How to Make Perfume

Series Summary

The art of making perfumes began in the ancient times of Mesopotamia and Egypt. As other civilizations mastered the art, perfume evolved into a variety of different scents, and herbs, aromatic plants and oils started to appear in perfume. Many Middle Eastern cultures helped the creation of perfume. In fact, perfume did not make it to Europe until the 14th century, and it was Hungary that introduced the first modern perfume. In this free video series on perfumes, a natural perfume producer demonstrates how to make various types of scented perfumes. Learn to use high-proof alcohol, such as Everclear, as a base for perfumes, and learn to blend essential oils and carrier oils. Discover the importance of base notes, middle notes and top notes when blending various scents, and get tips on creating perfume from raw plant material. Create unique fragrances using this helpful perfume guide.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Stephanie from stephanieknaturals.com, and I'm going to show you how to make perfume. The first thing you're going to need is essential oils. They are the essence of a plant. When a plant is distilled, they give off this essential oil. It is the part of the plant that contains the scent molecules. And, a diluting oil, or a carrier oil. Some people use jojoba oil. I use fractionated coconut oil. It's coconut oil that has had the solid parts removed so it's actually scentless. Now when you're starting to mix a perfume, you want to start by taking three types of oils. You want to have the base oils, which are the long lasting perfumes. Things like woods, tree resins. I'm going to start with sandalwood. And then you want heart notes, which are not as long lasting as a base note, but they're more lasting than the top notes. The top notes are very volatile, and they will come off quickly. Things like citrus oils, and some of the seed oils. So what you want to do is actually blend base oils, heart notes or middle notes, and top notes. I'm going to use some lavender as my heart note, and for my top note, I'm going to try this green mandarin. And, essentially, it's all experimentation to find out how the notes work well together. So we'll put them together, and we'll see how we like them. So start with a small vial, like this, and some droppers, like this. You can use a small glass dropper if you'd like, because, in this method, we're simply counting the number of drops. I'm going to start out with a base note, sandalwood. Count the drops, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, nine, ten. And, mix in some top notes. You'll also want to take good notes so that you'll be able to recreate the same perfume if you wind up really liking this particular scent. And, to calculate how much carrier oil you want to add, take your total number of drops of your essential oil, multiply that by four, and that will be the total number of drops you need to add of your carrier oil. So, for my perfume of ten drops each of my three....my three oils, it's thirty drops total, so I'll want a hundred and twenty drops of carrier oil. So now you have diluted your essential oils with your carrier oil. Now what you want to do is let this sit for at least twenty four hours, and, then open it back up and smell it, and you can, you know, do a little bit of adjusting if you'd like. When it's all matured and finished, you can put this in the bottle of your choice and you'll have a finished perfume oil."