Tea is known for its soothing effects, but that’s not all that a tea ball is good for. Tea balls can easily be repurposed for your shower aromatherapy.
To use a tea ball in the shower, fill it with Epsom salt and add several drops of your essential oil. Then hang it somewhere in your shower and let the scent surround you.
5. Invest in an aromatherapy showerhead
If you are open to investing in a new showerhead to get a spa-like experience each time you shower, opt for a special aromatherapy showerhead.
These showerheads allow you to add fragrance capsules or pods that infuse the oil right into the water, creating a heavenly aromatic mist.
6. Add it into your shower products
In addition to being used for aromatherapy, essential oils are also used topically. Add a few drops of essential oil to your shampoo or body wash to reap its benefits for hair and skin.
However, it is important to ensure that the ingredients in your shower products are compatible with the essential oil of your choice.
Post-shower care
To make your shower experience even better, here is how you can use essential oils for post-shower care:
1. Apply essential oils onto the skin
Essential oils have shown to provide benefits to skin health including targeting acne, providing moisture, and evening skin tone.
You can use essential oils post-shower by adding them to your lotion or moisturizer or diffusing them with a carrier oil, and then applying them onto your skin.
2. Spritz down your shower area with essential oils
Essential oils have shown to have antimicrobial, antiviral, and antifungal properties, so they act as great cleaning products.
After your shower, you can spray your shower area with cleaning products containing essential oils or diffused essential oils to keep your bathroom clean.