Perfume 101

Factual Questions
1

How does one know what ingredients are in a perfume?

I am not really a girly girl and what i know about perfume you could spray in the air and watch it disappear. I do like nice smells but i always seem to get conned into buying something that either loses it’s nice smell fast (cheap stuff) or doesn’t really smell the way i like. I hate that slightly chemical flowery smell that’s in most stuff.

What i do like is the slightly gingery smelling perfumes you sometimes find. I loved Cote l’Amaint for a long while but it’s harder to find now. I know there must be other perfumes with that gingery element to them cos i’ve occasionally smelt them on other women. Unfortunately sod’s law dictates that these women will be whizzing past me on the tube etc so i can’t really stop them and ask them what that nice smell is.

How would i go about finding a nice perfume with the particular smell i like? Department stores seem to mostly go for the sicklier stuff (CK etc) which i don’t really like plus i’m always intimidated by the ladies with three inches of makeup on so i don’t like to go there to buy. Where else could i find out about perfume? I suspect perfume manufacturers won’t list ingredients but how do i work out what’s in them so i know easily which ones to avoid?

2

I’m not a girly-girl either so I would say to try essential oils in flavors you like. The Body Shop and other similar stores usually have a good selection. This will get you to the root (heh) of the essential smells you like, like ginger, and you can go from there in terms of mixing them to your preference. I assume they are more natural and less chemical but I’m sure someone else will clarify that.

3

It’s been my experience that Guerlain (French perfumer) does list ingredients, or al least a desription of the top, middle & base notes of its fragrances, though perhaps only on the inside of the packaging.

Do you have any specialty shops in your area? Here in Portland, there is a shop called The Perfume House - they sell only fragrances, and carry everything under the sun, and the staff are very knowledgeable. Someplace like this, with a more intimate atmosphere than a department store, can make you feel more at ease taking your time & asking questions.

Good luck.

4

Have you tried mens’perfumes? They’re often a bit less flowery and more spicey. If you walked in and said: I need a gingery smell for my BF, the make-up ladies knwo what to look for and aren’t nearly as intimidating.

Lush also has a spicey, long-lasting perfume named " Ginger". I really like it.

You could also try to google that perfumename you liked. many perfumes are avaliable on-line. But check the spelling of the name, because Cote l’Amaint didn’t result in any hits.

5

I was at the perfume counter recently and asked them for spicy-woodsy women’s fragrances. They said there really aren’t many like that; most women’s scents are floral. But they showed me two that appealed to me: Obsession and Boucheron. When I sniffed Obsession, I could almost hear the clicks as its molecules snapped right into the receptors on my cells, and I knew it was for me. I planned to return and get Boucheron later. Neither was exactly what I had in mind, but Obsession is dark, sweet, rich, and musky with a woodsy spicy tinge. You might want to check out those two.

6

The Body Shop carries a lot of yummy scents, although they are all (or nearly all) artificial. But most of them smell nice, and as **gigi **says, you can build your own blend.

All perfumes have three ingredients: something to make it stick, something to make it spread and something to make it stink. Stick is usually ambergris or a synthetic fixative. Spread is usually alcohol. Stink is where you can have fun!

Think of a final scent as a chord of smells, like a chord of notes in music. You want scents which play well together but also let each other shine. The best scents change as you wear them, becoming smokier or woodsier or gingerier as some of the ingedients wear off. Bad perfumes wear off to reveal that chemically smell of their fixative.

Perfumers talk about “top, middle and base notes”. The top note is what you smell first, and it’s usually a fruit* or a flower. The middle note is usually from something that was once green or wood, and the base note is almost always wood, root or musk - a “deep” scent. When experimenting with fragrance, try taking one from each category - or maybe two from the middle, one top and one base.

Be aware that when working with perfume oils, porportion is key. One extra drop of a scent can change a whole blend dramatically. So go slowly, adding only a drop at a time, and stop to snif coffee beans frequently to clear your nose. Don’t inhale in a huge whiff, just gently waff a tester strip beneath your nose.

Finally, remember that any scent can smell great in the bottle and rank on you. If at all possible, whether you’re building your own scent or buying a premade one, wear it for a whole day to see how it reacts to your own body chemistry and make sure it smells as yummy at 10:00 as it did at noon.

For you, I’d first try a mix of tangerine, ylang ylang, and ginger. Maybe sandlewood as well. While ylang ylang and sandlewood are expensive, you don’t need much of either, and ginger and tangerine are dirt cheap.

*The only true fruit essential oils, by the way, are citrus and vanilla - no other fruit is heavy in obtainable e.o.'s. So that “Pure strawberry essential oil” isn’t from strawberries - it’s synthetic. Not that there’s anything evil about synthetics, but I do think misleading marketing is pretty evil.

