In my own personal experience…i did try olive oil infusion with tea tree leaves..so far no negative results , except that the strong scent of olive oil overshadow the subtle scent of other herbs. So with lavender, you cannot have a very good aroma of your lavender oil with olive oil.

Hi,
I have worked with essential oils and herbs in personal care products for several decades. I had a retail store selling hand made soaps, lotions, balms, etc.

Lavender and other herbs can be infused into olive or other oils, but the amount of linalool and other scent chemicals will be somewhat limited. In order to get enough scent chemicals into an infusion to add a fragrance, you really would need to add essential oils. Essential oils are distilled from aromatic plants and contain concentrations an order of magnitude greater than anything you can infuse.

The short answer is that your fragrance will be most likely very light, and the balm will also have limited therapeutic value, although it’s certainly a lovely idea.

If you would like to read more about essential oils, I recommend Valerie Worwood’s Complete Book of Aromatherapy and Essential Oils as a starting point.

From my company’s website:

http://store.scent-works.com/definitionsfaq.html#EO
“Essential Oils

An essential oil is a concentrated hydrophobic liquid containing volatile aroma compounds from plants. Essential oils are also known as volatile, ethereal oils or aetherolea, or simply as the “oil of” the plant from which they were extracted, such as oil of clove. An oil is “essential” in the sense that it carries a distinctive scent, or essence, of the plant. Essential oils do not as a group need to have any specific chemical properties in common, beyond conveying characteristic fragrances.

Essential oils are extracted from their plant hosts using a variety of methods including distillation, expressing, and solvent extraction (see “Extraction Methods for Plant Oils for further information). They are used in perfumes, cosmetics, soap and other products, for flavoring food and drink, and for scenting incense and household cleaning products.

Various essential oils have been used medicinally at different periods in history. Medical applications range from skin treatments to remedies for cancer, and are often based on historical use of these oils for these purposes. Such claims are now subject to regulation in most countries, and have grown more vague to stay within these regulations.

Interest in essential oils has revived in recent decades with the popularity of aromatherapy, a branch of alternative medicine which claims that the specific aromas carried by essential oils have curative effects. Oils are volatilized or diluted in a carrier oil and used in massage, diffused in the air by a nebulizer or by heating over a candle flame, or burned as incense, for example.”

Hope that helps.

I have a nice lavender plant that I got from Herbfest. I like to break off a piece and sniff it while I am in the garden, very relaxing.