DIY PERFUMERY - My top 10 asked questions, Answered.

0:06 [Music] what's going on everybody and welcome to another video so today's video is going to be a little bit different than my normal ones today i want to address all the most common questions that i get uh from my youtube channel and i get a ton of questions either whether if it's in the comments uh sometimes people find me on facebook and they facebook message me i've even had some people do some really good detective work and uh they found my personal email and they would just email me questions and stuff like that which i don't know how they they found me but they found me so what what i want to do is compile all

0:51 the most commonly uh asked questions that i get all the time and just compile them all into one quick video i have a note here of the top 10 most requested uh well not requested but the most common questions that i'm always getting over and over and over so hopefully this one video all the people that do follow this channel will be like oh okay now i get it now it's answered and they won't have to dig through all these different videos and figure things out okay so let's get started uh now before i i uh to go through these uh questions if you happen to know one of these questions might have been yours or a question like it please don't be offended there's no such thing as a dumb question it's you know everybody starts somewhere

1:38 uh we all have to learn so let's just get through these uh one of the one of these questions so it goes i got some perfume oils and when i mix it with alcohol it doesn't smell or perfume or perform like a real perfume can you help me um the answer the quick answer is no i cannot help you and the main reason for that is because you're not using the right materials to make a spray alcoholic perfume if you're purchasing things called fragrance oils or perfume oils that should be a dead giveaway that well won it's it's an oil it's an oil-based substance usually these are fragrances that are heavily

2:24 diluted in oil carrier oils like uh jojoba oil fractionated coconut oil almond oil so you can't really use things in perfumery in a sense of like a spray-on alcohol type fragrance it just doesn't work that way these materials are not meant to be used in perfumery in the sense of spray alcohol applications you can however use these in other applications if you're trying to make fragrances for like uh candles soaps uh reed diffusers like or read uh the little oil diffusers and so or even glade plug-in like uh those uh uh the things you plug into the the outlets of your walls that holds oils

3:10 and it burns off oils for scent you can use perfume oils and things for that but you cannot use them for perfumery in a sense of alcoholic spray applications they it just won't work uh the reason why people are always like i'm trying it and it's just you know it doesn't smell or perform like a real perfume that's because it's an oil-based product it's going to sit too close to your skin and it's going to be so damp and so oily and so moist it's never going to project because it's just sitting on your skin there's no alcohol to evaporate it all away and obviously it's not going to smell like a real perfume because usually these people that buy fragrance oils they're usually knockoffs of like they'll buy they'll buy like a versace per ohm fragrance oil and they think if they just add alcohol to it they can make their own

3:55 versace per ohm you know fragrance for a fraction of the cost it just doesn't work that way so hopefully that answers that question uh second question i get this one quite a bit are there any single materials that i can purchase to increase longevity projection in ciage i just need one material the quick answer again no there is not a single material that will do that if you want to increase longevity projection sea odge it's the whole perfume composition has to be considered as a whole there's not one single ingredient that you're going to add in

4:41 that's just all of a sudden gonna make it turn into a beast uh the choice materials that you choose in you know in alongside with all the other materials combined is what's going to determine your projection crs you know diffusion and things like that now there are some other sides to this there are single materials that you can buy like i believe it's called like glue uh glue glucam p20 or p40 which is an oil-based substance and you can put a few drops of that in your you know finished perfume usually at like maybe one or two percent max in the complete perfume but again it's an oily based substance so

5:26 the claim to these materials are it will increase the longevity of top notes well yes it does do that because it's an oil-based product and it just adheres the you know the fleeting top notes close you know close to the skin so they don't uh evaporate as rapidly uh the downside to it though is because it is an oily type substance it will dampen your fragrance down so while yes it will make your top notes last longer uh in the overall scheme of things you're going to lose on some projection so you'll you'll gain some longevity performance but you're now losing some projection and sias and things like that so for the person that's asking or the

