The internet is filled with lavender oil testimonials and various hair care promises, so it was only a matter of time before they started to mix.
With that in mind, let's separate the fact from the fiction and delve into the science of what lavender oil can actually do for your hair.
So, does lavender oil help your hair grow? In people, it has worked as part of a team. A blend of lavender, thyme, rosemary, and cedarwood oil, rubbed into the scalp every day for 7 months, helped people with alopecia areata (i.e., hair loss in round bald patches). On its own, lavender essential oil has only grown hair on mice. What it gives most people is a calming smell, and that’s worth having as long as you dilute it and patch test it first.
1. Promoting Hair Growth
A 2016 study by Toxicological Research found that lavender oil helped hair grow back on mice whose backs had been shaved.
The researchers mixed 3% or 5% lavender oil into jojoba oil and put it on the mice once a day, 5 days a week. After 4 weeks, those mice had more hair follicles (i.e., the tiny pockets in your skin that each hair grows from), and the follicles reached deeper into the skin than in mice given plain jojoba oil or salt water. By then, hair covered 90% to 95% of the shaved patch.
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Mouse skin isn’t your scalp, though, and a result in mice often doesn’t carry over to people. The 5% mix was also stronger than anything we suggest for your scalp, which tops out at 3% for a mix you wash out the same day.
In people, lavender oil’s hair result comes from a 1998 study of 86 people with alopecia areata, a condition where your immune system attacks your hair follicles and hair falls out in round patches. One group massaged lavender, thyme, rosemary, and cedarwood oil, mixed into jojoba and grapeseed oil, into their scalps every day. The other group massaged in the jojoba and grapeseed oil alone. After 7 months, 19 of 43 people (44%) using the essential oils had improved, compared with 6 of 41 (15%) using the plain oils.
The four oils were always used together, so nobody knows how much of that came from the lavender. If you have round bald patches, see a board-certified dermatologist first, and ask about adding the blend to your treatment.
If your hair is healthy and you just want more length, keep in mind that hair grows about ⅓ to ½ inch a month, depending on your hair type, and keeping your ends from breaking is what lets you see that growth. Either way, the blend was massaged into the scalp, not smoothed over the hair strands, so put your mix where your follicles are.
Original Curl Centric chart
Is lavender oil the right fix for this?
Find the row for what you’re hoping lavender oil will do, then start with the last column. Each row is built from a study or source cited in this article.
| What you want | What lavender oil has done | Why it matters | What to do first |
|---|---|---|---|
| A calming scent | Dental patients felt less anxious when their waiting room smelled of lavender. | Stress can push hairs into a resting phase, and they shed a few months later. | For scent alone, mix 3 to 6 drops into 2 tablespoons of carrier oil, and patch test it before it goes on your scalp.Patch test steps |
| Hair back in round bald patches | Mixed with thyme, rosemary, and cedarwood oil, it helped 44% of people with alopecia areata, compared with 15% who used plain carrier oils. | Round patches are often your immune system attacking your follicles, and people used the blend every day for 7 months. | See a board-certified dermatologist first, and ask about adding the four-oil blend to your treatment.Cedarwood oil guide |
| Longer or thicker hair | On its own, it has only grown hair on mice, using 3% and 5% mixes for 4 weeks. | Hair grows about ⅓ to ½ inch a month, depending on hair type, and ends that break off hide that growth. | For length, protect your ends from breaking. If your part is getting wider, see a dermatologist.Dilution calculator |
| Fewer flakes | It hasn’t been tried on dandruff. A shampoo made with 5% tea tree oil has. | Dandruff comes from a yeast that eats scalp oil, so a scalp oil may feed it. | Use a dandruff shampoo on your scalp, and keep oil mixes on your hair strands and ends until the flakes are gone.Dandruff guide |
| Getting rid of head lice | A store lotion with 10% tea tree oil and 1% lavender oil kept 44% of lice eggs from hatching after one use. | More than half the eggs survived, and a lotion made to smother lice did better, at 68%. | Use an over-the-counter or prescription lice treatment, and follow its directions.Head lice guide |
| Calming a red, itchy, or scaly scalp | It helped canker sores in the mouth heal, but it’s also a known skin allergen. | Psoriasis, infections, and scarring conditions can all inflame your scalp and cost you hair. | See a board-certified dermatologist, and leave lavender oil off your scalp until it heals. |
If your scalp burns, itches, or turns red after a lavender oil mix, wash it out with shampoo and stop using it. A board-certified dermatologist can find out what you reacted to if the rash doesn’t settle down.
