The ULTIMATE beginner guide to DIY perfumery.

what's up youtube my name is sam and today i'm going to give you the ultimate guide to getting started with diy perfumery so the idea of this video is to act as a central directory if you want to know how to make perfume and you want to start doing diy perfumer at home this video is going to give you all of the key steps and it's going to give you links to other videos that i've made about each of these steps in more details and i'm also going to put any links to any products in the description so if you need to buy an equipment for example you can see where to buy it i've also added some timestamps to this video so if you only are interested in a certain section or you want to be able to come back to it you can easily find all the information now this video has four main sections firstly it's going to be which equipment you need and more specifically how much it's going to cost i'm going to give you a high budget option and a low budget option so depending what budget you're working to you can see how best to make use of the cash you're going to spend secondly i'm going to give you a list of what i think are the 20 most important ingredients so you can get started and do a lot with those ingredients without having to buy any more for the time being thirdly i am going to tell you how do you dilute and learn the ingredients once you've got them because this is a key step in learning to make the perfume before you can mix things together you have to understand how the ingredients work on their own and finally i'm going to talk about blending so how do you go from these individual ingredients and how do you start mixing together to the various stages of actually making a final perfume so let's get into it firstly for the equipment so there is going to be a high budget option and a low budget option so depending on how much you want to spend you're going to be able to work out what is the most important thing for you to buy and once again i've put all of the links in the description for you to find these things on amazon however you can of course find them on our website such as ebay or just generally looking around the internet so i have already done a video on equipment and i will leave a link to that video the most important thing is the scale you use i like to use a scale with accuracy going to 0.001 grams and i explained in the other video why i like to do that however the problem with it is these scales are quite expensive these are proper lab scales and they can be upwards of 150 pounds so for the high budget option i would actually recommend you get one of these scales as it is probably the most important investment you will make however i cannot ignore the fact that on amazon you can get a cheap scale for less than 10 pounds that does claim to weigh to 0.01 grams of accuracy which is only 10 times less next up you are going to need some scent strips you can buy these online in packs of 100 they're generally quite cheap it usually costs around 3 pounds or so per pack i would recommend you get 5 packs so you get 500 strips this is going to be enough to last you a long time for both evaluating all of your raw materials and any blends or perfumes that you make the next consumable item that you're going to have to buy is pipettes again i would recommend buying 500 of these i would recommend buying them like this in bulk so you save on cost overall i know that some people are going to complain that pipette's a single use and wouldn't it be better just to buy something that you can use again and again like a dropper bottle but the reality is 500 pipettes are going to last you a very long time and they are very cheap and it just saves you a lot of hassle with having to worry about things getting cross-contaminated in the future as well as the pipettes you're going to need some sample bottles these are used firstly for making your dilutions of the raw materials and secondly for making your blends the ones that i use are around 10 milliliters and it costs 27 pounds 49 for a pack of 100 so again not too expensive that makes them about 27.5 p each next you're going to need some perfume as alcohol this is going to be used to dilute your materials and also to dilute your final perfume if you're on the lower budget i would recommend you start off with 500 milliliters or half a liter of perfume's alcohol which you can get for 16 pounds 99. if on the other hand you're on the higher budget you might as well buy a bit more so maybe a liter as it's going to last you a bit longer until you have to go and buy another bottle another thing that's commonly overlooked is labels this is really important because if you don't label your materials and your samples you're going to forget what's inside each bottle which effectively makes it useless now hopefully you already have some labels lying around the house however if not it's quite cheap just to pick up a pack of labels online one final thing i would recommend is actually picking up a book on perfumery to help give you some ideas on what you should be doing this isn't entirely necessary so i will only add it to the higher budget however i would definitely recommend picking up the book called perfume the alchemy of scent by jean-claude elena i've done a review about this book on my channel so if you're interested to know what it contains then feel free to watch that video so to summarize comparing with the minimal and the maximal spend if you buy all of the cheapest options that i've given above it will come to 82 pounds and 56 pence if on the other hand you want to go for the high budget option it's going to cost you 255 pounds 85 p now most of this is because of the higher cost of the high accuracy scale so if you're in the middle you could just not buy the high accuracy scale and buy everything else that i've said so that is the equipment covered now we're going to move on to the ingredients so i'm going to recommend a set of 20 ingredients to begin with i think 20 is a good number because 20 is enough to stay interested but it's not so many that you're going to get confused it's also not so many that it's going to get too expensive when coming up with the list of ingredients i kept the following criteria in mind so firstly i wanted to have ingredients which are commonly used and