Making Fragrances for Fun and Profit

I recently had the opportunity to review an eBook called Aroma Success. This is a book which you read on your own computer and there's also a printed version available.

The author has had her own successful business making and selling perfumes for over nine years. She gives you her wholesale sources where she can buy perfume oils for as little as 75 cents, which she resells for $8. She describes how she makes several thousand dollars each month

"You can do like I did and open your own shop, sell out of your home, build your own web store, sell at arts fairs and festivals, do home parties. All of these ways are featured in the manual. You can create your own line of perfume oils like the creators of "Child" and "Kai". You can even start a bath and body shop with the sources in this manual. "

Her customers love having their favorite scent in lotions, bath salts, shower gels and more. They love to know that a product has been custom made for them. And it becomes a show when you start to add the fragrance oil right before their eyes and do your mixing and shaking.

This is a remarkable ebook and certainly opened my eyes to the many opportunities available. There are hundreds of art and craft fairs around the country to sell your own products. You can even open your own website store. Sell from a mall kiosk. Hold parties at home.

She includes Top U.S. and Canadian sources of custom-scenting bases for creating your own products: Unscented lotions, bubble baths, bath gels, bath salts, foaming bath grains, massage oils, body butters, face creams and more. Where to buy the best quality oils at the best prices.

Even if you only download this book for the wholesale sources it's well worth the modest cost. If you start a modest home business you could recoup the cost many many times over.

Click here to download the ebook.

Disclosure: We receive commissions for recommending products on this website.  We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.

Essential Oils or Fragrance Oils?

A common question raised in perfume making is whether to use Fragrance Oil or Essential oil. If you've been shopping for both you will have noticed that there is a steep price difference between the two.

Essential oils are, mostly, a natural product derived from flowers or plants. Fragrance oils are a blend, often synthetic, of a number of ingredients usually diluted with an oil carrier.

The recipes here are really designed for essential oils but really there's no reason you cannot use fragrance oils. In fact, I would suggest you start with the much lower cost fragrance oils until you understand the blending process. This will save you a lot of money until you discover what fragrance blend works for your skin.

It's true that the better perfumes will often come from a blend of essential oils, so be prepared to move onto these for the best results.

A few reasons to stick with fragrance oil:

1. Low Cost

2. Some scents are only available with fragrance oil

3. Some people are allergic to essential oil

4. They may have a lower environmental impact. Sometimes several hundred pounds of plants may be needed for a small bottle of essential oil.

And some in favor of essential oil:

1. Some say that they make a better quality perfume

2. They may carry natural health benefits derived from the plants

3. Some people are allergic to fragrance oils

Ultimately, it's your choice in the end. As I've suggested, start with the fragrance oils and if you find yourself wanting to create more advanced perfumes, move onto essential oils.

Perfume Recipes

Here are some of my own favorite perfume recipes. All of these use 1 cup of distilled water and 5 teaspoons of vodka or other spirit, only the fragrance oils vary. Follow the instructions in the previous post to make these fragrances.

Arabian Dusk

3 drops of coriander oil
1 drop of Frankincense oil
3 drops of Juniper oil
4 drops of Orange oil

Motivation

1 drop Frankincense oil
4 drops Grapefruit oil
3 drops Rosemary oil
2 drops Spearmint oil

Here's my favorite cologne recipe:

3 drops lemongrass oil
10 drops lavender oil
10 drops lime oil

Don't be afraid to experiment with any of these fragrance recipes. Learning how to make your own fragrances is as much about experimentation as about following recipes. Just keep notes of everything you do so that if you do discover how to make the perfect perfume, you can duplicate the results.

How to Make Perfume

In this post, I'm going to cover the basic how to make perfume instructions. There's no special skills involved in making perfume, just follow the procedure and you will get a great smelling fragrance.

Since Perfumer's Alcohol can be hard to find in most cities, I'm going to suggest using Vodka in these recipes. As long as it's for personal use and you aren't selling the perfume, The Department of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms won't come and hunt you down. Use only 100 proof alcohol and be sure to test a single drop on your skin to make sure you aren't allergic to any ingredient.

The strength of the perfume is dependent on the ratio of fragrant oils, alcohol and water in the blend. Each blend will smell different and the amount of essential oil is critical. A single drop too much, or too little, will change the characteristic of the perfume completely.

