What You Need to Make Perfume
What You Need to Make Perfume
1. A Solvent
Perfume is made of fragrance materials diluted into a solvent. Most perfumes use ethanol as their solvent, and there are also oil-based fragrances, which use carrier oils, natural and synthetic, such as jojoba, almond oil, coconut oil or dipropylene glycol.
I recommend ethanol because it is by far the best solvent for perfumery use. This is commonly called alcohol, but in chemistry, there are many different kinds of alcohol so it’s best to be precise. If your choice is a carrier oil, then I’d suggest fractionated coconut or IPM (isopropyl myristate). The issue with oils is that they are sticky, and not everything dissolves in them.
It’s absolutely fine to start with “perfumer’s alcohol”. In perfume our ethanol must be “denatured”. This means that it has something added to it so people can’t drink it.
In the UK we generally use TSDA, trade specific denatured alcohol, and to be able to buy it we must first apply for a licence from HMRC. This licence is free, and once you have this you can buy it from a producer. The additive used to denature this is “Bittrex”, the bitter liquid - the clue is in the name - which is used to deter children from biting their nails. It has no aroma, but it tastes pretty disgusting, so if you accidentally drink it you will spit it out. TSDA is 96% - 99% ethanol, twice as strong as the strongest vodka, so it is dangerous to drink; that’s why it has to be denatured, and also why we must have a licence to buy it. Licence holders are not permitted to sell it neat, only to use it to make perfume.
In the US, the ethanol to use is SDA40B. You want something that is 95% ethanol or higher, known as 190⁰ proof.
The solvent known as Perfumer’s Alcohol is slightly different. As well as the bitterness, it contains an emetic so people can’t harm themselves by drinking it. Beginners can buy it without a licence, in small quantities. I started with perfumer’s alcohol and so did many other well known artisan perfumers. It feels ever so slightly more oily on the skin than TSDA, that’s all. Otherwise it’s fine.
2. Perfumery Materials
You do not need a perfumer’s organ of 500+ materials to get started. I first got going with around 25, a combination of synthetic materials and natural materials called NCSs, natural complex substances, in the perfume industry.
If you want to train classically and join a large perfume company, ready qualified to make every style of fragrance that your clients will demand, then you will need to add to your collection until you are familiar with hundreds, possibly thousands, of materials. To start as an independent perfumer, imaginatively blending what you have available, you need comparatively few.
To draw a parallel, to prepare a meal a creative cook will use whatever’s in the fridge and the cupboard, with a quick trip to the corner shop for missing essentials. To equip a cordon bleu restaurant, a professional cook will need access to every herb and spice, all the vegetables, oils, proteins and grains, ready for whatever the diner requests.
Owning hundreds of materials will not make you a better perfumer; practising your skills with a small number of them really will.
I recommend a combination of naturals and synthetics, to make what’s known as “mixed media” fragrances in the creative artisan world. This is a term borrowed from visual art, and in perfumery it refers to a palette of essential oils, absolutes, CO2 extracts, natural isolates, nature equivalents, bases and aromachemicals.
You can choose to use 100% naturals or 100% synthetics if that’s your preference. I find that the most adventurous and beautiful come from a mix of the two, both in my own work and fragrances by other makers, but perfume preferences are always subjective and it is entirely possible to make great fragrances with a small palette.
Suppliers recommended and vetted by my students are here.
3. Something to Mix Them in - Glass is Best
You will see photos of perfume laboratories showing a variety of glassware. Chemistry equipment is made from clear borosilicate glass because it expands less than normal silica glass when heated and you can see what you’re doing. (It still breaks when you drop it.)
Glass absorbs aromas. There are spaces between glass molecules which aromatic materials can squeeze into, so to speak, and once they’re in, they stay there. If you are storing your materials, accords and finished fragrances in glassware, you can only reuse them for the same scent. Borosilicate glass is better because it absorbs less.
I often use borosilicate glass beakers for blending a fragrance, then pour the finished concentrate into amber glass bottles to keep out more light, then wash the beakers in the dishwasher and reuse them. I could make my blends directly into the bottles, but it’s easier to get your powders into a wide necked beaker than it is to sprinkle them through the neck of a bottle.