there's quite a lot of information about on the internet secondly i wanted to have ingredients which are easy to use so even if you're a beginner you might be able to find a way of using them well in a perfume rather than having them and having no idea how to make them smell good when you blend them with everything else thirdly i wanted to stick to ingredients which were cheap where possible and not things which were stupidly expensive fourthly i wanted to minimize the number of potential allergens in the ingredients this can be difficult sometimes with the naturals but overall this palette doesn't have very many allergenic ingredients in it fifthly i wanted to give a mixture of synthetics and naturals the reason for this is because synthetics can often be quite clean and simple and give you very beautiful single note effects whereas naturals often can be very complex and they can also be more difficult to use it really depends on the case but it's nice to have a blend because you get a wide range of things to try out and lastly i try to have a mixture of top mid and base notes so top notes are the notes which are not going to last very long they evaporate straight away the mid notes are going to last a medium amount of time and the bass notes are going to last for a very long time so these are the only things that stick around on your skin after hours and hours of wearing a perfume so here then is my list of what i would recommend you buy as your first 20 ingredients i've drawn it out as a table which is split up into naturals and synthetics there's also one pre-made base which i'll get to in a minute so natural materials have been extracted from plants this could be many different parts of the plant for example vetiver is extracted from the root lavender is extracted from the flower heads cedarwood is extracted from the wood there are different ways of doing extractions so for example an essential oil which is denoted eo is made by doing a steam distillation of the plant material there are other ways of doing extractions however for example labdanum is commonly sold as an absolute which is a type of solvent extraction synthetics are materials which have been made in a lab by chemists for example this is similar to how paracetamol or ibuprofen might be made in a lab for general use for top middle base notes well top notes are the notes of the perfume which evaporate the quickest so these are the ones which shout loudly at you when you open the bottle but they go quite quickly mid notes are the notes of a perfume which stick around for a medium length of time so probably something like one to two hours base notes are the most long lasting notes in the perfume these are the notes that last to the very end however they can often be more subtle and they can also often be drowned out by the top and the mid notes at the very beginning of the perfume so why then have i chosen these ingredients to recommend for a beginner well the sweet orange and the lemon essential oils are both very easy to use and will impart a positive effect on almost any blend the bergamot on the other hand is not something that is so recognizable to someone who has not smelled bergamot before however it is in fact one of the most widely used materials in perfumery it is used everywhere the reason i recommend getting bergamot bf or burger terpene free is because natural bergamot can contain these things called burger terpenes and when they go on your skin they can react with some sunlight to make a sensitization so if you get bergamot with the burger terpenes removed it's much safer for use on the skin now for the synthetic top notes there are many synthetic top notes which smell really nice however for the purposes of this video i had to pick something that would be useful and versatile in a lot of situations cis3 hexanol is the smell of freshly cut grass however the reason that it's so useful is because as well as making your perfume smell like that if you want it to it's also very useful in very low doses in floral and fruity accords in order to make it smell a bit more natural and realistic next for the natural midnotes i picked lavender and cedarwood lavender is great because it's used in fujairs which is a classic type of accord and also colognes which is a classical family of perfume now the thing about lavender is it's widely used to soften out fragrances and you can often find a place for it cedarwood on the other hand is a quintessential woody notes it smells just like pencil shavings and is an essential component for woody accords it acts as a great backbone for any kind of woody accord that you might want to make next for the synthetic midnotes the first one i would recommend is hedeon this is one of the most widely used materials in all of perfumery and is a very famous mid-note when you try to smell it on its own it doesn't actually smell it very much but it has an incredible impact on many many blends which is why it's so widely used the next material is ethyl molten this is found in lots of fruits and it also allows you to build a candy floss style or sugary accords so again this can be very versatile beta-iron this is something that smells like violets and also smells like raspberry so it can be used as a base for both of those accords and finally fructone this again is found in a lot of fruits so it helps you build fruit accords it's useful for berry accords for example raspberry or strawberry and also things like apples finally for the mid notes this is the one time that i'm actually going to recommend you get a base which is javodan's rose base called rosejivko217 the reason i recommend getting a rose base over the natural rose is that the rose base is a lot more consistent this is because naturals can vary depending on their location and which manufacturer made them an even bigger reason however is that the rose base is much much cheaper than the natural rose so for a beginner this is a great choice to have now for the natural bass notes i'm going to recommend labdanum and benzoin these can both be used in a lot of contexts however they can also both be used to make an ambra chord which is something you can do as a beginner then the vetiver and the patchouli vetiver is quite a woody scent so this should blend well with your cedarwood however you can also use it in combination