Teach Soap

Hey awesome soapers! I hope everyone is doing well today.

I bought a bottle of White Shoulders perfume while shopping for other things (you know how that goes.) It was quite a nostalgic purchase. My mother used to buy it for me when I was a girl, and her mother bought it for her. Sweet!

So... of course my soap-student brain said, "I wonder if I can make that?"

How does one go about mixing a formula to recreate a scent?

Two different perfume websites said different things but they're similar enough:

Top notes: classic floral, based on aldehydes, white flowers (gardenia, jasmine, tuberose, lily of the valley, lilac, orris), and another review added Neroli.

Middle notes: (one site added rose and LOTV here)

Base notes: Sandalwood, oak moss, civet, benzoin, (another added amber and took away the sandalwood)



Would I just combine these various scents in a series of well-documented test batches? Once I got a good scent would I then add it to the soap, keeping in mind of course CP max amounts, seizing/ricing/etc rules, and other such data? That's what I'm assuming but I've not seen any tutorials yet so I could be wrong.

Has anyone ever tried to recreate a perfume from scratch before? How did it work out?

I do a lot of custom blends. I would start with q-tips first to see how close you can get. Once you find something you like, extrapolate it into parts. Then make a tiny blend, let it age a bit and see if that's what you want. Be aware that a gardenia fragrance can accelerate trace.

_________________
Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

It is almost impossible to duplicate the exact scent 'cause they use so many chemicals. Those big fragrance houses will often use forty different scent ingredients for one cologne or perfume. But you can mix something together that you will like MORE than the original if you just play around with those scents you listed that your research has revelaed to be the major ingredients. ALso, if you can figure out what TYPE of perfume it is that makes it a lot easier to reverse-engineer. Most colognes and perfumes, i think almost all of them, are part part of one or the other recognized categories of perfume, such as chypre, fuehrer, spicy, fruity, citrus, or oriental. Fuehrer is a category of man scents from lavender, oakmoss, & tonka bean.

http://beauty.about.com/od/fragranc1/a/ ... erfume.htm

Introduction to Blending Essential Oils

http://www.aromaweb.com/articles/blend01.asp