High quality ingredients
I buy essential oils, extracted from plants by distillation or occasionally by cold pressing. I don’t make my own materials. I would love to buy a copper still one day and grow enough lavender to produce my own essential oil. It takes 100-150 kilos of lavender flowers to produce 100ml. Herbs too, just possibly. Roses – not a chance! (My husband lives in dread of the still, convinced that its gas burner will set fire to the house like the saucepan he left on all night.)
I also buy perfume ingredients manufactured by specialist companies such as Givaudan and Firmenich. I would not want to be without them. If you saw the Ashmolean exhibition Colour Revolution, you will remember the story it told: how the invention of manmade pigments, beginning with mauveine derived from coal tar in 1856, transformed not only textile dyes but also paints, inks and printed materials.
Making perfume purely from plants is like restricting an artist’s palette to indigo, sage, marigold and madder. Lovely, but limiting. Natural aroma ingredients such as patchouli, bergamot and rosemary are wonderful materials in their own right. They can be mixed together, but their chemical composition varies from one bottle to another, making consistency a challenge. The results can be very exciting, or equally disappointing.
The scent organ
When it comes to composition, the analogies tend to be more musical than visual.
The palette becomes a traditional ‘scent organ’, consisting of dozens of raw materials in different dilutions, kept in 10 ml bottles and arranged in rows like the stop knobs of a church organ, so that it’s easy to locate and grab a particular ingredient.
I use these dilutions to invent the ‘accords’ which will become the building blocks of my complete perfumes - each one a combination of ingredients blended to create a particular impression, just like musical notes forming a chord.
Some accords are reconstructions of scents that can’t be extracted from their sources. Hawthorn, honeysuckle, red apple, purple plum and lily of the valley are a few I’ve made recently. Others are more abstract – morning mist, mossy bank, oak panelling.
From idea to finished perfume
To make a perfume, I start with a concept (perhaps a place or a memory) and try to achieve the desired effect by combining both accords and individual notes. I measure out tiny quantities, mix them together and evaluate the results. It’s trial and error. Many, many trials using different elements in different ratios, then leaving the samples to macerate for days before comparing them. Sometimes a small adjustment makes all the difference. Sometimes it means starting again.
One technicality is balancing base notes (which last the longest) with top notes (the most volatile, which dissipate quickly) and heart notes (in between). I build my perfumes from the base up, but often agonise longest over the top notes, the finishing touches.
I specialise in room fragrances, so three other technicalities particularly relevant to me are diffusivity (how far a fragrance travels), longevity (how long it lasts), and linearity (how consistently it retains its essential character over time).
A labour of love
Do I enjoy making perfume? It’s utterly absorbing. It’s infinitely time consuming. It’s expensive and unprofitable. I love it with a passion.
Bottling Perfume
Boxing and Labelling
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