One of the most common uses of lemon essential oil is in homemade cleaning recipes. Lemon essential oil has a wonderfully fresh and clean smell that helps your house to smell as clean as it looks, as well as having an amazing natural ability to cut through grease and some antibacterial properties.
How to use lemon essential oil for cleaning
Lemon essential oil can be used for cleaning in a variety of ways, sometimes simply to add a wonderful fresh smell to your clean home (and mask the smell of vinegar, which is often a key component of homemade cleaners), and sometimes as a vital cleaning ingredient in its own right. Below you’ll find a fail-safe all-purpose lemon essential oil cleaning recipe:
All-Purpose Household Cleaner
- One-part white vinegar
- One-part water
- A few drops of lemon essential oil
Combine these ingredients in a glass spray bottle and spray liberally onto the surface, before wiping over with a cloth to clean.
This is just one way of using lemon essential oil in homemade cleaning recipes. Marge from ‘The Safe and Healthy Home’ blog has an excellent long list of other recipes for using lemon essential oil in cleaning, including as furniture polish and a stovetop cleaner!
Safety Tip: Make sure that if you are switching to using homemade cleaning recipes you do not allow ammonia-based cleaners and products containing bleach to become combined because this can release toxic fumes.
Why switch to using homemade cleaning recipes?
You might be thinking, this is all very well, but why would I switch to homemade cleaning recipes when I could just go to the shop and buy products that are already made? Well, the first reason is simple, it’s much cheaper! Most of the ingredients that you require to make these cleaners you will already have in your cupboard, like vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. Those that you might not already have, like lemon essential oil, are usually inexpensive and one purchase will last you for multiple recipes. You only need to use a few drops of lemon essential oil for each homemade cleaning recipe and so you will have to replenish your supply quite infrequently.
The second reason is, of course, the environmental one. Homemade cleaning recipes tend to be far better for the planet as they do not contain the same harsh chemicals that are found in most shop-bought cleaning products. Additionally, by creating your own products you are also reducing your plastic consumption, as well as not using your purchases to support the production and transport of these shop-bought cleaning products, lowering your own carbon footprint. The large-scale production of most of these products, the transportation of chemicals and ingredients, and the transportation of the finished product to supermarket, creates a lot of carbon emissions that by switching to homemade cleaning products, you can avoid contributing to.
Other Essential Oils you can use in cleaning
As well as using lemon essential for cleaning, you can also use many other essential oils too! Lemon is by far the most popular because of its ability to cut through grease, but you can choose any combination of essential oils that you like to scent your homemade cleaning products. If you are not a fan of citrus, perhaps you could swap it out for a relaxing lavender essential oil or even eucalyptus.
