How they make perfumes?
We all enjoy wearing perfumes and we love the idea of sprucing up and enhancing our look. Which is why it can be a great idea to figure out how perfumes are made and why we tend to gravitate towards one or the other. Here’s a quick insight into how perfumes are made and why we like them so much.
Selecting the right ingredients
Most perfumes are made via extracting a scented oil from natural ingredients. What’s interesting is that the ingredients can be anything from fruits to plants, woods and even secretions acquired from animals. Other resources they add to perfumes can be things like petrochemicals, tars or even alcohol.
In some cases you will have synthetic chemicals that help emulate the scent. Picking the right ingredients takes time, because the ingredient combination is what matters the most. Some of the common natural ingredients are citron, frankincense, myrrh, rose petals, oakmoss, sandalwood, vanilla and many others.
The extraction method
Once you select the ingredients, the extraction method process starts. Usually you do this multiple ways. The oils are acquired via expression, enfleurage, steam distillation or solvent extraction, even maceration in some cases. For solvent extraction plants are added into rotating, large drums and they are covered with benzene. The plant parts dissolve and the waxy substance retains the oils. Then you add the substance in ethyl alcohol and that gets burned off, so you can get the perfume oil which is highly concentrated here.
Expression is a very old form of extraction since it focuses on pressing the plant to acquire all of its oil. Maceration is similar to enfleurage, and here you have the warmed up fats that are focused on soaking the fragrance up. The fats need to be dissolved in alcohol so you can get the essential oils.
Ingredient blending
Once the essential oils are collected, you need to blend the ingredients together. It can take a lot of time to complete this process because it all comes down to experimentation. You will have to choose how much of each ingredient you have. Major companies will choose the base notes which have a higher ingredient rate, the middle notes and also the top notes.
Aging process and quality control
Once the recipe is finished and the perfume is made, most high quality perfumes are aged for a few months. The idea here is to ensure that the scent was created properly and it all works as expected. Aging can be great because it helps scents blend together nicely.
Of course, adequate quality control is very important, since you want to avoid situations where you have unwanted products/compounds in the perfume. As you can see, creating perfumes can be very difficult and it definitely has its fair share of challenges. With that in mind, it’s a very good idea to learn how perfumes are made, because it helps you better understand the challenges that arise and the complexity of this task. Then again, creating a perfume can be difficult, since there are so many different parts that need to come together to create a great scent. That’s why creating the best perfumes can take months or even years.
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Article by: udaix