Orange Essential Oil: Complete Benefits & Uses Guide

Don’t you love when you peel an orange, and you can smell the sweet fragrance on your fingers?

Every time you inhale, you get that bright, happy scent.

You’ve just come in contact with a form of Orange Essential Oil. In fact, Orange Essential oil is made from the very substance that makes your hands smell so good.

It officially comes from the Citrus Sinensis plant and is sometimes called “sweet orange” oil.

You may think it requires the fruit, but the oils actually come from the peel itself. When Orange Oil is made, orange peels are ground up and added to pure grain alcohol to extract the oils from the peels.

After two or three days, the mixture is strained to reveal the purest essence of the oil.

*The companies chosen above are based upon my personal opinion based upon me giving them a try and testing their quality.

It’s prized for its health and beauty benefits in addition to smelling amazing. It helps flavor drinks.

It’s antibacterial, so it’s commonly found in household cleaners, both organic and not. It’s sometimes in mouthwash for the same reason.

The smell helps add depth to shampoos and lotions. It freshens sprays for the house and laundry.

It’s an excellent rejuvenator for the household space and for your body.

Orange Essential Oil has many applications throughout your home, body, and health. Let’s take a look at a few.

Disinfect

Many household cleaners use harsh chemicals to kill bacteria and viruses. While you might make your countertops clean, the long-term effects of using these substances can be critical to your respiratory and skin health.

Natural cleaners with Orange Essential Oil are effective in disinfecting surfaces, but they won’t cause long-term damage to your respiratory system or to your skin.

They’re safer to use in households with children and pets, or in households with severe allergies.

Freshen Laundry

Sometimes clothes come out of the laundry or drier with a faint odor from poorly dried water or set-in odors.

A little Orange Essential Oil helps remove odors associated with mildew and dried in odors.

Remove Grease

Orange is an excellent degreaser. The citrus in the oil helps break down oily compounds so that you can effectively wash them away.

Water and oil do not mix, which is why it’s so hard to remove grease from your hands. Orange oil added to your hands should help break the bonds of the oil so you can wash it off.

Polish Silver

Orange Oil can also break down the compounds found in silver tarnish. A few drops of Orange Essential Oil will restore your jewelry or fine silverware to a bright, healthy shine.

Reduce Inflammation

If you suffer from back or joint pain, or if your diet or medications have caused internal inflammation such as diarrhea or gas and bloating, Orange Essential Oil may be able to help.

It’s shown the most promise of the most common essential oils for pain relief and inflammation reduction.

A side benefit is the mood booster, which can also help raise your tolerance for pain. What pain the oil doesn’t relieve will be a lot more bearable.

Boost Mood

Speaking of your mood, Orange OIl is a good mood booster for a variety of reasons, not just physical pain.

It directly affects the hormonal system as well as your olfactory system. When you smell Orange Oil, it can have an immediate effect on your overall mood and stress.

It’s uplifting and calming, showing a lot of promise for overall stress reduction and improving your outlook on life.

Improve Skin

Orange Essential Oil improves circulation. It also provides vitamin C and binds with free radicals that cause the look of aging. The overall effect is clearer, brighter skin with a reduced look in the severity of wrinkles.

It also helps to balance your hormones naturally so you may also experience a reduction in adult acne.

As a topical use, it can also reduce the amount of bacteria and harmful oils on the face to minimize breakouts further.

In the long term, it helps moderate damage caused by UVA and UVB exposure from the sun.

Protect Gums

The antibacterial properties can also help protect gums. Swishing with Orange Oil combinations can reduce harmful bacteria and freshen breath without the harsh chemicals of synthetic mouthwashes.

It can help relieve the pain and inflammation of cold sores and prevent new ones by improving the overall health of the mouth.

Improve Digestion

Orange Essential Oil helps regulate glands within the exocrine and endocrine system.

If you suffer from poor digestion caused by improper diet or harsh medications, Orange Essential Oil can improve digestion secretions while reducing the effects of your digestive inflammation.

Long-term use may help regulate this system along with improving your overall diet.

Repel And Kill Insects

Synthetic bug repellants are awful. They smell and can be difficult to wash off, not to mention the havoc they wreak on the respiratory system.

There’s some evidence to suggest that orange essential oil not only repels insects looking for a meal, but it can also break down the larva to treat and prevent infestations in the first place. 

It may even reduce the outbreak of the most common household pest, the fly.

Orange Oil is filled with two different active ingredients that are responsible for the enormous benefit. The first, limonene, is a powerful anti-oxidant.

Free radicals in your cells cause a lot of damage if left untreated, and limonene binds to them to reduce their destruction. It also helps reduce inflammation.

The other, myrcene, is also effective against free radicals and inflammation. This can reduce the appearance of wrinkles and improve your overall complexion.

