I wanted to make a new fragrance by blending essential oils. I realised that I’ve posted several “recipes” for fragrances, but I haven’t said much about how I select and blend the ingredients. What follows is a description of how I made a fragrance called Winter. It blends essential oils with some science, some experience, some guesswork, some inspiration, some process, and just a hint of magic.
The First Step
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”
Lao Tzu (Sixth Century Before Christian Era)
There has to be a first step, something that prompts a creative process. It could be a theme, a memory, a mood. You might want to re-create something that you’ve encountered. Smells are strongly connected with memories, so you may want to create something that invokes a memory.
There may be an ingredient that you want to use. I’ve picked ingredients at random as the starting point for fragrance blends. On other occasions I’ve picked an ingredient because it connects with a theme I’ve chosen. I might pick an ingredient for it’s therapeutic properties. Most often, I’ll start with an ingredient just because I like the way it smells.
Over the course of a couple of years I worked up blends of essential oils, and sometimes other ingredients, to reflect the changing seasons. I created eight blends and named them for the eight pagan festivals. During the second pass through the year I created an alternate blend for Litha. I did that because someone convinced me that Litha “Is all about the Roses”. That left me without a name for my first Litha blend, so I called it “Summer”. My slightly obsessive-compulsive mind was disturbed by the idea of Summer without the other three seasons, so I’ve committed myself to creating blends for Autumn, Winter and Spring.
(Those who know me are sniggering now at the idea that my mind is only slightly obsessive-compulsive.)
Inspiration
I had a theme for my new blend. It would be Winter.
I had taken the Winter celebrations as my inspiration for a fragrance I called Yule. That combined the traditions of “bringing in the green” with the spices used in festive fare. I wanted to make Winter a celebration of other aspects of the season.
The Winters where I live are cold and dark and damp. (The photo at the top of this post was taken in Alaska.) It’s very rare that we get snow that reflects the natural light, but we do get frosts. Sometimes standing water freezes over. It’s a time to wrap up and go out and walk. You can see further through the trees when the leaves have fallen. Returning home to make things in a warm kitchen, or to curl up with a good book, adds to the joy of venturing out.
The bitter Seville oranges that are used to make marmalade start to become available in November. They can normally still be bought in early February. Making marmalade is one of the delights of Winter. It calls for two sessions of activity, each about an hour long, with a couple of hours between while the prepared fruit simmers. It’s a great social activity, because the two hours in the middle can become a long lunch while the house is filled with scent of oranges.
I had my first ingredient for Winter – Orange.
Guesswork
I already had a second ingredient because I wanted to use Wintergreen.
I didn’t want to create a fragrance in which Wintergreen dominates. It’s a very assertive smell. Wintergreen is the dominant smell in the Surgical Spirit sold in the US, and in many liniments and muscle rubs. It’s medicinal, sharp and penetrating. Any concoction that majored on Wintergreen would smell like the start of the London Marathon. However, I had a suspicion that Wintergreen could be a dosing ingredient.
There are some perfume ingredients that smell vile if you encounter them in isolation. Often they include indole, which is a chemical commonly associated with fecal matter. Civet is one such ingredient. Ambergris is another. Their value in perfumery is that they work a kind of magic when very tiny amounts are added to a blend of other fragrances. These ingredients are sometimes called fixatives. The process of adding one of these ingredients is called dosing.
Process
Now that I had selected two ingredients, I needed to determine the proportions in which to use them. There are a couple of ways to work this out.
The first way is to use perfume test strips. These are strips of absorbent paper that are typically around 150mm long and slightly less than 10mm wide. The process starts with writing the name of a different ingredient on each of two test strips. It’s a good idea to add the time of day as well as the ingredient name. Then add a single drop of each ingredient to its named tester strip. If you bend the scented end of the test strip upwards slightly, you can put the strip down without the scented end touching anything.
Hold the test strips so the fragranced ends are close together, but fanned out slightly so they don’t touch. Wave the test strips around for a moment, then bring them close to your nose and smell them.
If one of the ingredients overpowers the other, make up another strip with the ingredient you want to increase. Add that to the fan of test strips, and smell them again. Adjust the number of strips of each ingredient until you are happy with the balance.
There is a time dimension to perfumes. If you leave the scented test strips for a while and then return to them, you may find the balance has changed. Then you have to decide whether you want your blend to be balanced at the first encounter, or to mature into a balance later.
Another process
I like using test strips for sampling perfumes, but I don’t use them for working out the proportions of ingredients when I’m blending essential oils. It can be difficult to put consistent quantities on test strips, and (in my opinion) they don’t always represent the way ingredients will interact. My favoured approach is to mix up small samples of ingredients in different proportions.
