Our All Natural Perfume Workshop! (2/5/17) February 10, 2017 14:25 5 Comments

Making perfume with essential oils is a fun and easy process that can be done at home if you have the right materials and knowledge! We had a workshop here at the store, Earth Speaks, on Sunday, February 5th and it was a wonderful time. Everyone made two unique essential oil blends and combined them with either alcohol (for perfume), or rose water (for toner). All of the scents were so original and complex, and it will be exciting to see how they change over time. Below, I've posted photos from the workshop and will describe every step of our perfume-making process. 

 1. Know Your Notes: "Top" notes, "middle" notes and "base" notes are three types of scents that all need to be included in your perfume blends. The oils should be added in the order of base, then middle, then top. The top note scents are what you smell initially, but they fade rather quickly. The middle notes tie it all together and are the basis of the fragrance, and the base notes linger and deepen over time. We talked about this topic when we first began the workshop. 

* Our materials included a wide variety of essential oils, 15 mL dark tinted glass bottles with spray tops, 5 mL "testing tubes," 10 mL dark tinted glass bottles with roller tops, droppers, beakers for pouring, jojoba oil, grain alcohol, rose water, lavender water, labels, pens, paper and aromatherapy books. * 

2. Making Your Unique Blend: After we learned about the different components of a fragrance, we all experimented in tiny 5 mL tubes with various essential oil blends. We continued to add oils, using our noses to see what it was lacking, and kept track of how many drops of each oil we used.

 3. Recording Your Recipe: We all took the time to write down every oil that we used in our blends, and how many drops of each oil. Once we reached our ideal scent, we simply repeated the recipe over and over until we filled up our 5 mL testing tubes. 

4. Dilution: Finally, we diluted our essential oil blends using either grain alcohol (for perfume spray), jojoba oil (for a roll-on) or rose water (for a toner). Since the bottles were about 15 mL, we used 5 mL of essential oil and 10 mL of alcohol (or rose water/ lavender water) for a 30% concentration. For the toners, we made it a tiny bit less concentrated-- about 25%-- since you may be spraying it onto your face.

5. Make Your Label: All of the final products turned out so well! After bottling our fragrances, we transcribed the ingredients onto blank labels and named our blends. One woman chose to give her fragrances visual symbols instead of names, which is also very cool! 

We will send out an email every time we have a workshop, at least a week or two in advance. Simply send an email to earthspeaksbrooklyn@gmail.com to RSVP. Also, if you would like to set up a party or get together with friends in the form of a workshop with us, we would love to have you! Send us an email with the subject line "Private Workshop Inquiry," and we will get back to you with the prices and availability.

Thanks for reading! :-)