HOW TO MAKE YOUR PERFUMES LAST LONGER

0:00 one of the most common questions that I get as someone teaching how to make perfume AKA perfumery here on my YouTube channel goes something along the lines of how do I make my perfumes last longer and often that question takes the form of hey I've gone and started perfumery I've gone and made a blend and I really like the smell of it now what do I need to add in order to make it project and last a long time now a lot of these people have gone one step further and ask I've heard I can use something like isui super or ambroxan or DPG um to add to my perfume in order to make it project and last a long time how much do I need to add or that they've

0:47 gone and added that stuff and uh now their perfume smells flat or something along the lines of that so uh in this video I'm going to explain to you simply put what you need to know what you need to understand in order to make your own perfume compositions last a long time to make them project in other words to make them perform as you would like to make them perform I.E usually that is similar to designer perfumes the ones you find in shops so let's get into it then now I want to start by saying that the way this question has been phrase and the way that most people ask it kind of starts with this presupposition and this is really the root cause of most

1:33 people's problems and that's because most people presuppose that you can get the smell that you want you can get it to smell like how you like it and then it's just as simple as adding some kind of magic beans or some kind of magic substance you add that and then suddenly your perfume will work just like the ones in the shop suddenly it will perform and it will all be fixed now I hate to break it to you that is not in reality how it works in fact if that was how it worked you probably wouldn't really need perfumes cuz anyone could just mix a couple of things that smell nice together add this magic stuff and there you go you have the next big designer perfume you know you wouldn't need all of that specialist knowledge that actual professional perfumers spent years and

2:19 years and years studying and learning so why then do people run into trouble now the reason is because usually their composition does one of two things it usually either projects but doesn't last a long time or it lasts a long time but doesn't project and they want to add some kind of missing thing to make it do both now the innate problem with this is that projection AKA your raw materials uh coming out and especially in technical perfume what would call impact which is uh when you spray perfume and initially it has that big waft of smell which goes across the room that is pretty much uh the opposite uh

3:04 in chemical terms in a sense to longevity and Longevity is when something sticks around a long time and often not always but often that is associated with more subtle smells so usually people have one and they want to now add the other to their perfume but the reason that these things uh inherently are quite opposite and I say quite because there are some things that do a little bit of both and we'll talk about those later but the reason that those are inherently opposite all comes down to the way molecules work and you can think of it as the molecule whatever it is is on your skin or your clothes or wherever you've sprayed that perfume it could be your scent strip or your test strip if you're using those to evaluate something if you think about it the more

3:50 of your molecules that evaporate more quickly that means usually the smell is going to it's going to evaporate more right it's going to diffuse further you're going to smell it more quickly and from further away but the side effect of that is because those molecules have quickly evaporated off of your surface there's now not many molecules left to stick around conversely if you have something like a musk which lasts a long time well those molecules will stick to your surface and they won't evaporate that often that's why they last a long time because they only evaporate you know the molecules relatively speaking every now and again again so that's why they are subtle because at any given one time you've only got a few of them evaporating so uh

4:36 in general you're not smelling as many of them at once so there's less smell but they last a long time because now these molecules are still there cuz not so many of them have evaporated so they're sticking around longer so that is kind of the basic premise of kind of volatility um in perfumery assuming that we smelled all things to equal strengths which we don't um and that is you know something we'll talk about in a sec but assuming we did um then it's basically you have to pick either or you either pick High projection I high volatility or you pick High longevity or a balance of the two now you'll notice I did say that some raw materials do a little bit of both and that is true and

5:21 that's because certain raw materials uh they last a long time they don't necessarily evaporate um as quickly but some of them can have quite low uh what we call odor detection thresholds even even a small amount is picked up quite sensitively by the nose which means you don't need a lot of them to actually give a strong effect so usually um things like ISU super and broxan but there are more of these uh raw materials for example things like vanillin the specific raw materials that fit into this category are very important to perfumers because these are the ones um often that really allow you to kind of get the best of both with um that initial impact projection and longevity

6:09 in your perfumes but and there is a but the key thing to know is it's not just as simple as that simply dumping some of these into your perfume will magically fix all of your problems and there's two main reasons for that the first of these reasons is the fixative effect and this is simply to say that when you add something that lasts a long time what it usually does is pull pulls down the top notes a little bit with it so it it flattens that volatility curve if you have a lot of something that's um you can think of them as uh sticky uh like gunky substances a bit like quicksand so when you have molecules with high longevity for example things like musks often what they can do is kind of trap to some small degree uh some of the actual top notes the volatile molecules and make them last longer but remember

6:55 we said before about how volatility works if you make something last longer by actually causing the molecules to evaporate less quickly that means that necessarily there's not going to be as many in the air at one time um which means that you're not going to smell it quite as strongly but essentially what that means is if you add something that's going to fixate something else IE some bass notes and sometimes some of these raw materials or even things that don't have a smell DPG is one that's popularly used for this kind of thing well then if you do that by necessity it's going to flatten out I.E reduce the initial projection the impact of your perfume so a lot of people say hey I've