The basic procedure for making perfume is the same whatever the blend.

Most simple perfumes are a mixture of alcohol, essential of fragrance oils and distilled water. Don't be tempted to use water from your kitchen faucet for this, it must be distilled. The oils are stirred slowly into the alcohol, one drop at a time. Stir slowly but long enough for the oils to be completely dispersed.

Let the blend of oil and alcohol stand undisturbed for 48 hours. Now add the distilled water, again stirring slowly until completely dispersed.

Perfume is like fine wine, it needs to stand and mature before it reaches perfection. Leave your perfume to stand for at least three weeks in a cool dark place.

After the perfume has matured, filter it through a coffee filter to remove any sediment and bottle it into a colored glass bottle with a stopper.

Part of the fun of making your own fragrances is being able to experiment and make one that is yours alone. You may need to experiment for a while before you discover the perfect scent, so make notes of everything you do including the exact quantities used. Remember that a single drop of an essential oil can change the smell of the perfume completely.

Here are some recipes to get you started:

Rain Shower

This is a very light scent reminiscent of a lingering rain shower.

5 drops Bergamot
3 drops Sandalwood
5 drops Cassis
1 cup distilled water
5 teaspoons of Vodka

Blend the ingredients as described above.

English Country Garden

5 drops Valerian
5 drops Chamomile
3 drops Lavender
1 cup distilled water
5 teaspoons Vodka

Useful Make Perfume Sites

Here are some good sites for background reading on making perfumes and fragrances:

Make your own perfumes

Perfumery

Basenotes Forum

Make Perfume for Profit

How to Make Essential Oils

Essential oils can be quite expensive to buy so I though I would cover how you can make many of them at home.

Firstly, what is an essential oil? The formal definition for essential oil is that it is a concentrated hydrophobic liquid that contains volatile aromatic compounds from flowers and plants. In pure layman's terms it's the concentrated smelly stuff from flowers!

Most essential oils are made commercially by distillation. In this process the raw plant material, which can be in the form of flowers, bark, leaves, stems, roots or seeds, is placed on a rack above the water in a still. When the water is heated, the steam passes through the flowers vaporizing the complex volatile compounds. These vapors then pass through a cooling coil and condense back into liquid form. The essential oil itself then forms a film on the top of the liquid. It is then separated by skimming. The remaining water underneath the oil is a product known as a hydrosol and is often sold in this form as rose water or lavender water.

Unless you live in West Virginia and have a cousin with a still this probably isn't a practical method to use at home. Luckily distillation is a fairly modern method of producing essential oils so we have some more traditional alternatives for making our own fragrance oils.

Enfleurage is the process of placing flower petals or similar plant material onto trays of odourless vegetable oils which will absorb the flower's volatile essential oils. You can use a variation of the technique to make your own essential oils. Although this doesn't produce oils as concentrated as you can purchase, this is fairly easy to do at home given the raw materials.

You can use a variety of vegetable oils in this process including olive oil, sweet almond oil or refined jojoba oil.

How to make essential oils:

You will need:

Half a cup of oil
Four cups of tightly packed flowers (see instructions)
A wide-mouth jar such as a mason jar
A wooden mallet or similar
A zipping plastic bag
Some cheesecloth for filtering

You will need four cups of flowers picked over the course of a week for the best results.

Put one cup of the flowers into the plastic bag and expel as much of the air as you can before sealing. Bruise the flowers in the bag with a wooden mallet. The idea behind putting them in a plastic bag first to cut down on the mess and to avoid losing any of the material. Don't bash them to a pulp, this isn't necessary, just hit the bag a dozen times gently.

Mix the flower material with the oil well and place it into the jar. Seal the jar and put it into a warm place for about 48 hours. A sunny window ledge or a warm spot in the kitchen is fine. The warmer the spot, the less time they need to be left but don't overdo the warming or you may damage the oils.

Filter the mixture through the cheesecloth and return the oil to the jar. Discard the filtered flower material.

Take the next cup of flowers and repeat the bruising process. Mix this batch with the oil from step one and leave in a warm place for another 48 hours or so.

Repeat twice more with the next two cups of flowers.

After the final straining, transfer the oil to a storage bottle and keep in a cool, dark place. Colored bottles are ideal for storage. This will keep for up to a year.

