Have you ever asked yourself the question, how do I make perfume? You may have gotten some essential oils and started blending a few drops of each together only to realize that the result is something that smells like herbal medicine. You may have wondered, how do the perfumes in the shops smell so good?
Well, that's the art of perfumery. Similar to picking up a guitar or a paintbrush for the first time, it takes a lot of practice and knowledge to become a master of the craft. Becoming a professional perfumer is extremely challenging, but that doesn't stop you teaching yourself to be able to make great smelling perfumes at home. This video contains everything you need to know to do just that, so if you want to learn how to compose beautiful perfumes for yourself, then watch on. So then, to begin learning perfumery, you're first going to need some equipment and ingredients.
Let's start with the equipment. I did a full video on this where I go into more detail, and I'll link that video below, but here are the essentials. Firstly, you'll need a set of scales.
Ideally, scales which can measure accurately down to 0.001g. By investing in this, you can measure out small blends which make your expensive perfume ingredients last longer. If you can't afford an 0.001g scale, you can use an 0.01g scale to get started. Don't be tempted to skip using a scale at all however and use drops because it will cause you issues further down the line.
Next you will need some sample bottles. This is where you'll make most of your test perfumes to avoid wasting money on expensive perfume bottles. You'll need disposable plastic pipettes, I like boxes of 500, and paper blotters or scent strips as I call them. You'll also need a pen and some labels to identify all of your mixtures.
Other equipment such as glass beakers can be useful too, but aren't necessary to begin with. Check out my video on equipment for the full details. I will suggest some ingredients to get started with in a second. But firstly, let's talk about the different types. Fragrance ingredients in perfumery are referred to as raw materials, so we'll use that term from now on.
Now, raw materials can be divided into three classes. Naturals, synthetics, or aroma chemicals as you might hear them referred to as, and bases. We'll talk more about bases later.
Naturals can further be broken down depending on how they are produced. The most common are essential oils. These are extracted from plants using steam distillation which is when you pass steam through harvested plant material to capture its natural oils. Another type of natural commonly used in perfumery are absolutes. These are created by extracting plant material with solvents and are often both longer lasting and offer an aroma closer to that of the natural plant.
There are other types of natural such as resinoids and CO2 extracts but I won't go into them here. Aside from naturals we have synthetics. These are single molecules created in a lab. unlike naturals which are mixtures of hundreds of molecules extracted from nature. Synthetics are vital to modern perfumery and they are responsible for most great modern perfumes.
Synthetics usually have a clean and distinct olfactory signature and offer the perfume possibilities to go far beyond the smells found in nature. They are often easier to use and are critical for getting close to the kinds of smells you find in perfumes you can buy in the shops. A common misconception in perfumery is that naturals are safer and better for the environment than synthetics. This is not true however as a rule and each raw material must be taken on a case-by-case basis.
Finally, aside from your raw materials there are solvents, things like DPG and IPM. The only one that you'll need as a beginner is cosmetics grade ethanol or a similar product called perfumer's alcohol. This is what you'll add to your fragrance concentrate to turn it into a perfume. Let's talk about some of the most important raw materials in perfumery, which I think would be a great starting point for your beginner's palette.
Isoe, super, hedione and ambroxan are probably the most famous perfume molecules amongst the general public and all for good reason. They're all long-lasting and diffusive notes which help your perfumes to be smelled from a distance and they contribute to that elegant shop-bought smell. Bergamot essential oil is one of the most widely used citrus notes and is often used to bridge between the top and mid-notes of a perfume. I'll explain what top and mid-notes are shortly. Ethylene bracelate is a widely used musk.
and helps provide longevity and a soft lingering skin scent. Patchouli is an aromatic herb related to mint and lavender, and its essential oil is widely used in many types of perfume and contributes to many important accords. Vanillin is a smell most people would recognize as vanilla.
It's widely used in flavorings, but also to provide vanilla sweetness to perfumes. Finally, dihydromercenol is a fresh aromatic top note that can be used to make a nice, soft, and refreshing perfume. which is synonymous with men's aftershave. I'll put a link in the description to other videos I made on good raw materials for beginners since this list only scratches the surface and I just can't cover them all in this video. So then, all of these raw materials, where do you buy them?