Fighting inflammation helps improve circulation in the body and decrease hypertension.

Throughout history, Orange has been highly sought after to treat:

Limonene comprises over 90 percent of the oil itself. An exciting possibility is studies showing the reduction of cancer tumors.

It’s a monoterpene. Monoterpenes block a range of cancers including mammary, skin, and pancreas cancers.

Let’s look at the range of conditions and situations where Orange Essential Oil may be of use.

Mild Sedative

Difficult days can make it hard to unwind and relax. When the body experiences large amounts of stress, cortisol and adrenaline can cause damage to skin tissues and overall health.

Orange Essential Oil has a mild sedative effect that can help relieve anger and tension, depression, and other inflammations that arise with chronic stress.

Inflammation Relief

Another side effect of stress is inflammation. Orange Essential Oil can help relieve pain and reduce chronic inflammation.

If your diet has been poor and you suffer from gas and bloating or indigestion, or if you’ve taken medicines that have affected your digestive health, Orange Essential Oil can also help relieve the discomfort of those symptoms.

Gland Health

Orange Essential Oil is a cholagogue. It promotes health secretions from glands across a variety of bodily systems including both exocrine and endocrine systems.

It can help regulate menstruation, digestive secretions, certain hormones, and lactation responses.

Overall, it can ease the body back to a healthy secretions status.

Libido

If you suffer from low libido, but don’t want to take synthetic hormones or other medical solutions, Orange Essential Oil can help promote a healthy libido response.

It has mild aphrodisiac properties, so regular use helps increase your libido, ease frigidity, support a robust erectile response, and even increase your overall interest in sex.

Spasm Relief

Chronic spasms can cause pain and long-term lack of wellbeing. Spasms could include diarrhea responses within the digestive system, persistent coughing, muscle cramps and convulsions.

Orange Essential Oil helps relieve spasms and begins to prevent them altogether with long-term use.

It relaxes spasms associated with both the nervous system and the muscular system. It can also relieve the long-term effects of chronic spasms.

Stress Relief And Mood Improvement

The scent of orange is happy. It can help relieve mental stress and put you in a better frame of mind to deal with issues causing your underlying anxiety and depression.

There have been many studies over the years for Orange Essential Oil.

In 2010, a study published in the Journal of Molecular Nutrition and Food Research found that the use of orange oil may be able to help stop certain tumors from growing. It regulates how they reproduce and proliferate.

Another study found in the Indian Journal of Experimental Biology also found evidence that Orange Oil can stop tumor growth by enhancing the functions of the liver.

The liver is responsible for much of the body’s detoxification, so this is good news.

In 2014, a study from the Journal of Complimentary Therapies of Medicine found that Orange Essential Oil had substantial positive effects on mood.

It studied a combination of Orange Oil and Rose Oil. When exposed to this substance, over half of the participants experienced a sharp drop in oxyhemoglobin levels.

The result? Higher feelings of relaxation and overall well-being.

Essential oils are powerful substances, and there’s a lot of confusion about ingestion. Most major aromatherapy and vital oil institutions list ingestion as a viable option, but you need to consider the oil itself, and it’s undiluted strength.

Orange Oil is powerful and may produce a caustic reaction if undiluted. It’s considered safe to take internally when it’s diluted properly with a carrier oil or other substance.

Just adding the oil to your water isn’t sufficient for dilution. Remember, oil and water don’t mix, so you’ll end up with a much stronger solution than you think.

One drop in a glass of water stirred well or combined with a safe to consume carrier oil may work better for your ingestion.

You can add Orange Essential Oil to cooking recipes if you want to ingest it but are worried about safety. You can add it to desert batters or other recipes calling for a little citrus.

When you consume the dish, you don’t have to worry about any irritations.

Orange Oil is highly potent so you shouldn’t use it undiluted on your skin. It can cause serious reactions or increase the effects of UVA if used undiluted.

You should find a safe carrier oil to dilute the oil so that it’s safe to use topically. When it’s in lotions, shampoos, or soaps, there’s always a carrier oil to dilute it for topical use.

Once it’s properly diluted, test a small bit on a patch of skin to make sure that the strength is the right one for you.

Remember that everyone’s skin is different so you should do this same patch test for anyone new to Orange Essential Oil.

Even after diluting for topical application, you should avoid the sun during peak hours so that you don’t increase your chance of sunburn and ruin the effects of the oil on your skin taken internally.

The most significant precaution is making sure that any internal or external use is properly diluted. Citrus is a caustic substance.

You may have experienced sensitivity when peeling or eating an orange, and essential oils are even stronger solutions than that.

When you ingest or apply topically, watch for signs of irritation including redness and rash, as well as acid reflux or sensitivity in the mouth region.

