You are reading part 2
of a series of posts entitled “The Magnificent Perfume Making Experiment!” If
you haven’t read part 1 it won’t make any sense, for enlightenment click here.
After much delight
tinkering around with pipettes and amber glass bottles (which I find appealing
to the point of fetishism), I bring you the encouraging results of my first few
weeks of amateur perfumery.
The joy of mad scientist equipment
My olfactory
imagination pictured an effervescent sparkling scent, something to offset the
grim menace of the upcoming winter. I suffer greatly in winter, being one of
those for whom travelling to and from my day job in darkness brings a
flattening of spirit. Winter nights often see me curled up in bed with a
gruesome thriller and a peaty whisky by 9pm. I’d be fond of the life of a
hedgehog. Were it not for the brief romance of Christmas, I’d be quite content
to sleep in a deep pile of leaves for 4 months. With this in mind I want to
play with natural aromatherapy oils that effect a feeling of enlivenment and
happiness such as; grapefruit, bergamot and cypress. I see it essentially as a
sharp chypre softened with a comforting woody base, something to bring about a beam
to my grumpy November face.
My starting point was
to create the base i.e. A pre-mixed solution upon which you can add extra
notes. A useful metaphor would be to think of the base as the foundations of a
house, the underground layer upon which you’ll add additional floors. This is
how I did it:
- Cut vast quantities of
smelling strips (from artist’s cartridge paper) and select combinations of
notes to dip them into. After dipping 2 or 3 strips each time, fan them out and
waft them across your nose. This enables you to make a choice of notes that work
harmoniously ‘in the air’.
- Place 5 ml of
perfumer’s alcohol into a small bottle and begin to add very small amounts of
your notes bit by bit into the solution. For the synthetics you can use a calibrated
pipette (with millilitres on). For the essential oils you can simply use the
dropper in the bottle. As you add you’ll be able to sense when to stop by
closing up the bottle, shaking it, then having a sniff of a strip again. Write
down every single measurement as you do it. I really liked the combination of
Plush Folly’s slightly floral and very bright Aldehyde 2 with various wood
notes so I made several bottle variations i.e. A2 + cedar, A2 + rosewood, A2 +
sandalwood etc.
- Stop messing with it
and go to bed, leave the bottles alone for a few days somewhere dark and cool.
- Smell them again and
consider where to go next, you can repeat the smelling strip fan process now
using your favourite of the first blends alongside new notes. Split the blend
into 2 bottles and experiment with adding another note or two to each one. Be
prepared to pour it down the sink and start again when it doesn’t work (I
attempted to add teeny amounts of castoreum to my blend. Just the very tip of a
pin dipped into the bottle and added to the base caused it to emit a stench akin
to multiple cattle farts).
- Leave it alone again
for a few days.
- After some time I
found success in the combination of A2 + rosewood + cedar which gave me a
wonderfully deep woody vibe. Rosewood has a similarity to oud in that it
possesses a slightly rosy sharpness but without the removal of all the mucous
cells from the back of your throat. I vastly prefer it to oud. Alongside the
cedar (the scent of opening a flat pack box of untreated wood IKEA furniture),
it gave a rich gravitas to the blend. It needed a tiny touch of sweetness to
counteract the sharp so in went a few drops of synthetic Plush Folly’s Vanilla
Bourbon. This is exceptionally strong so be careful with not to obliterate the
gentler natural notes.
Smelling it tonight
(about 2 weeks into the process) I am delighted with my base. Here’s the
current recipe:
6 ml of perfumer’s alcohol (Plush Folly)
4 drops of synthetic vanilla bourbon (Plush
Folly)
6 drops of aldehyde 2 (Plush Folly)
5 drops of rosewood essential oil
2 drops of cedar essential oil
My recipe, pictured with the terrible castoreum mistake.
This is a very heavy concentration that will
need some serious maths work as future notes are added. I’ll ultimately use
Mandy Aftel’s marvellous natural perfume making manual ‘Essence and Alchemy’ to
determine what amounts will constitute an EDP or Parfum Extrait.
Tips:
Buy a lot of pipettes to avoid
cross-contaminating your notes. Wash them in warm soapy water, let them dry,
swill them in a little perfumer’s alcohol or rubbing alcohol to sterilise them.
Fiddle A LOT to get the right base, it is after
all your foundation.
If you detest maths and adore stationary (this
might be a female thing), invest in an object of desire for your record
keeping. My gorgeous Moleskine notebook made recording measurements a pleasure.
A bizarre thing happened to me when I created
my base, I could see clearly where to go next with my notes. It’s as if some
sort of intuition occurred and stopped it all being the purely hit and miss
testing that formed the multitude of sink fodder in the early stages. I can’t
wait to test my ideas this week and see if any of them work.
See 'number 3', my chosen base in it's little bottle. 'Jumbled up' is a few discarded trials mixed together, it smells infuriatingly good and I haven't a clue what's in it..
Keep an eye out next week for an interview with
Plush Folly’s Sally Hornsey where she speaks of her own adventures in
perfumery.
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