How to Make Perfume – Excerpts from my textbook
How to Make Perfume – Excerpts from my textbook
Slow Study
Making perfume takes time and lots of thinking and introspection.
As I work through adapting my textbook for my new website, I am finding many passages that are very helpful for anyone who wants to make perfume, or is already making perfume, whether you stick to 100% natural ingredients like I do, or if you use aroma chemicals. I’ve decided to excerpt some passages on a regular basis because I believe they can inspire and help others on this path. My first excerpt deals with the fear and indecision that every perfumer faces. If you don’t face it, I challenge you to challenge yourself, you’re too complacent.
Springtime image from the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, my hometown. I grew up knowing and loving this statue. So, it’s springtime, and you’re evaluating the mods for your new perfume.
Excerpt: Conclusion of Module 5 – Some Closing Thoughts
Although I am an experienced, professional perfumer, I sometimes face creating modifications with a bit of trepidation. For someone like me, a generally positive, self-assured person, that tinge of fear is a good thing. It keeps me balanced so that I don’t become overly confident that everything I create is a masterpiece because if I feel that way, I know I’m fooling myself.
Why do I instruct you to re-visit your vertical accords, although you just performed that exercise in the last Module? You might think it’s registered in your head, but I guarantee that, with your new concept or brief, you will be humbled when you evaluate your accords again. Subtle nuances, bits and pieces of it that didn’t seem prominent before, will become obvious now. Why? Because you now realize that you have to build upon the structure of that one simple accord, and you have to engage your scent memory and your artistic passions simultaneously in order to meet the final challenge in the next module – building a perfume.
A perfumer cannot become too comfortable, and the perfumer also cannot be afraid. Mods can humble you more quickly than any other exercise in this course. An accessory note, which is so beloved, so necessary to give a mod or a perfume panache, can begin screaming out its aggressiveness, overwhelming the blend, or just poking out in the drydown in a negative way.
Autumn — still thinking! Slow Study – taking time to make the right decision, and apply the right tweaks to the perfume.
My course is online, a resource in distance learning for those who cannot travel to attend a perfumery course. The 350-page textbook is the first American perfumery textbook, and it is written at the university level. For thinkers. And doers.
If you’re a perfumer, or thinking of becoming one, subscribe to this blog so you receive updates on this series, which I hope will inspire and instruct. There is a place to subscribe in the right column. Your email is private and will be treated as such.
Click here to find out more about the course.
Thank you- this is inspiring (even though I have the textbook). I don’t know you were from Philadelphia, such an interesting crowd of people hail from there.
If I decide on the the Private Tutorial option is this Tuition all at once?
Hi Migdalia:
Payment options can be set up. Please write me privately via the contact form and we can discuss them.
Anya
When are you going to have the Hungary Water for sale?
love you scents!!
I do not have Hungary Water for sale, it was only referenced in the post. I recreated a cologne from the 19th century that is similar to Florida Water.