How to Make Perfume Start to Finish - (By a Perfumer)

Summary

The video is a beginner’s introduction to making perfume at home. Perfumer Peter explains what perfume is made from, what equipment and ingredients to start with, how to build and test a blend, and how to make a simple example fragrance. His main advice is to begin with a small, manageable set of materials, work carefully and safely, and expect skill to develop through repeated practice.

What perfume is made of

Perfume is a blend of fragrant materials diluted in a carrier, commonly perfumer’s alcohol (ethanol).

Modern fragrances often use many synthetic aroma chemicals. These may reproduce natural smells, create imaginative accords, or provide notes that are difficult or impossible to obtain naturally.

Natural perfumery materials include:

• Essential oils, often obtained by steam distillation. The presenter uses lavender as an example: steam passes through the plant material and then condenses, allowing the oil to be separated from the water.
• Absolutes, commonly made by solvent extraction. In the rose example, the first extraction produces a waxy “concrete.” Further processing and filtration remove heavier waxes to produce the absolute.

Other extraction methods include CO₂ extraction. A tincture is made by steeping a material, such as vanilla pods, in alcohol.

Getting started: equipment and working habits

Peter recommends keeping the initial investment modest. A beginner can either work by counting drops or weigh ingredients on a precision lab scale.

• Drop method: An accessible way to start without buying a scale, and one used in books by Mandy Aftel. Its drawbacks are that it is difficult to scale up and makes accurate percentage calculations—and safety checks—harder.
• Weighing method: More precise and practical for larger batches. The presenter recommends a scale with fine resolution.

Useful supplies include:

• Plastic pipettes for transferring ingredients.
• Glass beakers or storage jars for blending.
• Paper test strips for evaluating materials and blends.
• Labels and a notebook, or another reliable way to record formulas and adjustments.

Keep detailed notes so a successful blend can be recreated. Use a protective surface, as perfume materials can damage wood, varnish, and some plastics. Buy perfumery-grade materials from established suppliers rather than general marketplaces.

Beginner materials and perfume structure

The presenter suggests starting with a limited palette, including:

• Iso E Super or Timbersilk for a widely used, light woody effect.
• Ambroxan-type material for a skin-like quality.
• Vanillin for sweetness.
• Patchouli oil or Clearwood for a patchouli-like note.
• Cashmeran, used sparingly for a soft, woolly, musky effect. Too much can become dominant or harsh.
• Vetiveryl acetate for a clean vetiver note.
• Javanol or Ebanol as synthetic sandalwood materials.
• Norlimbanol for a potent, sharp, driftwood-like note.
• Labdanum absolute at 50% dilution, which is easier to handle than the thick, sticky undiluted material.
• Hedione for a diffusive floral quality.
• Galaxolide 50 for a clean musk.
• Ethyl maltol for a sugary, candy-like note. Use very small amounts because it can easily overwhelm a blend.

A perfume is often described in three parts:

• Base notes: Longer-lasting materials, such as woods, musks, amber-like notes, and vanilla.
• Heart or middle notes: The central part of the fragrance, often including florals, herbs, spices, and some fruit notes.
• Top notes: More fleeting opening notes, such as citrus, aldehydes, some spices, and fruit notes.

These categories are flexible, not strict rules. A fragrance may emphasize one part, omit another, or evolve in a different way.

Safety and allergens

The presenter emphasizes that fragrance materials should be handled cautiously:

• Keep materials away from children and animals; do not swallow them.
• Avoid getting raw materials on your skin, in your eyes, or near your face. Wash your hands with soap if contact occurs.
• Some materials can cause irritation or allergic reactions. Natural materials, especially certain florals and citrus oils, may contain restricted allergens.
• The presenter specifically warns beginners about rose absolute, ylang-ylang, and natural citrus oils. Some citrus oils, including bergamot, can present additional concerns when applied to skin and exposed to sunlight.
• He recommends Bergamot Givco, a specialty base, as a safer beginner alternative to natural bergamot oil.

Anyone progressing beyond casual experimentation should check the safety information and restrictions for each material rather than assuming that synthetics or natural ingredients are automatically safe.