2. The Benefits of Other Essential Oils
Before we get deeper into lavender oil itself, it is also worth noting how other essential oils can potentially help your hair and scalp. Almond, coconut, and jojoba oil on this list are carrier oils (i.e., the plain plant oils you mix an essential oil into), and the rest are essential oils:
- Almond oil can potentially help moisturize your scalp
- Chamomile oil is one to use for its scent in a gentle mix, not as a hair treatment
- Coconut oil is excellent for moisturizing your hair, and it helps your strands hold on to their protein when you wash them
- Cedarwood oil has helped with hair loss only as one of four oils in the same blend as lavender, which was tested on people with round bald patches
- Jojoba oil resembles sebum, the natural oil your scalp makes, which makes it a gentle moisturizer for your scalp
- Rosemary oil has been tested on its own for hair loss, in a 6-month study of 100 men with pattern hair loss, where hair counts went up about as much as they did with 2% minoxidil, a hair loss treatment sold over the counter
- Sandalwood oil can imbue your hair with its lovely fragrance
Only two of these have helped people with hair loss in studies: rosemary oil on its own, and the four-oil blend that includes cedarwood and lavender. The rest are worth using for moisture or for their scent.
Our focus on lavender oil isn't because it's the only essential oil out there that can deal with these matters - far from it - but simply because it is by far one of the most accessible and versatile.
Several of the above have their own fantastic fragrances that are worth trying to give your hair that something extra. Lavender oil has one more thing going for it: like cedarwood, it was part of the one blend that helped people with patchy hair loss.
3. Fusidic Acid
Fusidic acid isn’t an oil or a hair product. It’s an antibiotic (i.e., a medicine that fights bacteria), and it shows up in research on one painful kind of scarring hair loss, so it’s worth knowing about if your scalp has sores.
Fusidic acid is a type of bacteriostatic antibiotic, meaning it stops bacteria from multiplying, and it comes from the fungus Fusidium coccineum. It works by blocking the way bacteria build their proteins, and doctors use it to treat skin infections.
An infected scalp is one of the ways hair growth can go wrong, and that’s where an antibiotic comes in. Fusidic acid prevents elongation factor G (EF-G), a protein bacteria need, from coming off the ribosome, the part of a bacterial cell that builds proteins, so the bacteria stall.
A 2019 case report on fusidic acid described one woman with folliculitis decalvans, a rare kind of scarring hair loss that leaves pus-filled bumps and crusts on the scalp. Her doctors gave her fusidic acid by mouth, 500 mg three times a day, along with two medicated lotions. After two months, her scalp was less red and had less pus, and some hair grew back, mostly around the edges of the bald patch.
That’s one person, and she used other medicines at the same time, so it can’t tell you how well fusidic acid works on its own. With this kind of hair loss, the goal of treatment is to stop the inflammation before it destroys more hair follicles, because a destroyed follicle can’t grow hair again.
So if you have painful bumps, pus, or crusts on your scalp, or a bald patch that keeps getting bigger, skip the home remedies, lavender oil included, and see a board-certified dermatologist soon. Catching scarring hair loss early saves the follicles you still have, and that protects your hair growth for years to come.
4. Moisturizing Your Hair and Managing Dandruff
Few things can be more annoying in terms of hair management than kicking up a mini snowstorm every time you comb or even touch your hair.
Anyone who is familiar with the annoyance and embarrassment that can accompany dislodging dandruff particles and sending them showering everywhere will want to know what actually stops the flakes. The answer starts with a surprise: dandruff usually isn’t a dry scalp.
Lavender oil won’t clear dandruff, but a dandruff shampoo will, and you can keep moisturizing your hair while you use one.
Here’s why. Most dandruff is your scalp reacting to Malassezia, a yeast (i.e., a type of fungus) that nearly everyone has on their scalp. The yeast eats the oil your scalp makes. On a scalp that’s prone to dandruff, what it leaves behind is irritating, so the skin itches and flakes. A dry scalp can itch and flake as well, which is why the two get mixed up so often.
That itch is what makes you scratch, against your better judgment, causing all those dandruff particles to come fluttering down on your shoulders.
Since the yeast lives on oil, putting more oil on your scalp may give it more to eat. So while you’re treating dandruff, keep lavender oil mixes and other hair oils on your hair strands and ends.
What clears dandruff is a dandruff shampoo. Check the Drug Facts box on the bottle for one of the ingredients dermatologists recommend: zinc pyrithione, selenium sulfide, ketoconazole, salicylic acid, coal tar, or sulfur. Work it into your scalp only, and leave it on for a few minutes before you rinse if the label says to. With curly or coily hair, about once a week is enough if your hair tolerates it.
