What is a perfume base, and how do you make one?
By Omer Siton, founder of PerfuMate · Updated
"Perfume base" means three different things: the alcohol or oil a fragrance concentrate is diluted in, the base notes at the bottom of a formula, and a supplier's ready-made blend sold as a single material. Work out which one a recipe or a shop means before you buy or weigh anything, because they are not interchangeable.
What is a perfume base?
It is whichever of three things the speaker means, and each gives a different answer to "what is perfume base made of".
- The carrier the concentrate is diluted in. For a spray it is perfumer's alcohol, ethanol of about 95 percent, sometimes sold ready-blended with a little glycol or fixative as a "perfume base"; for a perfume oil it is a carrier oil such as jojoba. It is most of the bottle: 80 to 85 percent of an eau de parfum.
- The base notes. The slowest materials in a formula, woods, musks, ambers, resins and vanilla, still there at the end of the day. "The base of a perfume" in a description means these.
- A compounded base. In a supplier's catalog, a base is a finished blend of many materials, made by a fragrance house and sold to be used as one line of your formula: a sandalwood base, a musk base, a floral base.
How do you make a perfume base at home?
Make the kind you need: an alcohol base is perfumer's alcohol, an oil base is a stable carrier oil, and a base in the perfumer's sense is an accord of slow materials that you build once and dose as one line.
- Alcohol base. Perfumer's ethanol on its own is the base most perfumes need, with nothing added. If you want a commercial-style base with a longevity additive, add the additive as a weighed line of the formula, and keep it small: the catalog describes Glucam P-20, a PPG-20 methyl glucose ether, as an odorless additive that slows the evaporation of an alcohol perfume, typically at 1 to 5 percent of the concentrate, and Dipropylene glycol as a solvent that slows evaporation slightly against ethanol. Leave water out of a home base: most materials will not stay dissolved in it.
- Oil base. Jojoba oil, fractionated coconut oil (MCT) or isopropyl myristate: odorless and slow to go rancid, where kitchen oils oxidize (how to make perfume oil).
- A base accord. Build the bottom of a perfume once and keep it as a ready blend. PerfuMate's Classic Amber Accord is one: labdanum absolute 28 percent, benzoin Siam resinoid 20, vanillin 15, ethylene brassylate 10, tonka bean absolute 8, olibanum oil 6, ambroxan 5, styrax resinoid 4 and patchouli oil 4, used at 10 to 30 percent of a concentrate as the base of an amber. A cleaner one is the White Musk Accord, layered from three musk families so that a nose blind to one still smells it (how to build an accord).
What is a "base" in a supplier's catalog?
It is a compounded blend that a fragrance house sells as one material, usually to give a ready effect, such as a sandalwood, a musk or a flower that cannot be extracted, or to stand in for a costly natural. PerfuMate's catalog carries hundreds of them, and their material pages say outright that they are blends with no CAS number of their own.
A base comes with only part of its formula disclosed. Its supplier declares the substances that matter for regulation, in an IFRA certificate and an allergen declaration, and keeps the rest. The catalog's Musk Concentrate declares ethylene brassylate 50 percent, galaxolide 15, benzyl salicylate 5 and hydroxycitronellal 3; Sandalwood Base X3, described as an economical stand-in for sandalwood oil with about three times the impact of Mysore sandalwood, declares far less. PerfuMate's IFRA check counts exactly what is declared, and a base with no declaration at all leaves the formula marked as not fully checkable, because unknown content is not zero content.
Dose a base as a single line, starting low and raising it on strips. Its IFRA certificate states the highest concentration at which it may be used in a fine fragrance, and that figure is a share of the finished product (what an IFRA certificate says).
How do base notes differ from a perfume base?
Base notes are part of the smell; a perfume base in the carrier sense has none. The alcohol evaporates within minutes and leaves nothing behind, a carrier oil stays on the skin without smelling, and the base notes are the slow materials that carry the drydown. A compounded base can sit at any level: the catalog's bases include citrus, fruity and floral ones that belong to the top and the heart.
Building the base notes is a composing question: a slow material or accord you would be happy to wear alone, dosed by how loud it is (how to balance top, heart and base, and what a fixative does).
How do I use a ready-made perfume base?
Read its label first, then weigh it like any other line: an alcohol base takes the place of perfumer's alcohol in the bottle arithmetic, and a compounded base goes into the concentrate at the dose its supplier suggests.
- An alcohol base sold for fragrance oil. Weigh the oil and the base at the strength you want: for a 30 ml bottle at 18 percent, 4.5 g of oil and 20.5 g of base; the perfume making calculator does other sizes. Anything the base carries besides ethanol, such as a glycol, a fixative or water, belongs in the formula as a line, because it changes the strength and the wear.
- A compounded base. Add it to the concentrate as one line, check the formula at its bottled strength against the base's certificate figure, and record the supplier's lot, because a base rich in naturals can change between lots.
Where can I buy perfume base?
From perfumery suppliers, which sell perfumer's alcohol, carrier oils and compounded bases; choose one that tells you exactly what is in the bottle over one that sells an unnamed "base" (where to buy perfume materials). What to ask for depends on the kind:
- Alcohol base: the alcohol strength, the denaturant and every additive. Perfumer's alcohol is usually sold denatured, which keeps it out of beverage tax; in the US, formula SDA 40-B, ethanol with denatonium benzoate and tert-butyl alcohol, is authorized for perfumes and colognes (27 CFR 21.76). Rules on buying alcohol differ by country.
- Carrier oil: the oil's name and grade, and its date.
- Compounded base: the IFRA certificate, the safety data sheet and the allergen declaration. A base without them cannot be fully checked.
In PerfuMate a base is a material like any other: its declared constituents count in the IFRA check, a carrier counts as solvent and lowers the concentration as it should, and the batch arithmetic follows. Start a formula, free.
Sources: 27 CFR 21.76, Formula No. 40-B; material descriptions and declared constituents from PerfuMate's catalog.