It's an important question since synthetics can be hard to find and most essential oils that you find online are not of the standard of quality necessary for fine fragrance. Cheap low quality naturals often feature off-nodes which will ruin your perfumes and make them smell like aromatherapy blends. You want to avoid things marketed as fragrance oil as well since these are generally made to be as cheap as possible for businesses selling mass market home fragrance products like scented candles or similar. I've found that the most reliable way to get quality raw materials is to buy from places which specifically sell raw materials for perfumery. Some examples are, in the USA, Perfumer's Apprentice, Perfumer's Supply House, and CreatingPerfume.com.
In the UK, Pellwall and Harrison Joseph are both fantastic. In the EU, Dehexerage, PCW, and Perfumiarz. There's also Perfumer's World in East Asia, and they offer fairly cheap international shipping.
This isn't an exhaustive list, but certainly covers some of the most popular ones in 2022. Right then, so you've got your equipment and raw materials, now how do you make perfume? Well, not quite yet. Before we can talk about learning to make perfume, we quickly need to cover some common terms.
Firstly, EDT and EDP, that's Eau de Toilette and Eau de Parfum. There are others, but these are the most common. Eau de Toilette are a less concentrated form of perfume and usually cheaper.
Commonly these would be around 10% fragrance concentrate to 90% alcohol. Eau de parfum on the other hand are far more concentrated, often around 20% fragrance concentrate and 80% alcohol. These are loose terms though and the percentages may vary.
Another important concept is that of top, mid and bass notes. Top notes are the shortest lived notes in your perfumes but also have the most impact when you spray it out of the bottle. Bass notes on the other hand are the longest lasting notes and last to the very end meaning more hours on the skin. Middle or just mid notes are well in the middle and you will use all three terms frequently when talking about the composition of your perfumes.
Finally it's important to know the difference between accords and basses since both are common terms which refer to mixing raw materials together. An accord in perfumery is a bit like a chord in music it's the name for when a A particular combination of smells results in a smell which is more than simply the sum of its parts. Think about it as a harmony amongst smells.
A base, on the other hand, is a reproducible formula that can be made and used like a single raw material in future perfumes. Think of it like a Lego brick. A good example would be an amber accord. The combination of labdanum absolute and vanillin creates a unique smell which is referred to as an amber accord. If you change the proportions a little you will still get an amber accord because you still have that combination.
However, if you fix the proportions you've made it into a reproducible formula which you can make up in a separate bottle and now use in your other perfumes as if it were a single raw material. As such, now your accord can also be classified as a base. Enough of the boring terminology, let's start talking about making perfume.
When you're just starting out, Making nice smelling perfume straight away is challenging without a good dose of luck, and that's because you still need to learn your fundamental skills. Think of it like a musician learning to play the piano. Yes, you might be able to learn some basic songs, but to begin composing and improvising, it really helps a great deal to know your scales first.
In art, it's the same. You may be able to trace a picture of a person, but to make one up for yourself without a reference, you'll need to know anatomy. And of course, other bits like Color theory will help you complete the painting.
So yes, you could easily create a nice perfume if you had the formula, you'd simply weigh out the raw materials. But I assume that's not why you're watching this video, you want to be able to reliably create your own formulas, that means you're going to have to learn some fundamentals in perfumery. I've been doing this for a while, and over that time I've developed a simple three-stage model for learning perfumery.
Those stages are 1. Learning your raw materials 2. Learning to create chords and basses And three, learning to create perfumes. I'll now show you the basics of each stage. Just remember, even when you advance to the next stage, you still need to continue practicing everything from the stage before. Let's start then with stage one, learning the raw materials.
When you first begin, it's very tempting to open all of your raw materials and just start smelling them out of the bottle. Sometimes it just has to be done if you can't contain your excitement, but it's not going to get you very far in the long term. And that's because raw materials are concentrated fragrance and your nose starts to shut down when bombarded with so many smell molecules. The technical term for this is olfactory fatigue.
