Ever ran out of perfumes and thought, “I so wish I could make my own customized perfumes at home?”
If the answer is yes, then I’m pretty sure what must have stopped you from creating your handmade Perfume. It was a lack of proper guidance.
So, what are you waiting for? Take it easy; here is a detailed guide to making an essential oil perfume from scratch. Scroll down to learn more about how to make Perfume with essential oils.
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A. Essential Oils
1. What Are These?
Starting from the basics. Before moving on to the actual procedure, let us first get the basics cleared because “A strong foundation makes a firm building.”
What are essential oils, you must be wondering? Stating it very simply, instead of using complicated words, “Essential oils are oils extracted from plants.” Or, we could say these are compounds extracted from plants and then processed into oils.
These are aromatic, meaning they have a pleasing and calming smell or scent. They are fragrance oils.
These have stronger scent levels than the plants they are derived from, as active ingredients are added to the extracts to enhance their aroma.
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2. How Are These Obtained?
The process of obtaining essential oils can be narrowed down to these two techniques:
1. Cold Pressing: In this technique, the plant is mechanically squeezed or pressed to obtain the oils or juices from the plant matter.
2. Steam or Water Distillation: Water or hot steam is passed through the plant matter to pull out all the juices or oils.
After obtaining the juices and the oils, these are further processed and made into essential oils. These are then packed into bottles and are sold out.
3. How Do These Work?
Essential oils are used for aromatherapy. Aromatherapy is the process in which essential oils are used for healing or helping cure a particular disease.
These oils work by helping the amygdala of the brain. Amygdala is the part of the brain that deals with all our emotions.
When the scent of these oils is inhaled, the molecules of these oils travel through our olfactory nerves and get transported to the amygdala.
These then help settle the amygdala, thereby regulating our emotions. This, in turn, helps heal or cure a particular disease.
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4. Where Are These Used?
These fragrance oils are known to be very beneficial to our bodies. These are used for various purposes, some of which are:
- Treating insomnia.
- Reducing anxiety.
- Reducing stress.
- Reducing depression.
- Treating appetite-related problems.
- Improving sleep.
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5. What Are Some Essential Oils?
Lavender oil, Tea tree oil, Peppermint oil, Lemon oil, Lime oil, Orange oil, Bergamot oil, Clary Sage oil, Rosemary oil, Eucalyptus oil, etc., are a few examples of essential oils.
B. Perfumes
1. What Are These?
As you must already know what perfumes are, these liquid mixtures help us smell good and improve our overall appearance by giving off a good scent when applied.
These are mixtures of aromatic compounds and essential oils professionally made to last long and smell great on an application.
2. What Are the Types of Perfumes?
There are six main categories of perfumes:
- Perfume/Parfum: These perfumes have the highest concentration of essential oils ab, out 20 – 30 %, and are the most expensive due to the high concentration. These tend to last for 24 hours and longer.
- Eau de Perfume/Eau de Parfum: These perfumes have a high concentration of around 15 – 20 % essential oils. These tend to last for 6-8 hours on average.
- Eau de Toilette: These perfumes have a concentration of essential oils, approximately 5 – 15 %. These are generally used in spray bottles.
- Eau de Cologne: These perfumes have the lightest scent concentrations and about 2 – 4 % of essential oils.
- Eau Fraiche: These perfumes are the most diluted with essential oils, with a concentration of around 1 – 3 %. The main ingredient in these is water. As the name suggests, Eau Fraiche means Fresh Water.
- Perfume Oil: These perfumes are made of oil as a base. No alcohol or water is used in these.
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3. How Are They Made?
The perfume-making process is a pretty long and interesting one. But, to keep it short, here are four steps that summarize the entire process of making a solid perfume:
- Extraction: The first step is collecting all the ingredients required to make a perfume. This includes collecting all the essential oils and perfume extracts required. Various methods like solvent extraction, steam distillation, expression, enfleurage, and maceration are used.
- Blending: After the ingredients are obtained, all the ingredients are blended in proper proportions and quantities as per the standard perfume recipe. In this process, dilution with water or alcohol is also done.
- Aging: To ensure a high quality of perfumes, aging is an important step. After the perfumes are blended, they are aged for months or even years. This helps enhance its scent of it and also improves its quality.
- Quality Control: This is one of the most important steps in preparing Perfume. In this stage, all the harmful and undesired substances are discarded from the Perfume. This step ensures that the prepared Perfume does not contain any harmful substances.
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C. Carrier Oils
1. What Are These?
Essential oils are extracts of plant matter and can cause irritation or burning problems if applied to the skin.
To tame the effect of the essential oils, these oils are used. These help the essential oils reach the body without causing any trouble to the skin. Hence these oils are called “carriers.”
2. Where Are These Used?
These are used in aromatherapy and cosmetic products like moisturizers, body oils, and body care products.
3. What Are Some Examples?
Coconut oil, Black Cumin Seed oil, Evening Primrose oil, Jojoba oil, Rosehip oil, Grape seed oil, etc., are some of the best carrier oils used.