6:14 people that are asking what are some single materials that i can purchase that will increase just pretty much all aspects that people want in a perfume better longevity better sea edge better projection beast mode there isn't it's it's it doesn't happen it has to be well thought out choice materials in concession with everything else all the other materials combined uh that completes this you know perfume to react that way so if you want better projection you know all these different materials that you're choosing in you know your base middle or top notes choose better projecting materials there's there's some that sit close to the skin and then there's some that are actually very diffusive you just have to know which ones to get and there's hundreds and hundreds of

7:00 them out there so for me to say you know which ones are they you just have to you know buy as many materials as you can and experiment just try them all so that that's how i want to answer that question that's a tough one to answer quite honestly uh number three this is an easy one somebody asks how many materials do you own or have uh as of today i think we're in uh like uh we're february 16th i think today's day i don't even know what day it is it's mid-february last time i checked i think i have just a little over like maybe 400 or 420 different materials which isn't a lot to somebody just now subscribing to the channel are just now getting into perfumery they're probably like oh my

7:46 god that's so many how do you you know why do you need so many trust me you're gonna want that many as far as i'm concerned i don't even have half the amount of materials that i want to have um but perfumery is expensive and if you're buying your own materials yourself and you know you have to you know start somewhere and grow your material library slowly so right now i'm at about 400 materials i store everything down in drawers and shelves and whatever i'm working on today i have them out right here out and about but when i'm done i just store everything away in shelves and drawers so yeah how many materials i have right now a little over 400 right now question four this one i get asked a lot

8:33 and it's so difficult to answer and i hope people don't get hurt by my answer but can you show us how to make an all-natural perfume using only real natural ingredients no i cannot well not to say that i cannot i can but i will not and the reason for that is while i do get the environmentally friendly conscious consumers in people out there that want to make perfumes using nothing but all natural ingredients there's downsides to that generally all natural ingredients don't project as much as a synthetic

9:18 you know counterpart they don't last as long or have the long longevity of a synthetic counterpart um so while i could sit there and do a video and be like hey here's an all-natural perfume that you can do at home i'm using you know real lab denim real benzoin real rose real you know grapefruit oil real this at the end of the day in my opinion it's going to suck it's not going to smell anything like a good perfume that you would go to like bloomingdale's or macy's or a department store and purchase off the shelf and you're going to smell and be like this smells like hippie juice that's what i call it hippie juice because that's what it smells like it's just raw materials and usually they don't end up smelling that pleasant because using all raw natural materials

10:05 generally don't have a pleasant smell to begin with like if you were to smell an all natural rose absolute a lot of them smell very dirty and while they do smell like roses but it's all natural so you're getting the grit the dirt the grime the oiliness along with it and that goes with any natural material you're getting the raw stuff and a lot of times people will smell the raw material and be like uh this is the real thing why doesn't it smell as good as i thought it would and that's because it's it's real i mean you got to take the good with the bad so to answer that question can you show us how to make an all-natural perfume using all real natural ingredients i can but i'm not going to because that's not really

10:50 what i'm into like i like to make fragrances that smell of you know finished professional quality like you would smell in a department store off the shelf uh all those perfumes that you you know store bought in a department store generally are probably 80 to 90 percent synthetic anyways you may get lucky and find a good perfume that has little bits of natural ingredients in it but they're usually backed up with a lot of synthetic counterparts to help do the heavy heavy lifting so yeah so hopefully that didn't hurt too many people's feelings when i answer that that way number five is actually tied into that same question how can i increase the longevity projection of my all-natural

11:36 perfume using only essential oils and quite frankly it's i think i've already explained it in question four you just really can't um if somebody were to take an all-natural uh we'll just say an all-natural bergamot oil versus a synthetic you know chemically made bergamot rendition and you smell the two side by side they're gonna smell pretty similar and nine times out of ten the the chemically made one is always going to be just a little bit more projecting a little bit zestier a little bit brighter and definitely usually is going to last a lot longer so you you can't really increase the longevity and projection projection of anything just using just

