Making Oils soluble in Water

[HyOnLyph]

To All Chemists....

I've heard that you can make oils soluble in water by mixing the oil with a clear alcohol.
Can any one advise me on how much it takes? Let's say I'm using Cinnamon oil. And want to add it to a DIY mix. Currently, the Cin oil by itself turns the mix cloudy and eventually separates. Tastes great and I know I can just shake it before using but I'm going for the clear look with no separation.

I remember from Chemistry that an oil can be made soluble by mixing with alcohol but I cant find info.

OK you experts... What do I add to what? And how much. (you may remember that it sometimes makes a difference whether you add alcohol to oil or oil to alcohol.)

Thanks in advance.
Hy

 

[Safira]

This is how I understand it. Alcohol can play nice with both oil's and water, it has both in it. So, it can bind with the oil and then get the oil to play nicely with the water. But, I wonder if PG and VG are not entirely aqueous. Someplace in my head I have one single brain cell screaming at me that they do have some alcohol to them, but I reserve the right to be totally wrong, because I'm hoping this year for Christmas Santa will give me a brain.

I don't know if my thinking is right or not but in my mind I picture those magnets with the North and South on them. Water is like 2 North's, and oil is like 2 South's, the alcohol has both a north and a south so that everyone can get along. (OK maybe that didn't come out right, but maybe you get the idea)

I use cinnamon oil, and with the oil I don't use very much oil at all. I haven't tested how little alcohol I need for the oil to mix, but what I do is take 50% of the oil flavor (like Cinnamon oil) and measure that amount for the alcohol.

 

[HyOnLyph]

Thanks, Safira. I appreciate your post. It's very helpful.

I'm hoping too, that someone can give me a minimum alcohol to oil ratio. Because in my Cin-mint mix, I like a lot of spicey fire. So the less alcohol the better because I don't want to dilute anything too much. I know I can buy soluble cinnamon but that's cheating and I already have the oil.

Speaking of fire.... I recently made a mix of Mongolian Fire Oil w dried peppers and let it steep in VG for a week or so. Not quite potent enough but I think I'm on to something.

 

[HyOnLyph]

Bumping.. Hoping to get some more input.

 

[Luvs5rugrats]

Not sure if this will help or not but I bought some oil based flavorings from a candy website and tried this. I added 3 drops to about 3ml of alcohol to see what would happen and not much did. I set it in some hot water and that didn't do much either. I don't know if there's a time period that it needs to sit but all I really saw happen was that the alcohol just broke the oil up into teeny-tiny little bubbles. After about an hour, I added some VG and shook it up. The oil still floated to the top. This was flavoring heavily based in soybean oil, so for one, it's surely not vapable as is and two, if the alcohol were to break it down, it would probably need to be a much lower percentage of oil than what I was using.

 

[Nikhil]

Don't vape soybean oil. Essential oils are not really 'oil' in the cooking/biological sense, but some are soluble in alcohol and not VG or PG, which is why you'd want to use alcohol. A flavoring in an oil base like soybean oil might not be safe but will likely kill your atomizer anyway.

 

[Seabrook]

I don't know for sure what is proper, but I DIY all my e-juice, and I was using 10percent Everclear which was waaay too much. It made me cough and gave me too much TH. I cut that down to 5percent for the oils (mostly limonene), and it was much better. My citrus oils don't separate. I don't vape cinnamon at all, I have reservations on cinnamon oil in the lungs, but I do use it in my coffee. To get that 5percent in cc's (or drops), I use scubabatdan's calculator. I measure everything with syringes. Good luck.