The Best Aromatherapy Play Dough

The Best Aromatherapy Playdough Recipe

Looking for a natural way to support your child’s sensory play and emotional well-being? This easy DIY essential oil playdough recipe is perfect for calming big feelings, encouraging focus, and making hands-on learning fun.

With simple pantry ingredients like flour, salt, and oil—plus a splash of food coloring and your favorite essential oils—you’ll create soft, long-lasting dough that smells amazing. Choose calming oils like lavender or Balance, uplifting ones like wild orange or peppermint, or let your kids mix and match their favorites.

This non-toxic, homemade playdough is perfect for crunchy moms, homeschoolers, or anyone looking to ditch the artificial stuff and bring some holistic magic into playtime. Also a great way to learn about the color-wheel!

I N G R E D I E N T S

     2 ½ cups water

     1 ¼  c. salt

     1 ½ tbsp. cream of tartar

     5 tbsp. vegetable oil

     2 ½ cups flour

     Food coloring or liquid watercolors. 

     Essential Oils of choice. We like Lavender, 

Peppermint, Lemon, Bergamot, The Kids Line, 

Cinnamon, Elevation, Balance, Wild Orange. 

You can pick depending on the needs of your 

child, or your own personal preferences! It can 

be fun to let the kids pick. 

D I R E C T I O N S 

Mix everything but the food coloring + essential oils together in a large pot until somewhat smooth. It will be lumpy. Not to worry, the dough will get smoother as it cooks. Cook the dough over a low heat. Mix frequently. The water will slowly cook out of the mixture and you’ll notice it starts to take on a sticky dough appearance. Keep mixing until the edges of the dough along the side and bottom of the pan appear dry.  It will be VERY thick and hard to stir. Pinch a piece of dough. If it’s not gooey, the dough is ready.

Place the dough on a counter top or large cutting board that can withstand a little food coloring. Knead the warm dough until it’s smooth and then divide it into the number of colors that you’d like to make. We divide into 3 balls, add red coloring to one, blue to another and yellow to the last.  You can decide here if you want to add 1 essential oil to each color, then they’ll blend when you mix the colors, or you can pick 6 oils, one for each of the final colors.

Once that is thoroughly blended, we divide the 3 balls into sets of 2

Set one of each color aside. 

Now we divide the remaining 3 balls in half and pair up a yellow + blue, yellow + red, & a blue+red ball. Now let the child thoroughly knead these together to watch what happens!

You should have 6 balls + 6 colors of playdough!

Please let us know if you have given this tried & true recipe a try! My kids just whipped up another batch today. (ages 14 & 10) so apparently it is timeless. <3

Printable recipe here