Part 2 of 2: A fortnight ago I started the process of trying to make homemade perfume using flowers, herbs and some leaves from the garden. This week, we're going to look at the results of that experiment and the process involved in trying to create two fully finished and bottled up fragrances.
First up just a little refresher on what I picked from the garden to add to the first perfume, which was made using jojoba carrier oil designed for perfumery. Into the oil I added sweet pea, sweet alysum, chamomile and marigolds flowers along with lemon balm herb, lavender leaves. I sniffed this concoction after a week and the scent was quite light so I added in some marjoram leaves and flowers, rose petals and geranium leaves donated by a relative, and had a bit of lavender essential oil on hand to add in the final stage for an extra kick.
The second fragrance had a base of perfumer’s alcohol with chamomile flowers, mint, rosemary, torn up tomato leaves and blackcurrant leaves, to which I added some myrrh absolute at the bottling up stage.
First up just a little refresher on what I picked from the garden to add to the first perfume, which was made using jojoba carrier oil designed for perfumery. Into the oil I added sweet pea, sweet alysum, chamomile and marigolds flowers along with lemon balm herb, lavender leaves. I sniffed this concoction after a week and the scent was quite light so I added in some marjoram leaves and flowers, rose petals and geranium leaves donated by a relative, and had a bit of lavender essential oil on hand to add in the final stage for an extra kick.
The second fragrance had a base of perfumer’s alcohol with chamomile flowers, mint, rosemary, torn up tomato leaves and blackcurrant leaves, to which I added some myrrh absolute at the bottling up stage.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Good evening, welcome back. It's been two weeks now since we put all the flowers and
00:20leaves and herbs into the bottles and added the perfumers alcohol and the carrier oil,
00:29so today we're just going to try and bottle it up. I've got these little bottles,
00:37what a wee set, come with three pieces of
00:43diffuser and the lid and then I also picked up
00:48some pipettes or droppers and a couple of tiny funnels to just to get them under the bottle.
00:59So these have been marinating now for two weeks, this one's got some very dark liquid on it.
01:06I'll just remind you what's in these, in this one there's blackberry leaf, tomato leaf, chamomile
01:13and mint and I'll put everything in the description that's in there. I know there's
01:22a few other things in there too, and here we had sweet pea and lemon balm, there's also marigold and
01:40some sweet alisin, I'm trying, I'm having a look here because I can't actually remember,
01:45but I should have wrote this down but I will write it down whenever I look back
01:49at the other video, and since then I've also added some rose petals that I've gotten off a relative
01:55and from their garden because I don't have any roses and also some geranium leaves as well and
02:06also on this one I forgot to put it in originally but there was some oregano I'm growing in the
02:11garden, their marjoram and I've added that as well. So that's been out in the sun for a few hours now
02:21as well just to sort of help it on its way and now we're going to start with this darker one
02:30and what you're going to need as well as what I've mentioned before is a bit of cloth that's
02:36porous, a sieve, some receptacle to catch the liquid in and then for the oil one I also have
02:45this perfume bottle which is a roll-on because more likely than not it'll clog
02:55the little diffuser here, so I'll roll that into there and then one of these I'm going to
03:02mix with perfumer's alcohol and oil just to see how that turns out, if it helps with projection or not
03:08so oh that's quite powerful, really powerful actually. I smelled this about
03:17almost a week ago now and it didn't smell as powerful as that
03:21the black currant's very strong on it but it's very dark smelling almost like a forest wood kind of
03:32hmm interesting, interesting to see what it's like on the skin so I'm just going to pour this into here
03:45and already you're seeing the liquid come out
03:51there and how dark that is
03:56let's get all the ingredients out and put that to one side now
04:03I'm just going to let that sit and drip for a minute
04:09meanwhile I'll just chat a wee bit about
04:14fragrance and skin chemistry. Now scientists are divided and there hasn't been a lot of
04:20experiments done on this but everybody smells different through their skin, obviously your
04:25skin is porous and sweat comes through and what you put into your body comes out as well
04:30in some way so when you mix it up with perfume it creates a kind of unique
04:35scent so you have your body scent and then you have a perfume on top of that so a lot of people
04:42say that perfume on two different people will smell, can smell completely different, it'll
04:49something you might smell on someone else might not necessarily smell the same on you and vice versa
04:56so that's
05:02dripping out there so what I'm going to do here you can actually see the green how green it is
05:06in the cloth but what I'm going to do here is now fold this over and make just a little packet
05:14like a bundle
05:25and then just squeeze the ingredients
05:30to get the rest of the liquid out
05:36now this one had perfumer's alcohol in it and this was 50 milliliters of perfumer's alcohol
05:44and
05:49and just fresh leaves, fresh flowers, fresh herbs all picked from the garden
05:55I'll link the previous video where we did all that down below
06:07I'll just leave that in there for a minute now to
06:09see
06:13drip out any further just wow that's very very strong so anyone who saw the previous video
06:20will know that I was going to add a few drops of myrrh into this particular perfume so we're