12:22 you know essential oils or natural ingredients when i build my perfume or any of my perfumes like i actually combine the both natural and synthetics like i have natural sweet orange oil here i've got coriander coriander seed essential oil here but i also have some fake you know yuzu uh synthetic yuzu here i've got real violet leaf absolute here uh we're with cedarwood essential oil you know but then you have to back it with things like you know isolate super hetion some you know some chemically made you know woods and some other things like aldehydes and you know

13:08 six uh nanio which is like a watermelon chemical uh yeah chemi watermelon chemical so when you combine all these things they all kind of interact with each other so yes you get the best of both worlds in my opinion when you combine natural with synthetics you get the realism and the naturalness of the you know absolutes and the essential oils but then you also support that and back that up with some synthetic renditions or synthetic molecules that will help give it some of that projection lift and longevity that you're looking for or maybe it imparts a different scent or a twist to that naturalness that you're looking for maybe your natural material isn't as bright and zesty as you want it so you would find a synthetic rendition of that and combine the two so you get the best of both worlds

13:56 so i didn't really answer that question uh directly but we're gonna skip and go to the the next one number six what kind of weight scale do you recommend um when you're first starting off into perfumery you're going to want to get a scale don't use drops and think your formulas are ever going to be accurate you're never going to be able to scale up a formula into larger batches based on drops if you're going to unless you're going to sit there and count i need 300 drops of this material 500 you know it's just you got to use a scale so what i usually use like there's this trusted like this model is re-branded many different ways like this one's made by us solid

14:41 that i purchased i got it for 100 online you can find uh replicate uh roughly you know replica uh scales that look just like this with the same gut same counterparts but it just branded something else and you can probably find those for sixty five seventy dollars what you're gonna wanna look for in a good scale is you know a couple different factors you're gonna wanna look at what's the weight capacity how much weight can can it hold total and that really you have you have to ask yourself well how much you know perfume am i making am i making just small little you know one bottle at a time or am i making you know large canisters so if you're doing just one bottle at a time you're just tinkering you're playing with things stick with the scale that

15:26 goes up to maybe 200 grams max weight capacity if you are doing a much larger scale and you're making jugs and massive you know mass producing stuff you're definitely going to need a much larger scale that doubles triples that you know that weight amount another factor you're going to want to look at is readability and that is how you know how many uh decimal points will it read out on the scale mine that i have will go uh down to zero point zero zero zero so that's three decimal you know three decimal places of a gram uh you can get by with just a 0.00 but i

16:11 like that extra decimal because i i tend to find that some scales aren't as accurate and they can drift a little bit so when you have that extra decimal place it just gives you a better idea of where you're at as far as the weights another thing that you will want to consider is accuracy so there's readability which is how many decimal points will it read as far as weight in grams but accuracy is important too because if it's not an accurate scale then what's the point of having having having it read that low as far as weight you'll want to find a scale that can be as accurate as plus or minus

17:01 .003 grams that means it can shift anywhere from 0.003 grams at any given time which in my opinion that's acceptable uh to give you an example if i were to take one drop of this passion fruit and drop it in it might weigh out as 0.01 or 0.015 grams for one drop if i were to then take another drop and put one drop in it might read out as point zero one seven grams so it'll shift and vary plus or minus by .003 which that's acceptable in my opinion so hopefully that kind of answers that but generally you're going to want to spend a minimum of 60 dollars and up for an acceptable scale if you're not

17:48 spending 60 65 and up it's probably not an adequate scale okay let me just get a sip of water real quick before we crank through the remaining questions so here's another odd question that i get from people that watch my videos when i do formulation videos and i kind of formulate and and i tell you my formula as i'm going along in you know how many parts per thousand and stuff like that a lot of people ask how many drops of materials is in your formula for this video and again for somebody that's asking for how many drops it doesn't matter like because you you when you're given a formula

18:34 based on parts per thousand like say if i add in one drop of callowan and it's one part per thousand it doesn't matter how many drops it takes or how much weight it is that's a per uh that's a percent of a formula which is 0.1 percent is called or one part per thousand so when somebody asks how many drops don't think of it in terms of drops or weight a formula is a formula you can break it down as a percentage or parts per thousand but it's don't think of it as drops and again to go back to the scale question get a scale stop using drops okay here's another good question and this is probably a question that a lot of people get confused about because they're mixing different uh well