It just means your nose gets tired quickly. In order to smell or evaluate, as it's technically called, your raw materials properly, you first need to dilute them. I like to dilute mine down to 10% in alcohol but the percentage is up to you. Some people prefer 20% since it's naturally an eau de parfum instead of an eau de toilette concentration.
What you pick is up to you, just be consistent. I've linked a video which I made which shows how to make these dilutions step by step so it's in the description if you want to follow along. Once you've got your dilutions you next need to evaluate them using the following process.
Firstly, Take and label a scent strip, for example, Hedione 10%, and then dip it into your dilution. Pro tip, fold the ends up like this to stop them cross-contaminating via your desk. After waiting a few seconds for the alcohol to evaporate, hold the scent strip about one centimeter from your nose.
It's important that it doesn't touch your nose, however, since this will cause cross-contamination and more of that olfactory fatigue. Try to describe the smell and write it down. This is for your future reference.
Write down what the smell reminds you of and any descriptors which describe the smell. Now leave the scent strip for a while and later repeat this process, regularly for the first day and then less frequently thereafter, until you can no longer smell it. This is really important because it allows you to work out if your raw materials are top, middle or bass notes.
As a rough rule I would class notes lasting less than a day on the scent strip as a top note, less than a week as a mid note. and longer than a week as a base note, but the boundaries are blurry. This information will be vital when you come to compose your perfume so do not skip it.
Ideally you would repeat this process of dilution and evaluation with a much weaker dilution but it's especially important for strong raw materials. This is because some raw materials can be deceptively strong and either smell bad or not at all until they've been diluted down enough. I usually do one percent as my secondary dilution.
It may seem tedious, but you're building fundamental knowledge which will later help you compose perfumes. Stage 2. Learning to create accords and bases. Once you're confident that you've learned your raw materials, the next step is to learn to create basic accords.
I'll now show an example with the amber accord we discussed earlier. A classic amber accord is made up from two components. Labdanum, usually the absolute, is used, and vanillin, a synthetic vanilla molecule.
If we take the two at our 10% dilution on separate scent strips and hold them together, we should immediately have an idea of the smell of the accord. This technique is frequently used to test the harmony without going to the trouble of making a trial blend. Now that we're happy that our labdanum and vanillin harmonize together, let's make our first trial blend. Weigh out 0.5 grams of the 10% dilution you made earlier of each raw material using separate pipettes into a new sample vial.
Never put a use-per-pet back into a different raw material since it will become contaminated and ruin the second raw material. Now label your sample, Amber Accord Trial 1. Now, since blending raw materials fills the air in your workstation with aromas, which in turn causes olfactory fatigue, i.e. ties out your nose, I like to get some fresh air before evaluating. Then, simply evaluate in the same way as you would have for a dilution. We want to make sure we get the smell as close to our personal taste as possible, which means finding the best ratio. When analyzing the smell of the trial blend, we would decide if the ratio is just right or if one thing is stronger than we would like.
If that's the case, simply adjust the ratio and make successive trial blends until you're happy. We could stop there and have our two component accord, or continue to repeat this process, adding more raw materials. If you're interested in learning more about this methodical style of perfumery, google the Jean-Cars method.
Stage 3, learning how to create perfumes. Okay, so we've made an accord, now let's try to make it into a perfume. There's no fixed method for doing this, but armed with the knowledge you've built up from before, you should now have an intuition for how you might want to build a formula. This intuition will get better over time with practice.
Let's start off with our amber accord from before. After studying it, you'll realise that it's a bass note. Let's pick a mid note to ensure the perfume has a heart character with reasonable volume.
Let's use rose since it's a classic and to make sure we're hit by a zesty sparkle when spraying the perfume we'll add bergamot as a top note. So I tested this by holding together the scent strips with those raw materials like before and While a good starting point, the theme seemed a little flat on its own so I decided to add some extra elements. Since we already have the floral rose and fresh bergamot, I was thinking we could go for an Italian summer type of light fragrance that some brands seem to be doing at the moment. We'll use helional to create a fresh sea breeze effect and also because I think it blends well with rose, some floral, a universal fresh floral note and finally hedione which has a diffusive citrus leaning floral note. Now, looking at the base, the amber is quite strong so let's dose it low and scaffold it with some musk and isoe super to create a more neutral structure.
