Learning how to make perfume is not only easy and cost-effective, but a wonderful way to discover and customize the perfect fragrance for you. Choose a scent you like and something that holds the scent in place and voila--you have perfume.
Homemade perfume should consist of three basic ingredients: fragrance, alcohol and oil. The fragrance acts as your desired scent. The pure grain alcohol acts to dilute the scent and the oil binds the scent to your skin.
Any scentless grain alcohol can work for perfume creation, though vodka is usually the most popular choice. If you use just the fragrances, or moisturizing oil, instead of alcohol for the perfume, then it becomes much more potent and is known as perfume oil. If you leave out the oil and just use fragrance, alcohol and/or water, you have toilette water.
When it comes to fragrance, you have two basic choices, essential oils or fragrance oils. Essential oils are usually natural and rather expensive. Fragrance oils are synthetic and rather cheap. Either type of oil will work, it just depends on what you prefer.
You want to mix abut one part fragrance for every three parts alcohol. Combine in a bottle, screw lid on tightly and let it sit to mature. Depending on how strong you want the perfume it can sit for a single day or many months, until the desired perfume potency is reached.
Add a little oil to bind the perfume, such as jojoba oil, and mix well. If you're looking to make a perfume for spritzing from a bottle, you'll need to use distilled water to tone it down a little and spread the scent for spraying.
To build a more complex scent, you want to layer the fragrances with different levels of intensity. These layers are referred to as "notes" in the perfume world. Base notes are the strongest scents and create the framework for the perfume. Middle notes are slightly lighter scents that play off the base notes. Top notes are very light scents that tie the fragrance together.
The only way to truly understand these notes is to play around with some homemade perfume. Adding a drop of vanilla to a sandalwood perfume, for instance, doesn't always mean it will smell like sandalwood and vanilla, it might just bring out the sweetness of the sandalwood.
 | Collecting perfume samples is a great way to try on different scents to see if they work with your biochemistry before you commit to a larger-scale purchase. Start with a basic undestanding of how perfume notes are formulated to help streamline the search for your signature scent even further. |
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Many people stick with one signature scent all year long. Finding the appropriate summertime fragrance, however, will give you a chance to make the right sunshiney sensory statement. |
While the particular scents of perfumes vary, the common perfume ingredients are largely the same across the board. |