19:21 let me just get to it this question says i have 20 grams of perfume concentrate so this person went through the the trouble of actually making a a perfume concentrate now he's going to make an actual perfume he wants to dilute it in alcohol he's probably wanting to make like an edt or an ep or something like that so he's like i have 20 grams of perfume concentrate how many ml milliliters of alcohol do i need to make do i need to add to make it an edp concentration of 20 for a 100 ml bottle now the problem with this question is is these people are confusing

20:07 two different uh um scales they're they're confusing weight with volume weight obviously is grams he has 20 grams of perfume concentrate that's weight but he wants to know how many ml in milliliters that's volume of alcohol do i make you know 20 percent concentration into a 100 ml bottle again volume he's trying to figure out weight and volume and he kind of thinks they're one and the same he a lot of people confuse this as far as you know they think well one gram of something in weight is probably one ml in volume and that is not true um i can sit here and take five grams of something and then weigh it out as five

20:53 grams and then dump it into a beaker and it's not going to be five l five ml exactly it may be close it may look close but depending on the weight of the material can can change that especially if you're using something heavy like cedar wood essential oil is a very thick dense weighted material so 5 grams of cedarwood essential oil in weight may not look like 5 ml in terms of volume it might only look like 4.5 or if you take something very light and watery uh like um bergamot oil you know that's so light and watery that one might actually come out equal you know five grams to five ml but

21:40 it's never the case the point of this that i'm trying to to get across is don't mix up weight and volume and think they're one and the same so to answer this guy's question is if he has 20 grams of perfume and you want to make an edp 20 concentration well you add 80 grams weight of alcohol will give you now a 20 uh final finished mixture but that doesn't necessarily mean that's going to fit a 100 ml bottle it may be more it may be less and that's the problem with uh some people making you know one bottle at a time they're always trying to figure out how much do i need to make so i fit exactly this bottle i don't

22:26 want any more i don't want any less and you'll never you'll know it'll never happen so i always do uh when i do you know one bottle at a time i always over compensate and i always try to make more than i think i need and and that's okay because you can always fill up your 100 ml bottle to the top and be like there you go there's 100 ml bottle and whatever's left over you know i always have like these little spray bottles i've got hundreds and hundreds of these things all you know laying around and just fill those up give them away as like little testers you know give them to your friends and family or if you're selling perfume why not give away free samples and vials of you know your other finished products

23:12 so always over compensate and make more than what you need and whatever is done when you're done filling the bottle just fill fill up little sprayers and keep them around as giveaways uh two two questions left do you test your finished fragrances on paper strips or skin and this is a great question um to best answer this question would be you test your fragrance uh based on what the end application was intended to be and that for me like if i'm making a spray alcoholic perfume

23:59 and i test you know i make a trial batch i keep going and i'm testing it and you know i'm trying to figure out if it smells good or not i tested on my skin i spray it on like as it as if it was a finished product obviously it's diluted you know to edt or edp before i do that because i wanted to simulate what a finished product is going to smell like i'll spray it on my clothes to see how it wears on clothes i'll spray it on other people because skin chemistry is different on everyone so but if you're making a let's say a perfume for the intended root uh use as like a roll-on perfume you would then test it obviously you would have like little you know tester roll-ons you would fill it up and test it that way because how it performs

24:46 as a roll-on versus a spray application are two completely different um interpretations of a perfume like i can take one of these finished perfumes and spray it on i i think it smells great but if i fill up a roll-on bottle roll it on it's going to smell different certain notes aren't going to be as evaporative because a roll-on is you know adhered to your skin usually roll-ons will have a little bit less alcohol and more oils in it so it adheres to the skin so it's going to be a little bit different so the best way to answer that question is you know do you test your fitness fragrances on paper strips or skin is test it as your intended final use of your products