D. How to Make Your Perfume Bottle from Essential Oil?
Now that you have your basics cleared, we can move on to the main part, the essential oil perfume-making process. Excited to learn the perfume recipes and make your Perfume?
Buck up; these are seven simple and fast steps to preparing a homemade perfume. Let us dig deeper into perfume recipes for making natural perfumes.
1. Explore
The first step of the perfume recipe to making an essential oil perfume is to explore all the ingredients you can use.
Exploration alone is not an ideal practice. Exploration with proper research about the ingredients is a must.
Essential oil is a naturally occurring substance that has a lot of benefits. Although it is natural, that does not mean it would not cause any harm to our bodies.
Our bodies can show significant side effects from the essential oil. Hence, exploring, doing proper research, and then selecting the ingredients is advised.
Doing so reduces the chances of the Perfume causing problems like irritation, burning, or itching.
Make it a point to consider all your allergies, sensitive skin, and other health problem before selecting the ingredients.
Doing proper research on them and exploring all the alternatives to the ones that might end up harming you is a must before putting them in your essential oil perfume spray.
Certain oils like citrus and mint oils can irritate the skin. Essential oils like peppermint oil, the ylang ylang oil, bergamot oil, and balm mint oil can irritate sensitive skin.
Hence, selecting the right ingredients is a crucial task, although difficult. But, once done, half of the hard work is done. The rest is more on the interesting part.
2. Understand
An essential oil perfume is made up of three notes: the top note, the middle note, and the base note. All three notes constitute the Perfume. Hence, for making an essential oil perfume spray, we must first understand what the top note, the middle note, and the base note are.
The Top Note: The top notes, also known as the head notes, are the ones we first smell. The top notes are generally dominant for 15 minutes after applying the Perfume.
The Middle Note: The middle notes, also known as the heart notes, carry the most Perfume. The middle notes are generally the most obvious for the next 15 – 45 minutes, after the top notes.
The Base Note: The base notes are the ones that are the most durable out of the three notes. The base notes produce the scent emitted after the middle notes fade away. These give the scent of the perfume longevity. The base notes last a long time; without these, the fragrance can fade away quickly.
In the perfume recipe, this is the second step. This is important because without properly understanding this step and the composition of a perfume, making a good essential oil perfume is difficult.
Although this step might not seem unimportant, please do not skip it and try to understand it well. It will help you in the process of making perfumes in the following steps.
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3. Choose
Choosing the fragrances to blend is the third step in the perfume recipe. It is completely up to you what scents you want to select and blend for your Perfume. But you must know a few guidelines to enhance your Perfume.
Usually, the citrus notes are used as the top notes or the head notes as they are strong and assertive. The floral notes are used for the middle of the heart notes as they have a lighter scent. Followed by woodsy notes being used as the base notes.
These are just the guidelines you must know before choosing your scents. There is no hard and fast rule to adhere only to these guidelines; you may even come up with scents of your own for the top, middle, and heart notes by using creativity.
Here are a few categories of essential oils to do your job of choosing the notes a bit easier, have a look:
3.1 Floral Scent:
If you want floral scents in your Perfume, here are a few essential oil names: Ylang-Ylang essential oil, Carnation essential oil, Chamomile essential oil, Jasmine essential oil, Lavender essential oil, Magnolia essential oil, Neroli essential oil.
There are more floral scent essential oils, but the ones mentioned above are the most commonly used floral fragrances.
The ylang-ylang essential oil has a lot of benefits: it helps reduce anxiety, it helps boost self-esteem, helps regulate mood, and is known to have a sedative effect when inhaled. Apart from this, the ylang-ylang essential oil also exhibits antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, and antifungal properties.
The ylang-ylang flowers are known to treat malaria symptoms, so using the ylang-ylang essential oil can also help treat malaria.
But, ylang-ylang is associated with irritating the skin and problems like dermatitis. Although it has quite a lot of benefits, it can end up becoming harmful to our skin.
Hence, you must be careful when choosing the right floral blend for your essential oil perfume.
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3.2 Musky Scent
If you want earthy scents in your Perfume, here are a few essential oil names: Vetiver essential oil, Frankincense essential oil, Myrrh essential oil, Patchouli essential oil, and Citronella essential oil.
You can use these essential oils to make an oil perfume with an earthy note.
3.3 Citrus Scent
If you want a citrus scent in your Perfume, here are a few essential oil names: Sweet Orange essential oil, Lemon essential oil, Blood Orange essential oil, Bergamot essential oil, Lime essential oil, Grapefruit oil, and Grapeseed oil.
Sweet orange essential oil is the most commonly used for making citrus perfumes as it is readily available and cost-friendly. It goes well with most essential oils. It goes well with another citrus, floral scents, minty, and spice scents. Blood Orange essential oil has the same applications and properties as Sweet Orange.
Bergamot essential oil is known to help with depression and problems like acne and oily skin. You might want to use this essential oil for added benefits.
You can use these citrus oils to make an essential oil perfume with citrus notes.