For smaller blends I use amber glass jars with wide necks. I buy 30ml and 100ml jars for making test batches.
4. Paper
Sniffing straight from the bottle can overload your olfactory system. Try your best not to do this, difficult though it is.
You can buy scent strips from suppliers worldwide, but when you start - and even as you continue - it’s fine to get a pad of watercolour paper and cut it up with scissors. I also own a small desktop paper guillotine which is very handy for strip cutting.
You will need strips to dip into your blends as you add materials. You can use these for your three-strip tests (see the bonus films) as you practise identifying different aromas. Cut points at the end for dipping into 100% strength materials because you only ever need a tiny amount of neat substance near your nose. You can give them a point by cutting a strip in half on the diagonal.
Also, cut some squares or rectangles to run test blends in drops. This is to save on materials while you are getting the hang of blending, and learning more about how your materials work together.
5. A Scale
Start inexpensively. Accurate scales don’t have to cost much more than around £/$20, but they will not be durable. When you start using them every day, you might want a more expensive, better made scale.
I prefer Ohaus as the company has always been reliable and they have a great customer service team with real people; I say this from experience. Ohaus once replaced my scale when I bought one which arrived and completely failed to work. I have a ten year old Ohaus which is still working well.
Accuracy - to the decimal point - and maximum weight add to the cost. It can be less expensive to get two scales, one for small amounts which measures to 0.001g, and another that measures up to 2kg with 0.1g precision, rather than one single scale which measures to a milligram and up to a kilo.
6. Storage Bottles
For your materials and your blends, use glass.
Owing to the relative density of ethanol, a 10ml bottle will only hold around 8g of perfume. Ethanol (0.77g to 1ml) is less dense than water (1g to 1ml).
I usually buy in the UK from Ampulla or Coloured Bottles - links below. I choose aluminium caps for storing neat materials and I buy glass pipettes for my diluted materials. I buy sizes from 5ml up to 1 litre, depending on the batch size.
If I have been storing a material in a bottle I only reuse it for that material, or for a fragrance which contains that material. This is to avoid contamination.
This is not a “getting started” point, but it’s best to know at the start. For shipping larger quantities of fragrance concentrate and finished fragrances overseas for my clients, I use 625ml and 1250ml UN standard aluminium canisters (they have the UN packaging standard symbol etched into them).
7. Pipettes
How do you get your liquids out of their bottles and into your blend?
For small glass bottles up to 100ml I use caps fitted with glass pipettes and bulbs. I can’t write or say this often enough: each time you use one, empty the pipette before you put it back into the bottle. This stops the liquid seeping up the narrow tube and evaporating from the bulb.
I also have plastic pipettes which I reuse until they break, because I work with ethanol. In a medical laboratory, plastic pipettes are single use, but in a clean, organised artisan perfumery, it’s fine to reuse them for the same material.
Contamination of your scents is easily done and can have a really strong effect, so if there is any doubt about them being used for a different liquid by mistake, they have to go.
Rinsing out a pipette in a beaker of ethanol is not enough to avoid contamination. That’s like washing your paint brush in a water pot; each time a new colour goes in the original liquid is changed. With paint water, you can see it happening, but with perfume ethanol you can’t. Use one per material.
8. Safe Storage
The Safety Data Sheets (SDSs) which accompany your materials will tell you the temperature to store them.
The best way to store materials is a wine fridge at cellar temperature of around 8⁰C, but we don’t all have the space and budget for one of those. You can keep volatile materials like citrus essential oils in a refrigerator if you live in a hot country. However, when you remove them from the refrigerator to use them, do not open the bottle until they have reached room temperature.
We do not want condensation to form on the inside of the bottle as that is water. It will dilute your materials. If the bottle is at room temperature, condensation will not form.
An SDS will also tell you if a material is flammable. Those materials, including ethanol, need to be stored in a COSHH (Control of Substances Hazardous to Health) cupboard. Industrial supply companies sell all sizes, including desktop sizes for when you start out.