Building and refining a perfume

Peter describes two broad approaches:

• Combine individual materials that already have distinct effects, balancing them into a finished fragrance.
• Build accords: combinations of materials that blend into the impression of a new note. Examples include:
  • Amber: labdanum combined with vanilla.
  • Strawberry-like effect: Fructone combined with ethyl maltol.
  • Chocolate-like effect: vanillin, patchouli, and isobutyl phenyl acetate.

A formula can use ready-made bases, constructed accords, or a combination of both.

Peter’s suggested working process is:

1. Start with the base—his personal preference—and then add heart and top materials.
2. Record the formula clearly before or as you blend.
3. Evaluate on a test strip and, when appropriate, on skin.
4. Make small adjustments, adding a little at a time and smelling between additions.
5. Trust your nose rather than relying only on tidy or mathematically convenient numbers.
6. If you add too much and lose the balance, set that version aside and make a new trial, adjusting the formula to stay below the point where it became excessive.

Perfumery can be approached analytically or more intuitively, but repeated smelling, testing, and learning how materials interact are central to both.

Example beginner formula

The presenter provides a minimalist, Iso E Super-centered formula inspired by the style of the Escentric Molecules line. The figures below are for a 100 g finished batch, with ingredients expressed as percentages of the final product:

Ingredient Amount in 100 g Iso E Super 6 g Cashmeran 0.55 g Hedione 4 g Javanol 4 g Norlimbanol 0.15 g “Amroin”/Ambroxan-type material at 10% dilution 3 g

The 3 g of diluted material contributes 0.3 g of active fragrance material and 2.7 g of DPG solvent. To make the final product a 15% fragrance concentration, the presenter says to add 82.3 g of perfumer’s alcohol.

The finished 100 g batch contains 15 g of active fragrance materials, 2.7 g of DPG, and 82.3 g of alcohol. The presenter offers this as a starting template that can be adjusted to personal taste, not as a formula beginners must follow exactly.

Formulas, concentration, and scale

Perfume formulas are commonly expressed in weight percentages, which makes it easier to scale a formula to different batch sizes. The presenter gives approximate concentration ranges while stressing that conventions vary:

• Eau de cologne: roughly 1–5%.
• Eau de toilette: roughly 5–8%.
• Eau de parfum: roughly 8–15%, with some products higher.
• Extrait or “pure perfume”: generally around 20% or more.

He suggests beginners start with relatively simple blends—roughly 5 to 20 materials—rather than adding ingredients just to make a formula more complicated. Simplicity can make a fragrance clearer and less costly to produce.

Practice and learning resources

Learn materials individually by smelling them over time. Peter recommends labeling test strips and revisiting them over several days, potentially keeping written notes.

Expect progress to take time. He compares learning perfumery to learning an instrument: practice matters, and developing a good nose and blending judgment is gradual.

He discusses several books but cautions that some are dense or more useful for background knowledge than step-by-step instruction. For beginners interested in the drop method, he recommends Mandy Aftel’s Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent. Other books mentioned include Diary of a Nose by Jean-Claude Ellena, The Perfect Scent by Chandler Burr, Perfumery: Practice and Principles, and Sense and Chemistry: The Molecular World of Odors.

Speakers and sources mentioned

Speaker

• Peter — the video’s presenter, a perfumer and owner of Centauri Perfumes.

People, books, companies, and examples cited

• Mandy Aftel — cited for drop-method perfumery and her book Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent.
• Jean-Claude Ellena — author of Diary of a Nose.
• Chandler Burr — author of The Perfect Scent.
• Sophia Grojsman — discussed in connection with perfume composition; the auto-generated captions render her name as “Sophia Grossman.”
• Escentric Molecules, especially Molecule 01 — used as inspiration for the example formula.
• Givaudan — maker of Bergamot Givco, the specialty base recommended as an alternative to natural bergamot.
• The Perfumer’s Apprentice and Eden Botanicals — suppliers Peter mentions.
• Nasomatto and Orto Parisi — brands cited in connection with Norlimbanol.
• Le Labo — cited as an example of a brand that lists note counts on its bottles.
• Centauri Perfumes — Peter’s own brand.
• Sense and Chemistry: The Molecular World of Odors and Perfumery: Practice and Principles — additional books mentioned.