Have you ever dreamed of making your own perfume? If so, you probably think that it takes a lot of strange, expensive perfumery ingredients and many years of study to create a good fragrance. This is not the case. Getting started making perfume is easy, fun, and fast if you start with fragrance oils.
If you don’t know what they are already, fragrance oils are concentrated scented oils used to add fragrance to products. The amount of fragrance oil is usually small, .5% – 5%, and used in soap, lotion, shampoo, bath bombs, and many other personal care products. What most people don’t realize is that fragrance oils can also be used to make very good perfume.
Easy To Work With.
FOs are easy to work with. What you smell out of the bottle is what you get, which is not true for full-strength absolutes or aroma chemicals. Absolutes and aroma chemicals are often disheartening for the beginning perfumer because they are often unpleasant at full concentration. You often have to dilute them to 5% or less to get their true scent. Fragrance oils are already at a comfortable smelling level. They are still strong, but their level will not turn your nose off.
Less Expensive
There is less financial risk when you start to make perfume with FOs. While half an ounce of real jasmine absolute is at least $60, an ounce of jasmine fragrance oil will only be $5 – $10. You will be able to carry out your fragrance experiments without worrying about wasting the precious botanical ingredients.
Wide Range Of Scents
Fragrance oils also give you a wider range of scents than if you just stick to essential oils or absolutes. Using fragrance oils is often the only easy way you have to get perfume “notes” such as peach, raspberry, currant, and marine-type scents. If you have an idea, such as combining strawberry and rose, you can easily put it into action with fragrance oils.
When you’ve made your perfume blend from fragrance oils, it is skin-safe. You can create a whole line of products in this same scent, such as lotion, shower gel, and massage oil.
Sometimes, people will claim that fragrance oils can’t make “real” perfume (also known as ingredient snobs.) If you feel like you’re cheating because you’re not using “real” ingredients – absolutes and aroma chemicals – keep in mind that the same ingredients go into both fragrance oils and perfume. Both of them use absolutes, essential oils, and aroma chemicals.
What matters is not how easy or hard to use, or how rare or common your ingredients are. The important issue is that you create perfume that you like!