Make your own perfume
Blend the compound, dilute it into alcohol, then leave it alone for a month. Everything else is detail — and this page has the detail.
Blend your aromatic materials into a compound first, then dilute that compound into perfumers alcohol. A standard 30 ml bottle at eau de parfum strength takes about 4.5 g of compound and the rest alcohol. Then it has to sit for around four weeks before it smells like anything you would wear — that wait is not optional and it is the step almost everyone skips.
Perfume is one of the few crafts where the making takes twenty minutes and the waiting takes a month. There is no cooking, no curing, no reaction to get wrong — you are dissolving aromatic materials in alcohol, and the hard parts are choosing what goes in and having the patience to leave it alone afterwards.
The structure is always the same. You build a compound — the aromatic part, blended on its own and thought about as 100% in its own right — and then you dilute that compound into alcohol to whatever strength you want. Keeping those two steps separate is the single most useful habit in this craft: it means the formula you liked survives being made stronger or weaker, and it means a recipe can be written down in a way that someone else can repeat.
The other thing worth knowing before you start is that professional formulae are written by weight, and almost every home recipe you will find is written in drops or millilitres. Those are not the same thing. Aromatic materials are mostly denser than the alcohol they sit in, so a blend measured with a pipette comes out weaker than the number on the recipe suggests — about 12% weaker at eau de parfum strength. It is the commonest reason a homemade perfume smells thinner than expected, and the dilution tool shows both figures side by side.
What a 30 ml bottle takes
Every row is a 30 ml bottle at a different strength, computed on a fragrance oil of unspecified density. The last column is what the same bottle reads at if you measure with a pipette instead of a scale — the two conventions genuinely disagree, and nobody tells you which one a recipe meant.
How much to make
Where every formula should start. Small enough that a failure costs nothing, big enough to macerate properly and judge honestly. Make three of these before you make one bottle.
The standard finished size, and the point at which it is worth buying a decent atomiser. Only make this once a trial has told you the formula is right.
Three bottles and a bit, or one very confident one. At this size the materials cost real money, so it is not the place to find out that the base note is too heavy.
What actually decides the result
The only thing separating an eau de toilette from an eau de parfum is how much compound is in the bottle — 15–20% for eau de parfum against 5–15% for eau de toilette. There is no legal definition of either term anywhere, so houses disagree with each other constantly, and a 14% eau de toilette and a 15% eau de parfum are the same perfume with different labels.
A blend is normally built in three layers by how fast each material leaves your skin. The classic starting split is 30/50/20 — 30% top, 50% heart, 20% base, as shares of the compound rather than of the bottle. 5–30 minutes for the top, 1–4 hours for the heart, 4–24 hours for the base. A blend with nothing in the base smells wonderful for an hour and then vanishes, which is what "it doesn't last" almost always means.
Formulae are written by weight because a scale repeats and a dropper does not. Measure the same recipe by volume and it comes out about 12% weaker, because the aromatic materials are denser than the alcohol. If you are going to work in drops, at least know that 20 drops is roughly a millilitre and that a thin citrus oil gives more drops per millilitre than a resin does.
Perfumers alcohol (SDA 40B) is the answer, and the reason is boring: it is about 95% ethanol, so it dissolves everything and flashes off cleanly. Vodka (40% ABV) is 60% water, which is why a vodka perfume goes cloudy and separates. Where to buy it is a whole problem of its own.
A perfume is not finished when it is mixed. It needs about 28 days for the materials to settle into each other, and in the first 48 hours it will smell sharp, thin and alcoholic. More first batches are thrown away at that stage than at any other. Maceration is the whole of the difference between a blend and a perfume.
Getting a first batch right
Get the aromatic part right on its own, as percentages adding to 100. Then dilute. Doing it the other way — adding materials one at a time into a bottle of alcohol — means you cannot restate the formula at a different strength, and you cannot tell anyone else how to make it.
It is the cheapest thing that will improve your perfume, and it costs less than one decent absolute. A 0.001 g scale turns a hobby of hopeful guessing into something you can repeat, and repeating a blend you liked is most of what this craft is.
Jasmine absolute neat is animalic and almost unpleasant; at a fraction of a percent it is transformed. Working from a 10% dilution in alcohol or DPG lets you dose small amounts accurately, and it stops one drop of something powerful eating an entire trial.
A formula recorded as percentages of the compound scales to any bottle size forever. The same formula recorded as "1.4 g of this" is locked to the one batch you happened to make that afternoon.
Three variations of the same idea, macerated side by side for 28 days, teach you more than one bottle ever will — and you find out which direction to push before you have committed the materials.
Work out your own bottle
Enter the bottle size and the strength you want, and the tool gives you the compound and the alcohol in both grams and millilitres — with the note split checked as you build it.
Open the dilution tool →Print the note pyramid
Top, middle and base splits with the percentages that actually work. One page, free.
Estimates, not advice. Every figure on this page is computed from published reference values and standard measures, so your own inputs, equipment and conditions will move it. Nothing here is professional advice — talk to a qualified professional before acting on it.