3.4 Herbal Scent
If you want a herbal fragrance in your Perfume, here are a few essential oil names: Tea Tree essential oil, Ginger essential oil, Lemongrass essential oil, Eucalyptus essential oil, and Saffron essential oil.
You can use these essential oils to make an essential oil perfume with a herbal scent.
Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay/Copyright 2017
3.5 Woody Scent
If you want a woodsy scent in your perfume, here are a few essential oil names: Sandalwood oil, Cedarwood oil, Rosewood oil, Pine Needle oil, Cypress oil, and Juniper berry oil.
You can use these essential oils to make an essential oil perfume of yours that has a woodsy scent.
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4. Collect
Collecting is the fourth step of the perfume recipe. In this step, you are supposed to collect all the required ingredients and materials. It is an interesting step as it is a stage to kickstart the actual making of the Perfume.
The following materials and ingredients are required; make sure to have them all, and don’t happen to miss out on any of them:
- One 5 ml roller bottle: For making the essential oil perfume. The roller bottles are easily available online. You can order one for yourself right away.
- Three essential oils: Three essential oil are needed for the Perfume as one essential oil would be required per each note. So one essential oil for the top note, one for the middle note, and one for the base note.
- Four droppers: One dropper is required for the three essential oils and one for the carrier oil.
- Carrier oil: Jojoba oil, Sweet almond oil, and Coconut oil are some of the best-unscented carrier oils. If you want an added benefit of making a Vitamin E-rich perfume, then you might want to use almond oil as the carrier oi aIt is rich in Vitamin D and E and is a hydrator.
Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay/Copyright 2018
5. Mix
This is the fifth step in the perfume recipe. Mixing it all up sounds easy but requires a lot of attention. The following are the steps to mixing the ingredients for making an essential oil perfume:
- Add 80 drops of carrier oil to the roller bottle or essential oil bottles with the help of a dropper.
- Add 20 drops of essential oil with the dropper to the bottle. Out of which,h ten drops should be the essential oil for the base notes. Five drops of essential oil for the top notes and the other five for the middle notes.
- Seal the roller bottle and shake it well.
- Store the perfume blend in a cool and dark place.
NOTE: The carrier oil helps make the perfume base. If you wish to use witch hazel for the perfume base, you can use it with distilled water. Add one part of witch hazel to 2 parts of distilled water. The water blend with the witch hazel will make up the Perfume’s base.
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6. Bottle It
This is the sixth and most important step of the perfume recipe. As this step helps enhance the scent and the quality of the Perfume.
In this step, after you are done with the mixing or blending part, you are supposed to let the Perfume sit for a week or two before using it. Letting the essential oil blend sit and age for a while helps improve the aroma of the Perfume.
Keep your perfume bottle away from sunlight, as it might degrade the quality of the Perfume. Also, when letting the perfume age, make it a point to use a dark-colored perfume bottle as the dark color would prevent light from entering.
7. Use
This is the last and probably the best step of the perfume recipe, “Using the Perfume.” Now that your DIY perfume spray is aged well and is ready for us, look at the directions for applying your Perfume.
The directions for the application are pretty easy, just like the other perfumes. You can apply your essential oil perfume on areas like: behind your ear, on your nape area of the neck, on your chest area, and your collarbone area. These points of our bodies help the scent retain the fragrance.
Avoid applying the Perfume on your pulse points. For those who don’t know, Pulse points are the areas of the body where the blood vessels are closely surfaced to the skin. The areas like your wrists must be avoided as the blood flow might cause evaporation of the scent quickly.
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E. What are some important points to consider when making Perfume?
The below-mentioned points are a few things you must keep in your mind when making an essential oil perfume at home:
- Make sure to store your perfume bottle away from direct sunlight. Keeping the Perfume in places that get direct sunlight might end up degrading the scent of the Perfume. The heat from the sunlight may break down the chemical bonds which cause the fragrance, which might result in the degradation of the Perfume.
- Make sure to use a dark-colored bottle for storing your Perfume, as it will help maintain the fragrance of the Perfume.
- Make sure to select the right ingredients. Do proper research about how the ingredients might react with your skin type, and depending on the results obtained from the research, select your ingredients.
- Make sure to age your Perfume for a while and then use it. As an aging, Perfume helps increase its quality and fragrance. The more you age the Perfume, the more nicely you smell after applying it.
- Make sure to use a lower concentration of essential oils of about 15 % if you have delicate skin.
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F. How To Make Perfume with Essential Oils?
Now that you have learned the “A to Z” of making an essential oil perfume spray, without any further ado, go ahead and try making this “DIY perfume” customized to your personal preference.
To sum up the process of making a solid perfume, here is a quick overview. Research your ingredients properly and see that they suit your skin type. Understand the composition of perfumes before starting off making Perfumes. Based on the research and understanding, choose the right ingredients.
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Once chosen the right ingredients, collect all the necessary materials and mix all the required ingredients into a blend in proper proportions. After mixing, let the perfume rest for a few days, and viola! You are ready to use your essential oil perfume spray.
Last Updated on by Laveleena Sharma