06:29going to try that now and for this I'm just going to use one of the pipettes
06:34and add it straight into the bottle then I'll give it a good check whenever so
06:41I get this myrrh from a Spanish seller many years ago and this is myrrh absolute
07:05that's better you can see the myrrh in here and then I'm just going to drop it in here
07:19I don't want too much myrrh because it can be overpowering as well but
07:24and now that this is drained I can just
07:36take another pipette you can also use a syringe for this as well and
07:46just soak it up and add it in and move this out of the road so you can see what I'm doing
07:55I really should have a funnel on here so I don't put it outside the bottle
08:12so
08:22once you can do it that way but you could also just pour it in as well
08:42so
08:51I knew this one was going to be strong so one of the fun things about perfume is making up names
08:56for them as well um there we have so I've been thinking about the names since I smelled these
09:05last week the other one was much lighter at the time this one was very dark already but it's got
09:13a lot stronger since so and now that's it there now you can see how dark that is it's like a
09:22bottle green almost murky bottle green and so we'll go with a black one for this
09:41shaking them around through it so that's basically it
09:48and that's it done and
09:53I'll just stick the lid on and we'll do a test of them afterwards I've made these wee labels
10:00the things uh I thought I thought long and hard about what to name them you come up with loads of
10:06crazy ideas but I thought this one was quite dark and with the nights drawn in
10:14I thought about local landmarks things like that and then I thought about Halloween so
10:19for which Derry is famous of course
10:23best in the world uh so I've called this one spectre 31
10:32just had the label I made these wee labels from a piece of um for permanent marker and
10:40a bit of a laminate adhesive laminate it's not even on entirely straight but there we go
10:49one one down one to go and we're back now so as you can see that was the first one
10:56and this is how much is left over so definitely got the 50 mils back from the perfumers alcohol
11:04that was poured in I thought I might have lost quite a bit of it that's why I bought the smaller
11:09bottles and these this set of three and there's a silver one in here as well was seven pound
11:18something on Amazon and the other ingredient or the other apparatus was maybe about four pound
11:29and all and I got 50 of these little funnels and around 50 of these too so
11:38and the kit itself the three bottles came with a syringe and with a pipette and a wee tube as well
11:44so it's all very reasonably priced when you consider the cost of a an actual fragrance
11:52these days so next up we have the other fragrance which is an oil based one and it's using this
12:01it's either jojoba or jojoba oil not too sure golden jojoba oil but you have to make sure
12:05you're you're using the right things and making perfume so it has to be the right alcohol and
12:10it has to be the right type of carrier as well of course is checking that the ingredients are
12:19something you can use I'm just going to use this cloth for a minute
12:23on your skin because everybody's skin will be different the oil has nailed this shut
12:30there we go right
12:45oh that's much more much more gentle but very much a garden smell
12:53like nice flowers but I suppose that's what's on it but I wasn't expecting that they smell
12:59they have strengthened this at that so that's a pleasant surprise getting it out
13:07it's going to be a bit tricky now I'm just going to use one of these kind of pocket
13:30so
13:35there we go that's it all coming out now
13:41you can see the how different the color of the liquid is there
13:50and that's down to the fact that the alcohol is more likely to absorb the color
13:57of the chloroform chlorophyll in the plants
14:03but also there was darker ingredients used in that too I don't know so
14:11so let that sit for a moment and we'll start preparing this and now what I'm going to do to
14:15this as I mentioned in the last video is add a few drops of lavender essential oil and this
14:21is a hundred percent lavender nothing added to it um
14:29we're not going to add too much because I don't want to change the
14:32character of the perfume that much I'll just put in two three
14:43so eight drops on there that's pretty potent
14:52and we'll use another clean funnel here just get that set up
14:59my hands are covered in oil I'm just going to have to wipe them in some way
15:06and like I was saying earlier I'm going to be using these little roller
15:10kept it's going to be rollerball on it for the oil and then I will try and get one in here with
15:17uh perfumer's alcohol and
15:25you should really measure this but I'm not going to bother like so
15:28I just want a little bit of this to help with projection and
15:34yeah that's why I should have used a pipette and to try and
15:38um mix with the oil so that it's a lighter consistency and that um
15:51it's thick it may still clog the little tube but we'll see if it's on
16:03it's still dripping
16:04but just to speed up the process here I'm going to do the same
16:09thing again make a knapsack or bundle here
16:16and what I'm using is an old dishcloth basically cotton two because it was a
16:21two layers of dishcloth or not an old dishcloth a new one one that's never been used
16:28and then now I'm just going to squeeze the rest of those oils out
16:34so
16:47it's a messy messy process here but
16:51two layers of dishcloth or not an old dishcloth a new one one that's never been used
16:58and then now I'm just gonna squeeze the rest of those oils out
17:05so
17:17it's a messy messy process here but
17:23kind of enjoyable too at the same time
17:28so all right so that's that part done I had to repeat the process of straining out there
17:34um with this one because there's sediment at the bottom of it but I used a finer sub this time