25:31 uh if you're making candles if you're making soaps don't make a fragrance and then spray it into the air and see how it smells you know make it into a test a small piece of test soap or a small piece of a test candle that's the only true way you're going to know how it smells based on you got to smell it as you intended the use for it basically um let's see the last question question 10. i get this a lot basically uh a month ago i had a video on should i or should i not pre-dilute my material so i now get this question quite a bit and this question is not a question of should i it's how do i

26:19 figure out how much i need to pre-dilute a certain material and there's two parts to this answer really one part is is you gotta learn you really should and the only way to learn is by using the material obviously if you use something neat in a blend and if it's overpowering and too strong just by a single drop you know how you you know you're gonna have to pre-dilute it to tame that odor strength uh so the question usually is well how much do i dilute it by and there's two things that i usually do to determine how i like to pre-dilute my materials one i'll scour the internet um and research this new material that i

27:04 have not used before so if i want to pre-dilute a new material i would you know research the material online and see if there's usually like there's a website the goodsensecompany.com they usually have a recommended dosing or recommended smelling dilution that's a good starting point another thing that you would want to do is research demo formulas like big fragrance houses like furminitch iff simrize and things like that they publish uh public you know finnish fragrance and formulas with all these different materials that you know they have or from other houses and usually you can just google like let's say let's see i've got here uh

27:52 jasmatone uh i have it pre-diluted down to five percent and that's what i like to use it at and you're probably thinking well how did i get to that one i had to mess with it for a little bit and figure this out because i initially had it diluted at 10 and i found that i added it in a trial blend and even a single drop of 10 was just too strong it was too noticeable so i dropped i cut it in half and five percent seems to work well but what i also did was i scoured the internet and you can google jasmatone demo formula and usually you'll always come up with some sort of demo formulas usually goodsensecompany.com has tons and hundreds of demo formulas fragrance houses jivadan iff simrize

28:40 have public demo formulas and you'll run across these materials and it'll show you what the you know what the formula is what the material is so if you come across material you're not sure what to dilute it at look at demo formulas and see how they are using it in a formula so in the case of let's say like the new material cascalone or even the old one cal a lot of people don't know how to dilute it one goodsensecompany.com says we recommend diluting this to i think they recommend 10 i find that way too strong you look at other demo formulas out there and most people are using it at one part per thousand maybe two parts per thousand max so then as you're building your perfume usually you have a formula and you're

29:26 calculating things as you go you have to figure out well if i add in a single drop of calorin what dilution ratio will it have to be to for one drop to equal one or two parts per thousand and that's where the math part comes in and you'll just have to figure you know people hate math but you know what if you're in perfumery you if you don't embrace it then you're just doomed to fail you need to know math you don't have to be great at it but once you get into the swing of things fractions percents decimals it all will become natural to you but research demo formulas see what other perfumers are using that material in a formula at what percent per thousand and then you ask yourself well if i add

30:14 in one or two drops of this material those one or two one or two drops at what percent ratio would have to be pre-diluted to equal that's you know average use amount that i'm seeing in all these demo formulas and that's probably the best starting point you start there and then obviously you tweak it to your own likings because you know sometimes what publication formulas show online may not necessarily be what you want the material to do for you another good thing one of my older older videos probably from uh six seven months ago i have a a formula spreadsheet like a calculator and this thing's super useful if you

31:00 haven't used it or downloaded it go back find the video download it and use it because it does all the calculations for you you just basically have to put in your weight in grams of the single material what the pre-dilution is whether if you have a pre-diluted 10 if you're using 100 neat full strength 50 20 it doesn't matter you put in the weight in grams you're dropping in what the pre-dilution level is from zero to one or from one to one percent to a hundred and it'll tell you what that parts per thousand is in the formula so that's an easy way to indicate you know how much you would need to cut a material or pre-dilute material to equal how many parts per thousand is the average use basically so that was the top 10 questions that i

31:48 most commonly get um this video went a hell of a lot longer than i thought it would be because i again i rambled on i apologize i'm always rambling um so yeah so with that being said until next time