Nutmeg Oil and Children: Keeping the Bottle Out of Reach

When people ask about nutmeg oil and children, they usually picture a diffuser humming in the nursery. In practice the more useful picture is the bottle. A curious child can reach a bottle, open it and taste it far faster than a diffuser can cause any trouble, so most of good practice here comes down to where the oil lives. We do not recommend our nutmeg oil for use on or around children, and this is how we think about keeping it out of their way.

Nutmeg Essential Oil

Our own Nutmeg Essential Oil, in sizes from 0.5 oz to bulk.

From $10.99

Shop Now →

Where it lives in a busy home

The best spot is one you will remember without thinking: a lockable box or high cabinet that is also where you keep your other craft supplies, away from the kitchen and the bathroom where children wander in and out. If you only craft now and then, write the storage spot on a small note inside the cabinet door, so anyone putting things away knows where it goes.

What poison centre records tell us

The best nutmeg case series we could read in full comes from the Illinois Poison Center, which logged 32 nutmeg ingestions between 2001 and 2011. Seventeen were accidental, and ten of those were children under 13. Four of the exposures in those young children were to the eye. The other fifteen cases were deliberate, and one patient who had combined nutmeg with other drugs needed ventilatory support in hospital (Ehrenpreis and colleagues, 2014).

These were mostly spice cases, so they do not measure what the oil does to a child, and no source we found gives a toxic amount of nutmeg oil for children. What the records do show is a pattern: small children get into things within reach, and the authors call for more education for parents about household hazards. We read that as a good reason to put the bottle somewhere it cannot be found.

A bottle is a concentrated material

Poison Control's guidance for essential oils in general is simple. If you have bottles at home, they must be locked up, out of sight and reach of children and pets, and anyone with young children might consider not keeping them at all. The EFSA panel that reviewed nutmeg oil describes it as an irritant to skin and eyes and a sensitiser of skin and airways, which is one more reason a splash is best avoided.

Our nutmeg oils come as a neat, undiluted liquid. The practical habits are easy:

Keep the oil in a closed cabinet rather than just a high shelf, because children climb.
Cap it every time you use it.
Leave the original label on, so anyone who has to call for help can read out exactly what it is.
If you decant into smaller bottles, label them and lock those away as well.

Please do not rely on the cap alone: let the cabinet do the work.

Building the habit

Good storage is mostly a habit, and habits are easier to build when they are small and boring. Here are the ones we would aim for:

Put the bottle back in its cabinet the moment you finish, before you answer the door or the phone.
Do not leave it on a counter, a nightstand or a crafting table, even for a minute.
Tell every other adult in the house, and any babysitter or guest who stays, where it lives and that it stays there.
Check visitors' bags and coat pockets at the door if they carry their own bottles around, since those travel low and open easily.

None of it takes long, and after a week it feels like locking the front door.

If a child gets into it

Call Poison Help on 1-800-222-1222 in the United States, or your local emergency number if the child is struggling to breathe or is unresponsive. Bring the bottle with you so the specialist can see exactly what it is. For a skin reaction, stop using the oil, wash the area and ask a pharmacist or paediatrician.

Skin and diffusing around children

We would not put diluted nutmeg oil on a child's skin. The Tisserand Institute's chart marks East Indian type nutmeg oil with an X for babies from 3 to 24 months and toddlers up to 6 years, meaning do not use, and allows 0.2% for ages 6 to 15. For West Indian type it also marks 3 to 24 months with an X and allows 0.5% for ages 2 to 6 and 1% for ages 6 to 15. Because the type of oil matters so much and we do not describe ours by type, we do not offer a child dilution. Ask a paediatrician before using any scented product on a child's skin.

For diffusing, we could find no authority that gives a child-specific time or room size for nutmeg oil, so we would not invent one. If you love the warm spice scent, a pot of simmering orange peel and cinnamon sticks from the kitchen is a gentler way to scent a family room. Our diffuser post covers using nutmeg oil in a shared space, the pregnancy post and the ingestion post cover related ground, and the skin post covers dilution for adults.

Talking with older children

Older children are curious about what the grown-ups are making, and a short, plain answer usually works better than a mystery. You can tell them it is an adult craft ingredient, strong and not for touching, much like the cleaning products under the sink. Treat it that way yourself, and the habit tends to pass on without a lecture.

The simplest rule is also the best: nutmeg oil is an adult's craft ingredient, and it stays capped, labelled and locked away like any other concentrated product around the house.