Finally, we'll add some subtle embellishments, ambroxan to emphasise the amber marine elements and alpha isomethyl ionone to create a comforting veil. Now, to make our trial formula, we simply weigh out everything into a sample vial with our disposable pipettes like before. I like to make 5g trials for perfumes with my 0.001g scale, but you should make larger trials if you have only an 0.01g scale to ensure you maintain accuracy. Again, we can evaluate on the scent strips. Contrary to advice that you may have seen elsewhere on the internet, do not add some things, smell it, then try to add some more, since the olfactory fatigue will warp your sense of smell and there will be a bias towards perceiving the newly added things more strongly than they really are.
Instead, come up with a formula idea, make it and then evaluate it when your nose is fresh. When you have an idea for an addition or a subtraction even, make the whole formula again with that addition or subtraction. An added benefit of this method is that you now retain both samples so you have them to directly compare to each other.
Creating successful perfumes takes many iterations like this and you will learn the most and save yourself confusion by only making a minimal number of changes per trial. Ideally one change per iteration as a beginner, but as you become more advanced you will be able to make more changes per iteration successfully, while still understanding the effect each change has individually on the smell of your perfume. Before you get started making perfume, make sure you educate yourself first on how to be safe when doing so.
Remember that alcohol and many of the raw materials that you'll be using are flammable, so keep flames and heat sources away from your perfumes and materials at all times. Raw materials are concentrated substances and some of them may be toxic, act as skin irritants or have other hazards associated with them. This is true for both naturals and synthetics.
Remember that often essential oils are produced by plants to protect themselves. For that reason, never ingest raw materials or put them on your skin in their pure form unless you know it's safe to do so. To ensure that you're using raw materials at safe levels in your perfumes, do your research on the IFRA and follow the IFRA standards.
If you don't know, the IFRA is a professional body which strives for safety in fragrances. I also recommend always having some kitchen roll on hand to wipe up any spillages you may make accidentally and you can also use gloves and lab goggles if you wish to protect yourself even further. Finally, I will share some of my top books for perfumery so you can continue your self-education after you finish implementing everything in this guide. Let's start with Perfume, the Alchemy of Scent. my most recommended beginner's book for perfumery.
It was written by Jean-Claude Alena, a master perfumer who used to make perfumes for Hermes, the luxury brand. The book offers a concise introduction to perfumery and the industry as well as providing a list of the raw materials he uses to make his own perfumes and even some combinations of raw materials for accords. The best part is the book is really cheap and accessible and it doesn't take very long to read. My favourite book for perfumery of all time is probably Perfumery Practice and Principles. This one is expensive, but in my opinion well worth it if you're serious about perfumery as a long-term commitment.
It's the best textbook-style source of information I've found that gives great advice covering all three of my stages for learning perfumery. If those aren't enough, I'll also recommend a few more. Scent and Chemistry is incredible if you're a chemist, but very technical so I wouldn't recommend it to the average person.
Then we have Diary of a Nose which is another one by Jean-Claude Allain. This one is a diary so less packed full of practical information but nonetheless it is a captivating read and comes with even more combinations for a cause than the first book. Someone called Stefan Arctander has some excellent books containing monographs, i.e. descriptions of the smell of both natural and synthetic raw materials despite being 50 years old. If you're looking for a book with some formulas for bases and a focus on the business and industry side of things, then try Introduction to Perfumery.
It's a professional textbook and does contain a lot of information. If you're still watching, firstly congrats and hopefully now you have a much better idea of exactly what you need to do to learn to make great smelling perfumes yourself. Like any art, perfumery takes a lot of time and practice but if you stick with it, the results are rewarding. Visit my channel to access a library of videos just like this covering all aspects of perfume creation and Finally, don't forget to subscribe to get new videos like this in your subscription feed every week Good luck with your perfumery and I'll see you next time