How to make perfume at home

A perfume is a concentrate of aromatic materials dissolved in alcohol: weighed on a scale, diluted to a strength, rested for weeks, then filtered and bottled. At home that takes a scale, a handful of materials and some patience. Everything else is arithmetic, and none of it needs a laboratory.

What do I need to start?

• A scale that reads 0.01 g. Perfume is made by weight, never by drops or millilitres. A jewellery scale is enough for a first batch; 0.001 g helps once you work with small amounts of strong materials.
• Glass: small beakers or vials to weigh into, a bottle with a tight cap for the concentrate, and a spray bottle for the finished perfume.
• Pipettes, one per material, so no bottle is contaminated by another.
• Smelling strips (blotters), to smell each material and each trial.
• Perfumer's ethanol, about 95 percent, to dilute the concentrate. Which alcohol, and why not vodka.
• A few materials. Five to ten is plenty for a first perfume. Some come as solids or are too strong to weigh neat, so keep them as 10 percent dilutions in Dipropylene glycol or alcohol.
• Nitrile gloves, safety glasses and a ventilated room. Many materials irritate skin or eyes undiluted, and ethanol is flammable.
• A place to write it down: every gram, every change, every date. A formula that was not recorded cannot be made twice.

Which materials should a first perfume use?

Pick a few from each part of the pyramid, so the perfume has an opening, a middle and a drydown. A small, forgiving set:

• Top: Bergamot FCF Essential Oil, bright citrus without the furocoumarins that limit ordinary expressed bergamot. Lavender Essential Oil bridges into the heart.
• Heart: Hedione, a transparent jasmine that makes almost everything around it more radiant.
• Base: Iso E Super (soft woods), Ambroxan (ambergris, used as a 10 percent dilution), Ethylene Brassylate (a clean musk) and Vanillin (a crystal, dissolved to 10 percent first).

Smell each one on its own strip before you use it, and again an hour later. Knowing how each material behaves over time is most of what makes a formula work.

How do I weigh a first formula?

Write the formula in grams and weigh it into one glass, material by material, zeroing the scale before each one. A first concentrate of 10 g:

1. Bergamot FCF Essential Oil: 1.5 g
2. Lavender Essential Oil: 0.5 g
3. Hedione: 3 g
4. Iso E Super: 2 g
5. Ambroxan at 10 percent in DPG: 1 g (that is 0.1 g of Ambroxan itself)
6. Ethylene Brassylate: 1.5 g
7. Vanillin at 10 percent in DPG: 0.5 g

Weigh the heavy base materials first and the volatile citrus last, and cap the glass between additions. If you overshoot a material by a little, write down what you actually weighed rather than trying to take it back out. The percentages can always be recalculated from real grams; they cannot be recalculated from a guess.

Before you dilute it, check it. Pasted into the IFRA calculator at 18 percent, this formula is within every IFRA Category 4 limit. The same formula with ordinary expressed Bergamot Essential Oil is several times over the bergamot cap, because the expressed oil carries phototoxic furocoumarins. That is why the first material on the list is the FCF grade.

How much alcohol do I add?

Choose the strength first. An eau de parfum is roughly 15 to 20 percent concentrate; an eau de toilette roughly 5 to 15. For a 30 ml bottle at 18 percent:

1. Alcohol weighs about 0.8 g per ml, so 30 ml holds about 24 g. Make 25 g to have a little to spare.
2. 25 g multiplied by 0.18 is 4.5 g of the concentrate.
3. The rest is alcohol: 25 minus 4.5 is 20.5 g of perfumer's ethanol.

Weigh the concentrate into the bottle, add the alcohol, cap it and swirl. The other 5.5 g of concentrate can become a second bottle at another strength, which is the quickest way to learn what concentration does to a perfume. The oil to alcohol ratio page has the arithmetic for every size.

How long does it need to rest?

Weeks, not days. A fresh perfume smells of raw alcohol and of materials that have not yet become one liquid. An eau de toilette is usually rested for about two months, an eau de parfum for about three and an extrait for about four. Keep it cool, dark and sealed. Shake it on day two, smell it on a strip on day seven, again halfway, and at the end chill it for a day and filter off any haze before bottling. What changes while it rests.

How do I test it?

Smell it on a strip first, at intervals over a day: the first minutes, an hour, four hours, the next morning. Then on skin, once it has passed the IFRA check at the strength you made it. Try a small spot on the inner arm before wearing it widely, and stop if the skin reacts. How to test a perfume formula goes further.

Then change one thing at a time. A second version with more Hedione, or with the base materials moved, teaches more than a new formula started from scratch.

Is it safe to make perfume at home?

With care, yes. Work with gloves and good air, keep materials and alcohol away from children, heat and flames, and label every bottle with its name and date. Many aroma materials are skin sensitizers at full strength, which is why they are handled diluted and why the finished perfume is checked against the IFRA Standards before anyone wears it. If you plan to sell, the rules are stricter: a safety assessment, allergen labelling and, in the EU, a responsible person.

PerfuMate is made for exactly this bench: you type grams and it keeps the percentages, the dilutions and the IFRA check in step while you compose, the Scale sheet works out the alcohol for any bottle and strength, and the maceration journal dates the rest and its four checks for each batch you make. Start a formula, free.