with all of the other three natural base notes quite well patchouli on the other hand is quite polarizing however it is one of the core bass notes for natural perfumery and it is great to know what this smells like and learn how to use it and finally for the synthetic base notes so firstly i'm going to recommend two musks these are ethylene bracelet and exaltalide these are both going to last a very long time and will help provide a solid base for your perfume that is quite transparent the ethylene brassylate is more of a sweet musk whereas the exaltelide is more of a fabric-like musk and finally three very important ingredients vanillin ambroxan and isui super natural vanilla is a very complex scent however the main scent molecule in natural vanilla is vanillin so vanillin is something that smells characteristically vanilla this can be used in combination with the ethyl maltol to make a candy floss a chord however it can also be used with labdanum and the benzoin to make an ambra chord ambroxan can also be used to make an amber chord however it can be used for so much more than that as well ambroxan gives you an intensely kind of golden clean effect to your perfume and it will make your perfume smell a lot more like a professional perfume rather than a homemade perfume it is used all over the place and is an indispensable ingredient isu super is another quite famous ingredient you may have heard about this if you're interested in perfumery it is quite a woody ingredient and it's a very warm hugging ingredient this can be used in great combination with all of the other base notes here especially the woody base notes and the musks and it can really be used in a large variety of perfumes to give a warm enveloping effect once you smell the icb super you will also start to smell it in lots of perfumes you find in the shops for the ingredients i've just talked about the total cost came to 171 pounds plus seven pounds for postage and packaging i'm not going to do a high budget or low budget option for the ingredients because i think that this is a good set so i wouldn't want to change my thought on what would be a good setting of ingredients just based on the budget that said if there is one or two things that are too expensive then sure you could always just drop those out and look to get them another time another thing you've got to bear in mind is the supplier there are different suppliers that you can use though you sometimes will have to do a little bit of searching on the internet in order to find them i use pal wall which is why i'm recommending it here however i'm not affiliated with them in any means and you could definitely use another supplier if you are in the uk if you're in the us perfumer's apprentice are a good supplier and i've also heard good things about creating perfume.com okay now it's time for stage three so now we've got our equipment and we've got our ingredients now we want to actually start doing things with them so the first stage is to learn the ingredients before we're going to do any blending or make anything with them you just want to learn the ingredients so you understand them properly the reason for this is if you're going to make a complex mixture out of things you at least want to know what they're like on their own it's kind of like cooking you wouldn't want to start cooking with a load of ingredients you've never used before without knowing what they taste like on their own because otherwise your meal could easily end up just tasting disgusting so the first step in learning your ingredients is by making dilutions the reason you want to make dilutions is because you can understand how the ingredient behaves at different concentrations and this means you get to know what it's going to smell like at the different levels you might want to use it in in the perfume in order to make a dilution you need to perform the following steps firstly you want to take one of your sample bottles and you want to place it on your scale and then set the scale to zero next take a pipette get some of your ingredient and you want to measure out something like 0.5 grams you could have any number you wanted to but i would recommend starting out with half a gram put that in the bottle so make sure the scale reads 0.5 grams next you want to times this number by 9 so if you've picked 0.5 0.5 times 9 is 4.5 now what you want to do is get a new pipette go to your perfumer's alcohol and you want to take 4.5 grams of perfume as alcohol and add it into the sample vial with the ingredient so what you've done here is you've added 0.5 grams of ingredient 4.5 grams of perfume is alcohol that adds up to 5 grams total so what you've done now is you've got a 10 dilution of your ingredient in the perfumer's alcohol now you just want to label this bottle as ingredient name 10 percent and this bottle here is your first 10 dilution now the 10 dilution is great because this allows you to smell and evaluate the material and learn what it smells like much much better than when you have it in its pure form sometimes when the ingredients in its pure form it can actually overload your nose and stop you smelling it properly but at 10 is usually a good amount so what do you want to do next well i've made a video about how to evaluate materials however in short you firstly want to give your nose a chance to rest after making the dilution and then all you need to do is take one of the scent strips and dip it in your 10 dilution leave it for a minute or so and then you can smell it and you'll unlock what the ingredient smells like then you can make a proper evaluation on it once you've got your 10 dilution and you know what it smells like you can repeat this process to make a one percent dilution so once again you take your 10 dilution you put 0.5 grams of that into a new bottle you then take a new pipette you take another 4.5 grams of the perfumers alcohol and then you add that to the bottle and you so now you diluted that to one percent you put a label on it saying material x 1 and again repeat the same process what you'll find of course is the one percent is much weaker than the 10 but this effect can vary with different materials so for some materials they're so powerful that even the 1 dilution is very strong it's really important to learn this because that will allow you to know