7:41 gone and added some of these material some of these longlasting synthetics why does my perfume smell flat now well that's the reason because you've added this fixative effect so you know basically by improving one thing you've disimproved uh something else okay now the second reason that usually just adding things like this doesn't work out is because when you add these things these certain materials and especially uh these ones that are popular like I super and and broxan these are raw materials which when you learn how they smell and perform on their own you'll notice yes they do actually last a long time and they do uh project throughout that duration as well but you will also notice they have their own smell now if they didn't have their own smell then they wouldn't be very useful at all right because um it's the

8:28 fact that they their unique smell which usually smells you know quite Pleasant in a lot of these that's why they're so popular has also those performance properties which is really why they used so much um but now you've got to remember that when you go and add these to your composition it's not like a magic uh substance which just makes everything else in your composition project and last longer no it's just adding this smell into your composition which on its own projects and lasts longer so you're not actually making everything else in your composition specifically uh last longer and project you're just adding in another smell as part of your composition which does that right so people complain well I've added these things and now it doesn't smell like how I originally wanted it to smell anymore

9:13 well of course it doesn't because you've added a new smell to it so there's no magic thing right that's going to make what you've already made uh project and last longer you just add in other bits which do that so then what is the solution to all of this well honestly it's really quite simple the solution as boring as it sounds is to compose your perfumes in the first place with not only the smell in mind but also the performance I you cannot have the performance of performant raw materials without also introducing their smells so therefore when you are composing your perfume you actually need to compose both for performance and smell concurrently or both both of those

9:59 things at the same time and that's exactly why perfumery is so difficult that is why perfumers spend so long uh training learning raw materials studying formulas and things like that um because it takes a long time to be able to compose perfumes that both smell great and perform at the same time because it's essentially a balancing act between raw materials which perform but also give you the kind of creative smell you want long story short you have to compose both for performance and smell at the same time you cannot just make a smell you like and add something nice later to make it last and all of this and like I said this is hard that is why perfumers spend so long studying um because it's a true skill and it takes time to practice so then maybe you're

10:45 feeling a bit lost your next question might be okay Sam well then in that case how do I learn to compose these perfumes which both smell nice and perform at the same time well here's how you do it like I've said many times on my channel the first step is really learning your raw materials now I've done videos about that before so I'll link those in the description um I won't cover them again right now but essentially you need to have a very thorough understanding of your raw materials that means doing a lot of smelling and evaluating them I like to do this in dilution and really learning their properties and this actually allows you to unpick their performance of each thing you really need to know which your materials are top mid and Basse notes and actually how much each of them project it kind of

11:30 allows you to build a map in your head of which raw materials are going to give you which performance properties to your compositions now while you're doing this you really want to keep a special eye out for the raw materials which both last long time and project cuz these ones are very useful uh in making perfume compositions which both last a long time and project and these are what are often employed in designer perfume so it's good to take a note of these particular raw materials but it doesn't mean you just always go and shove them in it just means you know them in your head so that when you're working on a certain kind of concept or type of composition you already kind of you have ideas of what certain things you might be able to look at adding especially uh in order to ensure that you've got the right performance characteristics in

12:16 your blend so then once you've gotone and done that it's simply a matter of learning to compose perfume structures which perform well essentially learning how to use all of these raw materials to compose in a way that both smells nice and performs now how do you go and do all this well the good thing is that it's probably the best time ever to learn perfumery online there's more information out there than there ever has been before so you know go online you've got loads of places like bass note forums obviously all of the free videos on my channel and you've got other people these days making content about perfumery as well so those are good starting points but then the actual Lego work is just something that you have to do yourself you know you have to

13:02 go and buy these raw materials you have to go and actually learn them and actually do that and then start practicing to make Blends and things that can be useful are both learning how to make your own Blends from scratch mixing things together but also studying existing uh formulas if you want all of this information in a neatly packaged way which is efficient to learn and you want to be able to kind of go through all the right things um and get it done you know in the right order quickly in my opinion that is then another thing you can consider checking out is my online course where I teach pretty much everything I know about perfumery in that I teach how to learn your raw materials properly and in detail I explain fixatives what they are and how they work I actually give a lot of these

13:49 certain raw materials that are very useful in perfume compositions and I also talk about those in the course so that you should have an idea of how to use them and then we study uh perfume structures using actual formulas you can follow along with the makeup yourself to get an idea of how these materials are used in compositions and finally I also teach my own guide uh for perfume creation techniques I composition techniques so when you run into these roadblocks the kind of thought processes you want to use in order to kind of steer your formulas in the direction you want to go in so that is another option as well if you're interested in that then I'll put a link to that in the description of this video down below so that's it what you need to know in order to make your perfumes last longer I'll see you soon with another video all

14:35 about perfumery and we'll learn about some more stuff [Music]