Perfume what is it made of

Today, most perfume is used to scent bar soaps. Some products are even perfumed with industrial odorants to mask unpleasant smells or to appear "unscented. While fragrant liquids used for the body are often considered perfume, true perfumes are defined as extracts or essences and contain a percentage of oil distilled in alcohol. Water is also used. The United States is the world's largest perfume market with annual sales totalling several billions of dollars.

Ancient Egyptians burned incense called kyphi —made of henna, myrrh, cinnamon, and juniper—as religious offerings.

They soaked aromatic wood, gum, and resins in water and oil and used the liquid as a fragrant body lotion. The early Egyptians also perfumed their dead and often assigned specific fragrances to deities.

Their word for perfume has been translated as "fragrance of the gods. Eventually Egyptian perfumery influenced the Greeks and the Romans. For hundreds of years after the fall of Rome, perfume was primarily an Oriental art. Europeans discovered the healing properties of fragrance during the 17th century.

Doctors treating plague victims covered their mouths and noses with leather pouches holding pungent cloves, cinnamon, and spices which they thought would protect them from disease. Perfume then came into widespread use among the monarchy. Royal guests bathed in goat's milk and rose petals.

Visitors were often doused with perfume, which also was sprayed on clothing, furniture, walls, and tableware. It was at this time that Grasse, a region of southern France where many flowering plant varieties grow, became a leading producer of perfumes. Meanwhile, in England, aromatics were contained in lockets and the hollow heads of canes to be sniffed by the owner.

It was not until the late s, when synthetic chemicals were used, that perfumes could be mass marketed. The first synthetic perfume was nitrobenzene, made from nitric acid and benzene. This synthetic mixture gave off an almond smell and was often used to scent soaps. In , Englishman William Perkin synthesized coumarin from the South American tonka bean to create a fragrance that smelled like freshly sown hay.

Ferdinand Tiemann of the University of Berlin created synthetic violet and vanilla. In the United States, Francis Despard Dodge created citronellol—an alcohol with rose-like odor—by experimenting with citronella, which is derived from citronella oil and has a lemon-like odor.

In different variations, this synthetic compound gives off the scents of sweet pea, lily of the valley, narcissus, and hyacinth. Just as the art of perfumery progressed through the centuries, so did the art of the perfume bottle.

Perfume bottles were often as elaborate and exotic as the oils they contained. The earliest specimens date back to about B. In ancient Egypt, newly invented glass bottles were made largely to hold perfumes.

The crafting of perfume bottles spread into Europe and reached its peak in Venice in the 18th century, when glass containers assumed the shape of small animals or had pastoral scenes painted on them. Today perfume bottles are designed by the manufacturer to reflect the character of the fragrance inside, whether light and flowery or dark and musky. Natural ingredients—flowers, grasses, spices, fruit, wood, roots, resins, balsams, leaves, gums, and animal secretions—as well as resources like alcohol, petrochemicals, coal, and coal tars are used in the manufacture of perfumes.

Some plants, such as lily of the valley, do not produce oils naturally. In fact, only about 2, of the , known flowering plant species contain these essential oils. Therefore, synthetic chemicals must be used to re-create the smells of non-oily substances. Why spend a fortune on perfume or cologne when you can make your own for cheap. Instead of wearing a fragrance that everyone else wears you can make your own unique blend.

Your own aromatic creations also makes a thoughtful gift. Sterilize the bottles and jars in the dish washer, especially if you are reusing bottles.

They need to be clean and sterile. Once you are happy with the fragrance that you've created it is time to let it age. Place it in a cool dark location for a minimum of 48 hours, up to a month. Aging your fragrance allows the scents to mingle, and also become stronger. Once you have aged your fragrance for the desired length of time, smell it again, the mingling may have changed the overall scent, so feel free to add a few more drops of scent to tweak it don't forget you will need to age it again, if more scent was added.

Pour the perfume into your bottle, use a funnel if you need to. If you are using clear bottles, you will need to cover them with aluminum foil or wrapping paper your fragrance needs to be protected from the light or it will go off. Add a label, decorate it, give it a fancy name and be happy that you saved a lot of money! Question 4 months ago on Step 7. Hello everyone, I'm trying to make sweet smelling scents for my bed and breakfast guest. Things like cotton candy candy apple banana if you get where I'm going I have the basics from here but do I just add Carmel for Carmel smell?

Question 5 months ago on Introduction. Can anyone help me with the ratio for how much fragrance oil and perfumers alcohol needed for 2 oz Glass bottle 60ml? Question 9 months ago on Introduction. I live in my home country Nigeria, can you give me a link where to buy the basic tools and the raw materials for production. Question 11 months ago on Step 7. Hi, what percentage would Glycerine make up of a fragrance spray?

How much should glyercine make up if we start to add it and which should be reduced in it's place, alcohol or perfume oil? Thanks, Adam. Answer 10 months ago. Most persons here I am struggling. I use ethanol and fragernace oils only. The scent carries well, and it blends wells. I'm trying to get a better way. Reply 1 year ago. Store bought perfumes have a lot of additives that extend the scent. You can try this. I don't go by drops. I use very specific measurements in mL.

This is much easier and way more accurate. You seem to be a wealth of information. Help me. I use ethanol and fragernace oil. But the real stuff is expensive. Because of the enormous waste — er, amount — of flowers it takes to produce the oil necessary to use in fragrances, the price of jasmine oil is hi-i-i-iiiiiiiiiigh.

What's more, jasmine flowers are incredibly fragile and must be placed in special baskets to protect the petals from bruising. And processing has to be immediate. Like jasmine, rose oil is found in most fragrances. But rose production is even more time intensive and therefore more expensive than jasmine. While it takes 2, pounds of jasmine oil to produce a pound of oil, it takes 10, pounds of rose petals to distill one pound of the highly coveted rose oil.

The Rose Valley in Bulgaria produces 70 percent of the world's rose oil. The picking season in this valley dates back more than years and is very short. Workers usually women only have a few weeks from May to June to pick the flowers and they have to get their jobs done in the dark before sunrise. Each flower has to be cut individually hello thorns! Because of the high price of rose oil, cheating is rampant. Some rose producers cheat the system by diluting the oil with geranium or palmarosa essential oils, which contain the same chemical as rose oil.

Now that you've been told about the vast quantities of rose and jasmine petals it takes to make oil, wait until you learn about the iris bulb, which creates an extremely expensive oil called orris.

James Craven, a perfume archivist at Les Senteurs in London , named Orris one of the top three most expensive perfume ingredients in the world. Because it's a huge headache to make the stuff. One needs one ton of iris plant bulbs that have been aged 2 to 5 years to produce 2 kilos 4. Oud or "oudh" comes from the wood of a wild tropical tree called the agar.

No biggie, right? Well, the wood has to become infected with a type of mold called "Phialophora parasitica," which causes the wood to produce oud, a dark, extremely fragrant resin. Apparently, only 2 percent of agar trees produce oud, making it incredibly precious.

And therefore, expensive. Due to its rarity, high demand, and the difficulty of harvesting it, oud oil is one of the most expensive oils in the world. At one point, its value was estimated to be 1. Oud has been popular in the Middle East for centuries and is enjoying a boom here in the West with more and more brands creating oud fragrances.

But they all come at a price. While natural musk is one of the most expensive animal products in the world, the vast majority of musk produced and sold in the world these days is synthetic.