If you’re allergic to orange or another citrus, Orange Essential Oil may also trigger reactions. Don’t try this oil if you have any sort of severe allergy.

If you’re pregnant or nursing, you should talk to your healthcare provider before adding Orange essential oil to your diet or healthcare routine.

Diffusing the oil should be fine because diffusions won’t react with any hormonal systems or medications you might be taking.

Speaking of medications, some essential oils can react with medications and cause detrimental side effects.

If you’re on any other type of medication, you should also consult your healthcare provider before adding Orange Essential Oil as an internal or topical application.

If you have an existing chronic condition, such as cancer, your healthcare practitioner should be able to discuss possibly adding Orange Essential Oil to your treatment plans.

These oils are potent, so we don’t advise you to add them to your treatment plan without thorough consultation with those helping you with your care.

It may be much too powerful for children’s delicate skin. You should be extra careful to dilute and do a patch test if you plan to use it for your children.

Diffusing the oil can help improve the mood of your children and should be a safe action. Adding it to the body itself may trigger reactions, so be aware and cautious.

Essential Oils have been researched extensively, and Orange Oil is no different.

1. In one major study from 2012, Orange Oil showed an extreme desiccation effect when applied to household fly larva. 

Those without the application showed no impact. This suggests that Orange Oil may be a much more eco-friendly way to treat flies and possibly other insect infestations. (source)

2. Many people use Orange oil to help reduce anxiety. In a significant study on children, patients between the ages of six and nine who were receiving dental work at a certain clinic were subject to Orange Essential oil. (source)

Dental work is a huge stressor for people and especially children. All the patients had to undergo two procedures, so the researchers gave them Orange oil aromatherapy for one procedure and nothing for the other.

The procedure with aromatherapy showed a marked difference in stress response.

In another study, researchers studied the effects of the oil on labor. 100 women participated in the study in which half were exposed to Orange Oil aromatherapy, and the other half were not.

The women who experience aromatherapy showed a significant reduction in stress and overall pain tolerance than those who had no aromatherapy. (source)

In a third study, orange aromatherapy possibly reduced the perception of pain for patients with fractured limbs.

While it didn’t improve vital signs more than the control group (with no aromatherapy), researchers believe it might be an effective complement to standard treatments and the healing process. (source)

3. In a compelling study of the antibacterial properties of Orange oil, researchers examined its effects on one of the most feared infectious agents, Staphylococcus aureus. Brutally resistant strains have plagued the health profession for years. (source)

Alternative therapies for wound healing include essential oil use. This study showed a powerful link between topical Orange Oil applications for dressing wounds and a reduction or elimination of the dangerous staph bacteria.

Staph infections were reduced or eliminated in the study without detrimental effects to the patient’s skin or healing process.

This might be a huge step forward in getting control of some of our most prevalent cases of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Orange Essential Oil is powerful and versatile to your remedy cabinet. It has such a wide range of uses including household and health, as well as just smelling amazing.

When you combine it with a variety of essential oils, it gives you a fresh, bright note in the blend. It can improve mood and help you deal with a lot of life’s little stresses.

It’s also essential if you’re transitioning your home to green cleaners. The antibacterial effects can help you remove all the little infections critters from household surfaces without making everyone sick with allergic reactions to caustic substances.

As you clean, you make your home healthier and improve your mental health through the smell.

It’s even safe to ingest provided to take the proper precautions to prevent causing irritation and reactions.

Some good carrier oils are coconut and olive oil, especially if you’re adding it to a drink or to a recipe. Over time, it can help improve all your systems, including hormonal systems, digestive systems, and other types of endocrine systems.

Topically, it can enhance your skin and help relieve some hormonal effects of aging, as well as reduce the long-term environmental impact of things like pollution.

As long as you avoid sun exposure during peak times when it can enhance the effects of UVA and UVB rays, it’s an excellent way to ease aging and restore your skin to some of its natural brilliance.

Whatever you decide to do, be sure that you discuss anything with your healthcare provider so that it doesn’t interact with any treatments you may have.

Also, make sure to test any topical formulations on a small patch of skin to check for irritation. Once you have everything situated, you’re in for a long-term improvement in your skin, health, household, and outlook. 

What are some of your favorite essential oils? Tell us all about them in the comments below.

I hope you enjoyed learning about all of the cool benefits and uses that orange essential oil offers. It is definitely one of the most versatile oils because it can be used to create so many different types of blends to solve your everyday problems.

My personal favorite brand that I purchase most of my oils from is doTERRA. I find that they offer the highest quality oils, starter kits, and diffusers. They are especially good if you are brand new to oils because they offer a lot of free resources and education once you become a customer.

I highly recommend giving them a try. You can read more about my story of using their oils here.