While you don't need qualifications or any kind of graduation ceremony to be a perfumer, you do need to know how to make "real perfume." Most people would call this professional quality, and what most people start out with to be amateur. I have personally tried all of these, some before I knew about the better ways to make a good perfume.

Actually, amateur simply means "for love." It has no bearing on the quality of your product, but that's a discussion for another day. I'm planning to write an article on the true difference between amateurs and professionals in the business section.

Amateur Perfume Making Methods

Vodka and essential oils. This can make a nice toilette water or linen spray, but it is not perfume. Perfume has at least 15% aromatic materials, usually higher. Using vodka, you can only achieve around 5%, sometimes not even that much with denser oils. (Essential oils are only one kind of aromatic materials, by the way.)

Why is this? Ethanol is what dissolves the oily fragrance materials; ethanol is an effective solvent for most lipids. Vodka has ethanol in it, but only 40%. The rest is water, which also combines with the ethanol. Your fragrance materials end up competing with the water for the ethanol, and the water wins.

The oils will separate from the vodka if you go over a certain low percentage, which varies depending on the density. You will never be able to get a full-strength perfume from vodka and essential oils.

Using flower petals, bark, or other raw botanicals in alcohol, water, or oil.

This gets you either a weak, sticky extract (like vanilla extract) after waiting about 2 months, faintly scented oil, or an oil-saturated mess of soggy flower petals. It's fun to try, but you will never get a strong scent. Why is this?

It takes much more than a few flowers to make perfume. It takes 80 pounds of rosemary to produce 1 pound of rosemary essential oil - and this is an oily plant. In fact, in the case of jasmine, it takes 8000 flowers to make one gram of absolute (which is like essential oil, but stronger and more true to the plant scent.)

Most essential oils are made by steam distillation (like rosemary) or pressing (like many citrus fruits.) Most absolutes are produced by solvent extraction (like hexane or CO2.) These are the best ways of making the scent into a concentrated substance which is strong enough to be used in perfume.

Using food extracts as perfume. My sister and I used to do this all the time when we were young. We loved vanilla in particular and coated ourselves in it. This is fun, but, most food extracts are not that strong (the solvent problem), sometimes sticky, and they never last long.

Most flavor extracts, such as lemon, vanilla, and peppermint, are fragrances that evaporate quickly. With nothing to anchor them down, they vanish off your skin within 1 to 2 hours. Still, if you like to mix them, you've had your first experiences of blending perfumes! Now that I think about it, this is probably how I got interested in perfumery.

Want to find out about the professional versions of these methods?