How Do I Make a Sturdy Essential Oil Carrying Case?

DIY perfumery is all about making it work, minimizing barriers, and focusing on the joy of scent. When you don’t have enough space in your home to have a dedicated perfumers organ, you will end up carrying your materials, scale, and other tools from a closet or storage to various work sources. We started with small (and very cute) wooden boxes with dividers from Soligt. We outgrew them both with the number of different essential oils and other materials that we wanted to keep at 10% dilution for scent training and test blends as well as the size of storage bottles, moving from 5ml up to 30 or 60ml depending on the material. You will find that 30ml bottles don’t fit well in almost any of the storage solutions designed for essential oils. Plastic bins of various sizes (some with bins inside of them to organize materials) function alright, but they were not designed for the weight of filled glass bottles. They have plastic latches that can’t be trusted and often don’t have handles. With only an hour or so to train at night, it became a hassle to get everything out and the back into the closet.

Find out more about setting up a workspace and training your brain to recognize and appreciate scents in our Complete Guide: How Do I Make My Own Perfume?

Every toolbox deserves a glamour shot. These DEWALT Flat Top Tool Boxes look and feel pretty substantial given the price.

This is the foam bottom that comes with the Feldherr Pick and Pluck Pre-cubed Foam. This is probably not entirely necessary, but easy to put in. We used double-sided foam mounting tabs to secure the foam bottom to the case, also probably not necessary.

This is to show how nifty the foam block looks before we destroyed it by picking out holes for the bottles. The first hole has a 1-column border at the side and bottom. The 3x3 section we removed is just about a perfect fit for the 30ml bottle. We include the metal chopstick in the picture (from a Bonsai Jack’s succulent soil purchase) that we used to pry open some of the pieces. We almost thought a knife or long scissors would help, but didn’t use them. We found that pinching three columns together on the side you won’t be tearing and then pinching the three that you will be tearing encourages on those columns to come loose.

This works as desired. Everything is staying in place, the bottles are happy. Pick and pluck foam definitely has a learning curve in terms of not separating adjacent columns from the single-layer grid structure here. Also, this case has a good amount of rectangular area, but some irregular corners and other places that don’t look wonderful with this type of foam.