Make Your Own Poo Pourri At Home — Slash Your Toiletry Budget With This 2-Minute DIY

Jenna Cartusciello
·3 min read

I bet you can remember the first time you discovered Poo Pourri. A small spray bottle that promises to erase bathroom scents with just a few pre-business spritzes? It's a dream come true! But flash forward a few years, and the price of individual Poo Pourri bottles starts to add up. While it's an amazing product — and one I've spent plenty of money on myself — I recently started looking for alternatives. Turns out, there's a DIY toilet deodorizer that works just as well, and you can make it in only two minutes. The ingredients are customizable and budget-friendly, so you may have everything you need at home already.

How DIY Poo Pourri Works

While there are several ways to go about making a DIY Poo Pourri — you can swap ingredients and customize the mixture as much as you like — you will need three core ingredients to make it work: essential oils, a solubizer, and a viscous substance.

  • Essential oils create a film over the toilet bowl water, so urine or stool that passes through gets coated in oil and stops emitting odors. (And of course, essential oils smell nice.)

  • A solubizer is something that makes insoluble liquids, like essential oils, soluble in water. (Denatured alcohol makes an excellent solubizer.) This helps keep the essential oils mixed throughout the DIY solution, so you don't have to vigorously shake the bottle to mix the oils each time you're about to spray.

  • A viscous substance, or something with a thick consistency, helps the spray stick to the surface of the water. (This traps odors beneath the water's surface.) Glycerin is a good choice, but since most people don't have a pure bottle of glycerin on hand, a natural dish soap works well, too.

Safety of DIY Poo Pourri for Sewers and Septic Systems

Store-bought Poo Pourri is non-toxic and made of natural ingredients, so it's safe to breathe and flush. It's also safe for sewers and septic systems. Some ingredients in homemade Poo Pourri however, like glycerin or dish soap, are not recommended for sewage and septic systems in high amounts. Still, in very small amounts (such as a few sprays each day), they shouldn't cause damage. Keep in mind that your shower water contains a great deal of soap and conditioner — so if your system can handle that, you should be fine! But if you want to be on the safe side, just use an all-natural dish soap when making your DIY deodorizer.

How To Make DIY Poo Pourri

After looking at several DIY ingredient lists, I decided to make my own and customize it. Here's what I used:

  • 2 ounce spray bottle (Walmart sells them inexpensively in the toiletries/travel section)

  • ½ teaspoon denatured alcohol

  • 1 teaspoon dish soap

  • 15 to 25 drops of essential oils (your choice)

  • Water

Here's how to do it:

  1. Add denatured alcohol, dish soap, and essential oils to spray bottle.

  2. Fill rest of bottle with water and shake.

Note: Don't have denatured alcohol? Swap it (one to one ratio) with rubbing alcohol, vodka, or white vinegar. If you don't want to use dish soap, use glycerin.

DIY poo pourri on red tablecloth next to essential oils
My own concoction.

How It Turned Out

I used 10 drops of a citrus oil blend (orange and grapefruit), 10 drops of jasmine, 5 drops of lavender, and a citrus-scented dish soap — and I couldn't have been more pleased with the resulting scent. It was gentle and floral, without the sharpness of traditional citrus-y deodorizers. (I hope Poo Pourri makes this scent some day!) The best part? It worked like a charm and sprayed evenly in the loo.

I can't wait to try other essential oil combinations as well; bergamot, lemongrass, and orange would make a good mix, as would peppermint and lavender. Happy spritzing!