7

I’d recommend smaller, mom and pop style perfumeries. The birdgirl & I visited one in New Orleans a few years ago and the, since they make perfumes onsite, the people who work there are actually knowledgeable. They also think perfume is intensely important & will take time to test scents & answer your questions. Being that you live in London, there should be one in the area and, if by some stroke of bad luck there isn’t, there’s always a quick ride on the chunnel. Sometimes, these stores can actually make or combine certain scents you particularly enjoy.

For the record, I love wisteria. I can almost smell it now…

8

One that is not really spicy, but more mossy-woodsy, is Verino, by Roberto Verino. It’s from Spain. Not at all easy to find in department stores, however.

A nice light oriental you might like, if you haven’t tried it already & ruled it out, is Samsara. One of my favorites. Go for the EDP (eau de parfum) over the EDT (eau de toilette), if possible - more essential oils, will last longer. But it’s definitely not at all overpowering.

9

Birdmonster, I wonder if Hervé parfums is still in the Quarter? I spent the most fragrant afternoon of my life there many years ago. They totally rock the scents. I wish I could go there right now!

My favorite EO blend, which my friends are all very fond of, is strongly woodsy and spicy. Mainly frankincense, myrrh, sandalwood, patchouli (the base), with traces of pine, cypress, and cedar, plus a rich blend of several spices with cassia as the top. This is a powerful blend and always brings me compliments. It takes plenty of trial and error to find the right proportions, as WhyNot explained.

I’ve found that spices and woods are easy to blend. How to blend florals is something I still need to learn. I find it much subtler and trickier to get it right.

10

Have a look on Basenotes which an excellent site for all your fragrance needs. Go to directory and then search for all female frangrances with ginger as a description. I see 21 fragrance varying from the very common (Romance, Ralph Lauren) to the rather obscure (bourjois). Your best bet would be read the reviews of each one and then print out the list and take it to a large department store or small perfume shop. Ask to try each one on the list that they have and figure out 2 that you really like. Have them spray one on each wrist and evaluate it throughout the day to see which one wears better on you and buy it.

11

YaWanna, those ideas sound attractive. I’ll check 'em out. Speaking of orientals, I still see the old classic Shalimar by Guerlain for sale. I guess its appeal is timeless. It’s tempting to get some.

12

Well, I was gonna say to run it through a GC-MS (and an LC-MS for anything non-volatile) and see what it spits out, but I guess that’s not really the question. Aren’t “essential oils” just liquid esters that happen to smell like something we like?

13

Actual essential oils are plant extracts - alcohols and volatile “oils” (but they aren’t actual fatty oils) from roots, rhizomes, flowers, leaves and some fruits. They are extracted through three methods: pressing, steam distillation and a newer technique called CO2 extraction. They are called “essential” because they were once believed to be the “essence” of the plant.

Perfume oils are synthetic substances which smell nice.

Any perfume (eau de parfum or eau de toilette) may have essential oils, perfume oils or both.

14

So I was on the right track. I think it’s a case of something like the perfume industry calling something a name along the lines of “oil of wintergreen” or “birch oil” (this is just an example, since that’s an ester I know off the top of my head) while I’d probably call it methyl salicylate if talking about it or looking it up in Aldrich or even using the IUPAC name if needed (if different from the trivial.) Kinda like the old alchemical names for various compounds–oil of vitriol instead of sulfuric acid, for instance. Valid, but actually using it would probably get you weird looks, though I have known people who keep other people out of their chemicals by writing an uncommon name on the bottle, either out-of-date or alchemical if available. Of course, natural products can get really tricky on the naming, so I’d probably use the trivial as well if significantly easier.

Does CO2 extraction use supercritical CO2?

15

Store your fragrances in the box in a drawer or closet. Protect them from sunlight.

Never try on more than one fragrance at a time.

Invest in the best strength and use sparingly.

16

You can also search Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab by favorite note. They have a lot of fun high quality scents, and while they aren’t UK based, there’s a heavy trade on eBay from UK sellers. I like them, and I used to hate smelly stuff.

17

Another source for more earthy fragrances is Whole Foods or any local earthy-crunchy food store. Lots of them sell essential oils in the toiletry aisle. There are the regular ones like lavender, of course, but they probably also have some mixtures intended solely for perfume use. They smell nice, and are usually less than 10 bucks per vial.

And if you haven’t read it yet, try Perfume by Patrick Suskind. It’s a novel about a man in search of the perfect scent.

18

IANAChemist. My lay undersanding (Verified by this page) is that the CO2 is pressurized to form a liquid solvent.

I forgot the fourth category of e.o.'s: solvent extraction. For some plants which don’t extract a lot of oils another way, they’ll use solvents to extract them, and then remove the solvents. Some cheap oils use solvent extraction, and don’t bother getting all the solvent out. Lots of the cheap line at Whole Foods smell all solventy to me.

19

That’s what “absolute” means – solvent-extracted.

20

Wow! So many informative posts.

Thankyou everyone. I’ve had a brief look at some of those sites and they look really good. I’m sure there’s bound to be a perfumers somewhere in London so once i’ve done some reading up i’ll go and play with the nice stinky stuff :slight_smile: