Any (hobbyist or small business) perfume makers here?

After years of dabbling with homemade perfume creation using the very limited resources at my disposal (culinary herbs, spices and teas, and whatever solvents and carrier oils I could find in the pantry) I finally took a perfume making class last week. Now the company that ran the class is going to put together a kit of raw materials tailored to my budget and preferences so I can continue exploring perfume making in my own time, how cool is that!

My goal is to familiarise myself with the smell of different ingredients so I can better identify what I like and dislike in fragrances, and learn how to create my own unique fragrances that reflect ideas in my imagination or complex scent memories from my past. This is just for my own enjoyment - I don't have any aspirations to start a business, but it would be amazing if it happened.

Has anyone else here gotten into perfume making? If you have, what did you learn and what do you wish you'd known when you started out?

I started getting into perfume-making during the pandemic. First started with simply mixing essential oils into perfumer's alcohol, and learned very quickly that simply mixing the correct essential oils in the correct proportions was not all that perfumery was. After that, I started mixing in small amounts of aromachemicals such as Iso-E, hedione, vanillin into my compositions. I thought then that each "note" in the note pyramid was a separate "accord." Now I'm realizing that a lot of fragrances just have 2-3 accords, and the "notes" are very subjective, sometimes only a single aromachemical or natural at a very low percentage can represent a "note."

My biggest advice to someone just starting out is to look at as many formulas as you can. The same way that an aspiring author reads many novels by the masters, or a music composer learns how to compose by following along their favorite tunes with sheet music, perfumers learn by analyzing and recreating formulas. Labtorium offers very close interpretations of a lot of different fragrances, and they have some available for free. GoodScents also has many demo formulas, but those are mostly accords, not full compositions. Also utilizing communities like the Basenotes DIY forum.

Thank you so much, that's great advice

I should take a class, I bet they happen in the city sometimes 🤔

I've been experimenting on and off over the years with making my own blends with perfumer's alcohol from vetiver aromatics and aromachemicals and naturals from the perfumer's supply house here in the states. 

It's tons of fun for me and I've even created some things I enjoy wearing sometimes. My issue is that I have no methodology skills for it so I just throw together one-off scents and can't recreate anything so if I wanted to start a brand, I'd have to really focus on getting that part down. Besides the market is so saturated with new brands launching seemingly every day, there's no way I can compete with that to break even 😂 Keeping my day job for now.

This is excellent advice I shall finally take next time I feel like getting my materials out and dabbling! I think I've avoided it so far just because I have so many different vials of different things, but never what the formula calls for 😂

A very simple technique we were taught in the class I attended is to try different ratios of ingredients (e. g. 3 drops of this, 5 drops of that) in separate sample containers (adding only 1 new ingredient at a time), and when you find a ratio you like, move on using that. By the end you have a formula of exactly the number of drops of each ingredient. Then you just do some arithmetic to scale up the quantity for the amount of fragrance you want to make. We were only working with one each of top+middle+base notes plus an extra ingredient of your choice, though, so I'm sure it gets a lot more tricky once your dealing with more complex accords. Even with just those 4 ingredients, they interacted in unexpected ways and created an entirely new scent on my skin.