17:42and a different bit of cloth and managed to get a more a more clearer liquid but if you
17:51all the sediment was at the bottom so it's not too bad
17:54but since then I've gone ahead and I have filled two vials with the oil-based perfume and in this
18:05one I have mixed the alcohol with the oil and so what I'm going to do here is show you some
18:17ones that I bought before in the past that are fragrances that are oil-based and fragrances that
18:24are a mixture of oils and expensive half solutes I'm not expecting mine to be anything as nice as
18:31these but um these are from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab in America and they're oil-based and they're
18:45a really really powerful source with natural ingredients from around the world and some of
18:53these are from some of the same people who started up the company Lush and they're sold through Lush
19:03they have some really outlandish and weird fragrances that they've done through the
19:08years and then some popular lines as well and they've made some things like bath bombs and
19:12they have fragrance uh sort of replicated it and some of them are really weird like this one the
19:19bug it smells a bit like burnt wires and but really really nice as well at the same time
19:27this is Flowers Burrow it's like a geranium based one but
19:33but very floral very nice and it's supposed to evoke like an ancient site
19:37in England somewhere
19:41so interesting concepts interesting smells but in terms of longevity and projection
19:47these are some of the most powerful you could get like the both of them
19:54so what remains to be done then is to try my out my own
19:59so we'll try this one first and I've given this the name Fairy Fort because again in keeping with
20:03the Irish legends and when I smelled it last week I thought it smelled very airy and kind of
20:12like a college garden basically but mild just like a breeze coming through the college garden
20:20and what I've done in here I've added a few drops of lavender essential oil
20:25and and there I'm just going to spray that on my wrists and see how that develops
20:38it's really powerful I'm actually really surprised now
20:42it's not falling a room or anything but when you hold it up close it's actually really nice
20:48you get a wee bit of lavender in the background but mostly it's like an apple blossom
20:57and I think that's coming from the chamomile flowers because they there's a really strong
21:02smell of like fresh apple when you walk past them I have about a few dozen chamomile plants
21:08all along a row in the garden
21:12but it's really pretty and complex too but very light, airy, I mean like it's strong enough
21:26so we'll see if that gets any stronger on the skin even in projection wise like
21:31from back here you don't smell much like but but maybe a skin scent which means that something
21:37that you can smell close up and this is one without the lavender so this is just a roll-on
21:54yeah that's nice you can get the apple even more in that one so there's no alcohol or
22:00lavender in this one so
22:04I like that too that's really nice
22:08but I do prefer the one with the lavender in there
22:12alcohol helps with projection as well as diluting the oil otherwise it probably would clog up the
22:18sprayer so that's why I've mixed a wee bit of perfumer's alcohol in through the sprayer
22:23otherwise it probably would clog up the sprayer so that's why I've mixed a wee bit of perfumer's
22:28alcohol in through this as well and then just dropped it in so that's that one I'm pretty
22:34pleased with that I would actually wear that you know and there's nothing scary about it I think
22:39the name actually suits it pretty well Fairy Fort and this one is Spectre 31 as I mentioned earlier
22:48this is named for Halloween in Derry which is the best in the world and which is the city's
22:56signature kind of festival every year and the biggest festival it runs and bring people from
23:02all over the world so Spectre 31, 31 being the 31st of October I'm just going to put that in my
23:10crook of my elbow there
23:11oh yep my do you know what it's well named you get the getting a licorice kind of vibe
23:23and then the green the forest green and the myrrh coming on behind it just a hint of myrrh which is
23:28really beautiful actually I would wear that definitely I like darker scents anyway I like
23:34really strong kind of woods and leathers and but really strong flowers too like jasmine and rose
23:46that smells like walking through a forest at night
23:50maybe in the late autumn winter time or something
23:56there's like a dampness state and a real darkness as well
24:00that's really interesting I'm really surprised that they both turn out not terrible to be honest
24:07like but that's really that's really nice
24:20they're both really fragrant like it's
24:24it's mad I really wasn't expecting them to be as nice as they are like but
24:29where they go where they settle and change we'll see over the coming weeks but for now
24:38very happy to have these it means I have something from the garden whenever the
24:42flowers die back and the winter sets in something there to remember them by
24:48for the year's effort but I would definitely try that again it was a bit of craic doing it and
24:53maybe try with other things instead like maybe try with some of the absolutes and
24:59the different chemicals you can get and stuff like that they mimic the natural things but also
25:05I will try again with naturals maybe next year I'll try and grow some more fragrant flowers some
25:12more different herbs nothing was super expensive but there was just there's quite a bit that you
25:18need like but once you have it all like sure that's great time to show you this is a spare
25:26bottle left over with a silver lid so I'll maybe use that for another experiment someday
25:37before the winter comes so
25:41that was great well I hope you enjoyed that wee video