This whole process to make your own essential oil will take a week or so so isn't as quick as the distillation process but of course doesn't involve the expense of building or buying a still.

Easy Homemade Fragrance

Before I discuss ways to make "proper" perfume here's an idea for an easy to make fragrance using only home ingredients.

Take about a cup and a half of flower blossoms. You can use rose, lavender, honeysuckle or anything that has a strong fragrance. Chop them roughly and add to three cups of warm water.

Leave the mixture to soak overnight and in the morning strain through cheesecloth or similar material. Put the mixture into an old saucepan (you may not want to use your best pans for this!) and simmer on the stove gently. The emphasis is on the word gently. Use only a very low heat. Reduce until there are only a few tablespoons left.

Cool and store in a suitable bottle. This fragrance will keep for about a month or six weeks in a cool place.

How to Make Fragrances

Fragrances are surprisingly easy to make.

You may think that from the exorbitant cost in the stores that they all contain the most expensive ingredients or involve a long drawn-out process. Nothing could be further from the truth. 95% of the money you are paying for perfume is for packaging, marketing and the retailer's profit.

The difficult part of making fragrances is getting the smell that you want. There's a lot of scope for experimentation - actually that's an understatement - there's an almost unlimited scope for experimentation and creativity in perfume making. To start with you should follow some well-tried recipes. These are very simple and are as easy as baking a cake. In fact the process is a lot easier than baking a cake. It's really had to burn perfume.

Firstly some cautions. Some of the oils we will be using are quite concentrated, so exercise great care when handling them. Keep them well away from your eyes and mouth and cover work surfaces with plastic. A few on the oils can damage a table or work surface.

So.. how to make fragrances. Any fragrance, perfume, cologne, eau de cologne, eau de toilette or after-shave lotion is made from a blend of the same basic ingredients. Typically you will use an alcohol base together with one or more fragrance or essential oils. Since most people won't have these at home they will have to be purchased from a specialist retailer. Some of them are quite expensive so I'm going to cover ways to get these are greatly discount prices and how you CAN substitute items that you may well have sitting at home.

I want to back up a little and discuss the ingredient you might use and their characteristics.

Parfumiers have come up with a classification system for essential oils that you will need to understand if you are blending your own fragrances. Their system is complex so I'm going to try and break it down to the basics. Fragrance Oils are classified according to their note. They may be top note, middle note, bottom note or bridge note.

Some examples should make this clear:

Top Note Oils include mints such as peppermint and spearmint. They also include the fruits such as lemon, orange and lime. This group also includes bergamot.

Middle Note Oils are lemongrass, geranium, nutmeg, basil rosemary, rose and lavender.

Base Note Oils are patchouli, sandalwood, cedarwood and frankincense.

Before we go on, stop and think about these oils. Imagine the smell of each. Spend a little time on this and if you have some of each at home go and smell them. By becoming aware of these classifications and their characteristics if will be easy for you to sort any new essential oils into the correct category.

In addition to these three categories, we have Bridge Notes. These are oils like vanilla and lavender. These act a little differently that those in the first three notes in that they create harmony within a blend of oils.

There's a lot of discussion about some of the oils and their correct category. You may see some of them placed into a different section by another parfumier. Don't worry too much about this - we are an argumentative bunch - just get a feel for the characteristics of each scent as you consider them in a blend.

Each group of oils behaves slightly differently when in a blend. The base notes will stay active for a long time and provide the longer lasting scent. The middle notes are important but stay around for a little less time and the top notes evaporate quickly. Those are the ones you smell as soon as you apply the perfume.

Perfumes are a blend of alcohol base and oils. I've seen websites, and even books, suggest that you use vodka as a base. I can think of another and better use for vodka personally.

Interestingly enough, in the United States, The Department of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms prohibits the use of vodka, or indeed any other spirit, as an ingredient in fragrances without a special permit. The better solution is to use special perfumer's alcohol which is a blend of alcohols with a fixative that is designed for skin contact.

In future posts, I will go into the specific details on how to make fragrances as well as some secret recipes. I will also cover wholesale and discount retail supplier of fragrance oils and perfumer's alcohol.

Welcome

This blog will be used to describe how I make my own fragrances and perfumes. It's really quite easy to make your own fragrance. You can experiment and create one that matches your own personality at a fraction of the store prices.

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