Scents or Sense?

“Wherever I go, there you are; my luck, my fate, my fortune. Chanel No. 5 ... inevitable.”

Put “mis” in front of fortune and replace “Chanel No. 5”with “cancer”, and you have the harsh reality of fragrance today. I’m by no means an expert (choosing to spend my time reading Vogue rather than medical reports), but cancer is everywhere, and perfumes with synthetic ingredients (which include most commercial perfumes these days) are notoriously dangerous, leading to many serious illnesses and terminal diseases. One of the problems is that manufacturers are not required to list the specific “ingredients” (read, chemicals) that make up the aroma or smell, needing only to cite “fragrance”. There could be rat poison in there for all we know! (For a more “researched” article about this issue, click here).

This all led me to try DIY perfume. I’ve always been a bit of a DIY-er; one Christmas I asked for a set of power-tools ... strange for a 19 year old fashion fanatic, right? Well, I’m also a perfectionist so I prefer to do things myself to ensure they are ... well ... perfect! DIY perfume was sadly not one of these things. Perhaps there is something to be said for the price and composition of cancer-inducing candy-coloured bottles with expensive and sometimes just plain weird advertising campaigns (yes, Brad, I’m talking about you).

I started by Googling some DIY perfume recipes. Most recommended using the basic composition of “real” perfume, i.e. unscented base oil, scented essential oils for the top, mid and base notes of the fragrance, alcohol (such as vodka) to help the product evaporate, and water to dilute the oil. I spent hours in my local organic shop sniffing and smelling all the essential oils. I couldn’t tell if I was in the store or a hobbit house, so earthy and organic were some of the aromas. Eventually I came back to my fragrance stalwarts – the citrus family. I’ve always been a citrus kind of girl, and I was keen to try something with lemon, but for creativity and originality’s sake, I thought I had better include some base and mid notes (lemon and citruses typically being top notes). Sandalwood was quite nice, but also quite dear (5x the price of the other oils), so I opted for its close cousin, Cedarwood. My first batch of perfume smelled like an alcoholic hamster-raising hippie (thanks to the vodka, and the woody “freshness” of the cedarwood).

The oil/alcohol/water balance was difficult to get right, and I can’t say I ever mastered it. Too much oil and you’re left with a not-so-pleasant residue on skin or clothes; too much alcohol and people start to wonder ... too much water and the three of them won’t mix – much like Brangelina and Jennifer Aniston circa 2005. I also had to use up far too much of each tiny bottle of essential oil to get a fragrance beyond what only dogs could smell. The whole process was neither easy nor economical.

On the second batch, I left out the Cedarwood, opting only for Lemon and Mandarin, and it smelled less like hippie, more like a lemon martini (I added more vodka, thinking that it might dilute the base oil and create less residue, but sadly only added to the party girl vibe) ... not really a professional smell for anyone other than a bartender/shot girl – not the sophisticated-fashionista-meets-healthy-happy-girl-about-town fragrance I was going for. As well, because the citrus oils are so light in their fragrance, the lemony goodness soon wore off, not having the lasting power of my favourite cancer causing friends (perfumes, that is ... not actual friends). 

I mixed up the oils for the third batch (lemon with lavender), with less base oil and less vodka, and ended up with a generic grandma scent – lavender water and lemon candies. Throw in some mothballs, a bit of crocheted patchwork and I might have pulled it off ... if I was closer to 92 than to 29. Similar to the first two, the fragrance had no lasting power. I added that one to the pile of “linen sprays”.

The only fragrance that really worked was just plain lemon essential oil, diluted with a small amount of water – I suppose I’m a bit of a purist and don’t like to overcomplicate the scents. Nature usually gives us what we need and by mixing and mashing we destroy the simple beauty that has existed before us and will continue to exist long after we are gone.

DIY perfume has, for now, been put on the back burner, and I’ve opted to forgo perfume altogether in favour of trying to avoid cancer and other such unpleasant illnesses. I’ve decided too, that on days when I get out of my pj's and into the shower, I can smell pretty sweet just being me.

GG Rating -  Good for Hardcore Hippies, if anyone at all.