If you want an essential oil in the mix, tea tree oil is the one with results. A shampoo made with 5% tea tree oil cut dandruff by 41% in 4 weeks, compared with 11% for the same shampoo without it. That was a ready-made shampoo, not drops stirred into your own bottle.
Give your dandruff shampoo about four weeks. If the flakes haven’t improved by then, or they’re thick and severe, see a board-certified dermatologist, since psoriasis and other scalp conditions can look like dandruff.
Once the flakes are gone, keep using the dandruff shampoo about once a week so they stay gone, and let lavender oil do what it does well: make the oil on your hair strands smell good.
5. Antimicrobial Properties
Lavender oil can slow the growth of some bacteria and fungi in a lab dish, but that doesn’t make it a treatment for a scalp infection.
In one study, lavender oil held back the growth of every kind of bacteria swabbed from people’s mouth ulcers when the researchers tested it on lab plates. Still, a review of lavender oil research called the evidence on lavender and germs inconclusive and often controversial, partly because it wasn’t always clear which lavender oil had been tested.
A lab plate isn’t your scalp, and a scalp infection needs real treatment. If you have scaly, swollen patches, small black dots where hairs have broken off, or sore bumps around your hair follicles, see a doctor or dermatologist. Once an infection clears, your hair tends to grow back.
6. Combatting Head Lice
If there is anything more embarrassing than dandruff from a hair care perspective, it's head lice. Head lice are tiny insects that live in your hair and feed on blood from your scalp, and young children get them most often.
According to the CDC, a student with head lice doesn’t need to be sent home early. They can go home at the end of the day, get treated, and come back to class once treatment has started.
However, lice nevertheless remain a threat to the integrity of your hair and scalp.
According to a 2011 study, lavender oil and tea tree oil went into a lice lotion that was tested on children with lice eggs in their hair. Researchers checked 722 children and enrolled 92 of them, aged 4 to 12. Each child got one 10-minute treatment with one of three store-bought lotions, and the researchers clipped eggs from their hair before and after, then waited 14 days to see which ones hatched.
The lotion with tea tree oil (10%) and lavender oil (1%) kept 44.4% of the eggs from hatching. A lotion with eucalyptus and lemon tea tree oil managed 3.3%. The best result came from a lotion with no essential oils at all, one made to smother lice, at 68.3%.
The company that makes two of the three lotions, including the tea tree and lavender one, paid for the study. And with lavender at just 1% of that lotion, the study can’t tell you what lavender oil does on its own. More than half of the eggs survived one treatment, and every egg that survives can hatch into a new louse.
However, it is extremely important to note that neither lavender nor tea tree oil is an acceptable replacement for medication given by your doctor.
Both over-the-counter and prescription lice treatments are available, so start with one of those and follow its directions. If it doesn’t work, ask your doctor or pharmacist about a different one, since lice in many places have become resistant to some of the common treatments.
7. Helping with Skin Inflammation
Lavender oil isn’t a treatment for an inflamed scalp, and it can cause skin inflammation of its own. That matters, because the American Academy of Dermatology lists several inflamed-scalp conditions among the causes of hair loss.
Those conditions include scalp psoriasis, scalp infections, and scarring alopecia, where inflammation destroys hair follicles so they can’t grow hair again. With psoriasis and infections, your hair tends to grow back once the scalp clears.
A European Union safety committee lists lavender oil as an established skin allergen in people (i.e., something that can give you an itchy, allergic rash). Its two main compounds, linalool and linalyl acetate, react with air over time, and in lab tests, lavender oil that had been exposed to air was more likely to set off an allergy. So an inflamed scalp is the worst place to experiment with it.
If your scalp stays red, itchy, scaly, or sore, see a board-certified dermatologist. When it comes to preserving your hair follicles and sparing yourself the itchy agony and embarrassment that can come from scalp inflammation and subsequent hair loss, getting the right treatment early counts for a lot.
A 2012 study in the American Journal of Dentistry found that people who dabbed lavender oil on canker sores (i.e., small, painful mouth ulcers) had less swelling and pain, and their sores healed faster, in 2 to 4 days, than people given a placebo. That’s promising for mouth sores, but it doesn’t tell you what lavender oil does on an inflamed scalp.
8. Scents and Scents-ability
One of the most noticeable things about lavender and other essential oils is also one of the most difficult things about it to quantify - their pleasing aroma.
On the one hand, there is no hard scientific proof for lavender oils or aromatherapy being a cure-all. They smell nice, yes, but that's all - the cure for cancer or Alzheimer's isn't going to arise from pleasing aromas alone.
That being said, there are still other potential medical benefits to pleasing aromas and the psychological states they can evoke.
For example, it should come as no surprise that stress and hair loss are linked. (You probably don't need any scientific data to back that one up, but if you do, here it is.)