when you're making it into a perfume you might not want to add a drop of the pure ingredient for example you may only want to add a drop of your 1 dilution because even then it still has a chance potentially of overpowering the perfume okay so if you're following with me at this point you've used up 40 of your 100 sample bottles and you've used up 40 of your 500 pipettes plus one for the perfume's alcohol which is one that i like to reuse i think you can reuse the pipette for the perfume as alcohol as long as you make sure that it never gets contaminated with anything else if it gets contaminated always throw it out and use a new pipette at this stage you should have 60 sample bottles left and these are going to be used for making your blends this is where the real perfume starts happening so i like to split blending up into three distinct stages firstly is making binary mixtures secondly is making your chords and thirdly is making final perfumes so what are these different stages and how do you do them firstly then what are binary mixtures well binary mixtures are a way to assess the compatibility between two ingredients so when you've got two ingredients what you can do is you can take two scent strips you can dip those in the two bottles and then you can hold them next to each other and you can use that to see what the two ingredients will smell like once you've found a combination that you think smells well together at this stage you can work out which actual fine levels you want to use in the blend or how they might fit together when you're using them later on so what you want to do is you want to take one ingredient and then you want to take another one i would start off by diluting something like 0.5 grams of each mix them together in a sample bottle using separate pipettes for each of course and then just like the evaluations before after some time you take a sense strip and you dip that into your mixture of the two things and then you work out is one of them too strong is the other one too strong or are they perfectly balanced if they're perfectly balanced then that's great but if not this gives you a chance to make another trial so if they're not balanced you can use more of one material and less of the other or alternatively you can use a lower dilution level of one so for example if material a is much stronger in the mixture than material b then what i could do is use the one percent dilution of material a and then i could mix that equally with the 10 dilution of material b the final mixture in this case material a will still be 10 times weaker than material b in the final mixture now for step two step two is making a chords a chords are just more complex mixtures than the binary mixtures generally with an accord you want to go in one of two directions you either go for a realistic accord or an abstract accord when you're making a realistic accord you try to make it smell like something that exists so for example if you take the ethyl maltol and the vanillin which i recommended in those ingredients when you mix those together you find you get a candy floss kind of smell you can use a chords to make things like fruit smells or floral smells when you can't obtain a natural or an essential oil or something to get the smell for example apple doesn't have an essential oil but you can make an apple a cord so that's how you get the smell of apple in your perfumes secondly is the abstract accords when you're making an abstractor chord you're essentially doing what you're doing with the binary mixtures you're letting the ingredients speak to you and tell you how they want to be blended together so if you find a number of binary compositions that go well you can mix them all together into a bigger chord of five things now it may not smell like anything particular but if you think it smells nice then that's fine that's an accord and finally step three so step three is when you're now starting to make perfumes instead of simpler chords so perfumes and accords are both mixtures of things what is a different scent of a perfume to me the difference for a perfume is when you're constructing a perfume you start to think how it is going to evolve over time when you're making a chord for example it may be something that is a top note accord or a mid note accord or something else but you're generally thinking about more the smell and the impression you get rather than how it's going to affect the skin or how it's going to last on the skin over time on the other hand when you're making a perfume you want to think what does it smell like when i open the bottle what does it smell like once it's on my skin and what does it smell like after hours and hours so this case is when you're gonna have to be thinking about your mid notes your base notes and your top notes do i have some top note of chords mixed with some bass note naturals for example and some bass note synthetics or i have some bass note accords mixed with some top note synthetics who knows any combination is possible but the idea is this is what you're thinking you're bringing your the sense that you like or the smells you've made that you like and you're making them functional and work as an actual perfume the best way to test these is generally to put them on a scent strip and study them over days you will have to think about what they smell like straight away and what they smell like after a day or so another thing you can do is put them on your skin when you put things on the skin they can react with your skin chemistry and start to smell different so this will really help you work out how it's going to actually function as a perfume so that's it in a nutshell obviously you could go into each one of these topics as much as you want i've tried to link other videos where i can however this is a basic overview and i think this should tell you all you need to get started so thank you for watching the video please give me a like or a subscribe and also remember to comment what other videos you would like to see about making perfume and i'll see what i can do in the future so enjoy the rest of your evening and thank you for watching goodbye you

Channel: Sam Macer

Views: 113,021

Keywords: perfumery, tutorial, perfumer, make perfume at home

Id: dhaizDgS0Y4

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020