Making perfume with ESSENTIAL OILS
While regular perfumes may last longer on your skin, you can breathe easy knowing that perfumes made from pure essential oils are 100 per cent natural.
Just as you can make perfumes from fresh or dried herbs, you can also make them with pure essential oils. But the fragrance you are creating will have a more full-bodied aroma if you include top, middle and base notes. Some essential oils evaporate more quickly than others. For this reason, they're given a class of weight, which is determined by the oil's volatility, or how quickly the fragrance disappears relative to other oils. Oils that evaporate the quickest, within one to two hours, are called top notes. Top notes are what you smell first in a perfume. Oils that evaporate within two to four hours are referred to as middle notes. They surface after the top notes. Then there are base notes – these last the longest but are the slowest to emerge.
Generally speaking, base notes will dominate a blend if used in equal parts. To start off experimenting with a blend, a good ratio to begin with is three drops of your chosen top note, two drops of your middle note and one drop of your base note. Blend these and see how they smell. After a while you will learn how the oils interact with one another, and whether you want more of one or the other.
The list of top, middle and base notes is extensive. Search the internet to find which essential oils come under which category.
Remember that essential oils are soluble in vegetable and herb oils, and alcohol. They are not soluble in water. Also, you can buy fragrance oils as a cheaper alternative to essential oils. Fragrance oils are manufactured oils and contain fixatives and stabilisers for a longer lasting scent. They're fine to use, but if you want to use your perfume for therapeutic purposes, then you must use essential oils.
To make a perfumed oil, pour 10ml jojoba (or sweet almond) oil into a darkcoloured glass bottle. Create your perfume adding essential oils drop by drop, shaking the bottle after each addition. Use around 15-20 drops of essential oil per 10ml carrier oil. Leave in a cool, dark spot for a few days to allow the scents to meld.
A perfume made out of essential oils may smell great from the outset, but leaving your perfume to sit for 48 hours – even better, a week – will give you a much better idea of what the combined scents will smell like for the majority of the perfume's life. Sometimes the oils may combine into something less appealing. When making perfume, patience is a virtue.