Thankfully, a study done by Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology found that dental patients felt less anxious while they waited for their appointment when the waiting room smelled of lavender. The study compared 340 patients who waited with the lavender scent or with no scent at all.
Similar results show up elsewhere. In a 2019 study in Physiology & Behavior, people who breathed in lavender oil before having a wisdom tooth removed were less anxious around the surgery. And a 2019 review in Phytomedicine pooled dozens of trials and found that breathing in lavender lowered anxiety, though most of the studies were of low quality. The strongest results in that review came from lavender oil capsules taken by mouth, which are a standardized product, not the oil sold for your hair.
Again, that’s by no means a cure-all. If stress has you shedding, the smell of lavender oil in your favorite scented candle, shampoo, or another form may help you relax, but it won’t stop the shedding by itself.
With telogen effluvium, the kind of shedding stress causes, hairs shift into a resting phase and fall out a few months later. That kind of shedding usually isn’t permanent, and your hair may fill back in after the stress passes. Talk to your doctor if you’re losing more hair than usual or it’s falling out in patches.
Using Lavender Oil for Hair Care
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So you've come this far and have decided that lavender oil sounds like it's worth a try after all. What now?
Well, to get the most out of it you'll want to make sure that you keep a few basic things in mind.
First, when using lavender oil for hair care purposes, it should come as no surprise that you'll get the best results if you massage it directly into your scalp.
Mixing Lavender Essential Oil With Carrier Oils
You’ll want to dilute it first. Mix it into a carrier oil such as jojoba oil or coconut oil, which are plain plant oils, not essential oils.
How much? In 2 tablespoons of carrier oil, 6 to 18 drops of lavender oil make a 1% to 3% mix, which suits a treatment you shampoo out the same day. If the mix will stay on your scalp until wash day, go lower: 3 to 12 drops, or 0.5% to 2%. Your first mix should be the weakest one. For other amounts, our essential oil dilution calculator does the math.
Before your first use, patch test the mix. Dab a little on a quarter-sized spot on the inside of your elbow twice a day for 7 to 10 days. If your skin stays calm, with no redness, itching, or swelling, it’s fine to use on your scalp. Our patch test steps walk you through it.
Applying Lavender Scalp Oil to Your Hair
You can massage diluted lavender oil into your scalp before you wash your hair or after, whichever fits your routine. Part your hair as you go so the mix reaches your scalp instead of sitting on top of your curls.
Once you have added it to your hair, let it sit for about 5 to 10 minutes. You can then either rinse it out or let it sit there and enjoy the nice fragrance it can give your hair.
You can also leave it in overnight if you wrap your hair in a towel. Use the leave-in strength for that, or for any mix you don’t rinse out, since it stays on your scalp for hours.
Adding Lavender Oil to Shampoo or Hair Oil
You may also want to add lavender oil to hair products you already have. For example, you may choose to add it to your shampoo or conditioner, as long as the product’s directions say that’s OK.
This can be an especially good move if you want to enjoy the lovely aroma of lavender oil in your hair.
That being said, a little goes a long way here. For a teaspoon of shampoo or conditioner, 1 or 2 drops are enough. For a whole bottle, the dilution calculator will tell you how many drops to add. If you’re adding it to a hair oil you leave in, 1 drop per teaspoon is plenty.
Another alternative is to add a drop or two to a dollop of whatever shampoo or conditioner you are using once you have some in your hand and then work it all in at once.
Some people prefer to purchase specially-made hair care products that already contain lavender oil.
You should also be aware that any hair care product containing lavender oil has likely already diluted it, so you should not have to dilute it any further.
When to Stop Using Lavender Oil
Stop using lavender oil if your scalp burns, stings, itches, or turns red after you put on a mix, and wash it out with shampoo right away. A rash like that is your skin reacting to the oil. If it hangs on, see a board-certified dermatologist, who can find out exactly what you reacted to.
Because air makes lavender oil more likely to cause an allergy, keep the cap screwed on tight and don’t leave the bottle sitting open while you mix.
And remember what lavender oil can’t do. It won’t clear dandruff, lice, or a scalp infection, so see a doctor or dermatologist for bald patches, shedding that won’t stop, or a scalp that stays sore.
It's true that sometimes the benefits of essential oils are overstated.
However, it's also true that in this case, as long as you know what you're doing, do your research, and make sure you're using the right products in the right way, lavender oil can be a lovely part of your hair care routine.
Used at the right strength, it leaves your hair smelling fresh and may help you relax, and in a blend with thyme, rosemary, and cedarwood oil, it helped people with round bald patches. Patch test every new mix, and keep it on your hair strands rather than your scalp while you’re treating dandruff.