I started mixing samples in test-tubes. It resonated with studying in chemistry laboratories, and with the mad scientist ethos. Test-tubes have their own challenges. You can’t put them down unless you put them in a rack or put a stopper in them. Glass test-tubes are expensive. Laboratory grade plastic test tubes don’t react well with neat essential oils. If you have any doubts about whether you should ingest undiluted essential oils or apply them to your skin, take a look at what they did to a plastic test tube:
I use glass vials now. They are relatively inexpensive, and as stable as essential oil bottles.
As the starting point for working out proportions, I label 5 vials with the proportions I’ll put in them. Using Orange and Wintergreen as an example, I mix up the oils as follows:
1 drop Wintergreen, 5 drops Orange
2 drops Wintergreen, 4 drops Orange
3 drops Wintergreen, 3 drops Orange
4 drops Wintergreen, 2 drops Orange
5 drops Wintergreen, 1 drop Orange.
You can smell each of the mixtures to see which you think is balanced. It sometimes helps to add a little perfumer’s alcohol to each vial, screw down the cap and shake the vial to mix the oils and alcohol. Dipping the end of a test strip into a vial is a good way to sample the mixtures. It’s best to wave the test strip around for a moment to reduce the alcohol fumes before you smell it.
It’s quite possible that one ingredient still overpowers the other in a 1-to-5 mixture. In that case you might want to mix up some more samples with proportions of, say, 1 to 10, 1 to 15 and 1 to 20.
I was reasonably content with a mixture of 1 Wintergreen to 12 Orange at this stage.
Experience and more Guesswork
In Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume, his character Jean-Baptiste Grenouille blends 12 ingredients as the basis of his perfume. Then he doses the mixture with a thirteenth ingredient. Although the total number of ingredients is not a hard and fast rule, professional perfumers will typically blend about a dozen ingredients. I’m not a professional. My blends typically contain 5 – 8 ingredients.
I could systematically work out the proportions of 2 ingredients, then having fixed the proportions the first two I could repeat the process to determine the amount of a third ingredients to add to them. Then I could fix the proportions of the three ingredients and work out how much of a fourth to add.
Life is too short. I’m sure some apprentice perfumers go through the extended process to work out a blend. I’m equally sure that most perfumers, professional or amateur, cut some corners based on experience and guesswork, and then make some final adjustments to their blend.
THE PLAN COMES TOGETHER
I liked the combination of Orange with a small quantity of Wintergreen. But both Orange and Wintergreen are Head notes. They are volatile, fading rapidly. A more balanced blend needs some ingredients that are more persistent, that will linger when the Head notes fade and disappear.
Returning to my chosen theme of Winter, I wanted my blend to be comforting. I wanted it to bring to mind dark evenings curled up somewhere warm with hands wrapped around a mug containing a favourite hot drink. There is an essential oil of Coffee, which is a Heart note and smells much as you would expect concentrated coffee to smell. To add a Base note that would contribute sweetness to the blend, I chose Oakmoss Resin.
My Winter fragrance was coming together. After mixing up a few test samples, the blend comprised:
12 Orange
1 Wintergreen
4 Coffee
6 Oakmoss.
There’s still something missing. It’s time to take a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Arsed Guess) and try something completely random. I add a drop of Camphor …
Camphor is another of those very difficult ingredients, a little like Wintergreen. It’s rarely used in perfumery, like Wintergreen. It just might work …
With the addition of Camphor, I’m almost content with my blend. I eventually conclude that the Wintergreen is just a little too dominant. I cut the proportion by half (and because there’s only one drop in the original blend, that means doubling the quantity of all the other ingredients).
Wrapping up
Now I can write up the final recipe and rinse out my trial mixture vials into my latest bottle of Frogs Breath.
I can’t use my blend as a perfume until I have diluted the essential oils with a carrier. In this case I plan to use perfumer’s alcohol and make a perfume at Eau de Cologne strength (1-5% essential oils in perfumer’s alcohol). I can make an Eau de Cologne at just under 5% by using one measure of the blend and topping up to 50ml with alcohol. The mixture needs to be left for a few days to macerate.
The final test is to wear the blend, and try to persuade a few other volunteers to wear it too. Perfume works slightly differently (sometimes very differently) with each individual’s skin chemistry.
Perfume doesn’t have to be worn on a body. It can be sprayed onto fabric or used as a room spray too. I’ve recently discovered these refillable sprays. I keep one with my mask to freshen it up between wearings. Isn’t that a very 2020 thing to do?
