There are two reasons why I wrote this particular article. One is because many people don’t believe they can do it; they think that they need some special qualifications or genius to be a real perfumer. The other is that people just like to complicate things unnecessarily, resulting in wasted time and effort.

Two things I know about you.

I probably don’t know you personally, but I’m pretty sure of two things about you. You like to make stuff, and you don’t have enough time to make everything you want. That describes just about every do-it-yourselfer I’ve encountered, myself included!

If I asked you – or any of the DIY-ers I know – if they would rather get stuff done faster or slower, most of them would say, “Faster, of course.” If I asked them what was more important, the hours they put into knitting a sweater, or having the finished product, many (though not all) would say that the finished sweater was more important than the hours. (That’s why we like to finish our projects.)

This is a roundabout introduction to the concept that perfumes don’t have to be super-complicated to be good. They don’t have to require months of development. Some of them even happen by accident!

Some of the designer scents on the market have hundreds of components, witches’ brews of synthetic and natural ingredients that would scare off anyone if they were required to list the formula on the label!

But some of them are only 8 components, carefully balanced. Now that you can handle!

Even more important than the number of components is…

But even more important than the number of components is your idea. If you have a clear vision of what kind of perfume you want to create, your solution-seeking mechanism will kick in. Your fragrance idea is what makes a perfume great, however you can make it happen. As a real life example from The Emperor of Scent:

Dior created Diorissimo out of ambergris (yes, the whale vomit) and a cheap Miss Dior knockoff, discovered in someone’s bathroom soap. The man, a perfume ingredient buyer, had been handling ambergris and washed his hands with the Miss Dior knockoff soap before getting on a plane. He smelled his hands, and it was exactly what he had been looking for. It only took two ingredients and thirty seconds, and no amount of tinkering in the lab could have yielded it.

Trust in your own ideas and solutions.

If you’ve been through the educational thought-control mill… sorry, I mean school, then you know that people aren’t encouraged to be creative past elementary school. Unless we have extraordinary teachers, our creativity and problem-solving abilities get squashed when we “just try to get A’s” (or B’s and C’s, in my case.)

Original thought is swept aside in favor of memorization and regurgitation, and only two kinds of intelligence, verbal and mathematical, are tested. If you’re not good at either of those things, you might go through your childhood and early adulthood “knowing” that you aren’t smart. That your ideas aren’t any good, especially if they come easily. “That can’t be a good idea because it came from me!” says the little voice in our heads.

Great works of art start in the mind. Often, the idea comes in an instant, like a bolt of lightning. After that, the implementation of the idea – the mechanical problem solving – is what takes up your time and energy.

What matters is that you (or your customers) like your perfumes.

I can tell you that everyone who bought Diorissimo didn’t care that it was discovered in 30 seconds, or that it was made from a cheapola knockoff. Perfume customers only care that they like the scent.

When you make perfume, perhaps you should keep the story of Diorissimo in mind. The only thing that matters is that you like it. If it’s just lavender absolute plus d-limonene, so what? If it smells great, it is great!

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