Jan. 7, 2004

Making Your Own Perfume

Perfume has been used for thousands of years. Long before department stores and designer fragrances existed, people around the world used perfume. The Assyrians put perfume on their beards. Nero, a Roman emperor, took baths in rose wine. Cleopatra had the sails of her barge soaked in perfume to receive the Roman general Mark Anthony. The French emperor Napoleon used a bottle or two of perfume every day.

One reason many people used large amounts of perfume in the past was because they did not bathe very often. Today people do not perfume beards or boats, but producing perfume is a major industry. It costs more than 20 million dollars for a new scent of perfume to be produced. Last year the worldwide sales of fragrances totaled more than 15 billion dollars. With such a high demand for new scents, people in the perfume business are developing new scents faster. Twenty years ago it took one to three years to develop a new scent. Now, some scents are developed in a few months.

In this experiment you will make three simplified versions of perfumes. The perfumes in this experiment have only two ingredients. (Most commercial perfumes contain anywhere from 10 to 500 ingredients.)

Materials

• 3 plastic film canisters
• rubbing alcohol (CAUTION: Do not get in eyes or mouth)
• whole cloves
• cinnamon stick
• orange
• knife

To make your perfume, fill three plastic film canisters about halfway with rubbing alcohol. In the first canister, add 5 cloves to the alcohol. Now break the cinnamon stick into about 5 pieces. Add 3 of those pieces to the second canister. Cut an orange into 8 slices. Take the peel off one orange slice and tear the peel in half. Roll up that half and place it in the third canister of rubbing alcohol.

Put the tops on all 3 cannisters. Let your perfume mixtures sit for 3 days. On the third day, your perfume should be ready. Use your finger to rub the alcohol from each canister on your wrist. At first you may just smell rubbing alcohol, but as it evaporates the scent of citrus or spice should come through.

Commercial perfumes have additional ingredients. Almost all store-bought perfumes include natural oils, aroma chemicals, fixatives, and alcohol. The alcohol that you used in your perfume dissolved the chemicals in the ingredients you added. It acted as a carrier of the fragrance.

You may notice that your perfume fragrance does not last very long. Fixatives are used to make the smell of perfume last. The lack of a fixative in your perfume may be why the scent did not linger. Fixatives slow the evaporation rate so that the perfume will not all evaporate in the first few minutes. Fixatives are chemicals that come from natural mosses or resins, or they are made in a lab.

Perfumes used to have only natural ingredients, like those used in the perfumes you made. Today aroma chemicals are also used in perfume. These chemicals are produced in labs. They may copy the smells of nature, or they may be unique odors developed by a chemist.

Project Ideas and Further Investigations

• Get creative! Mix and match ingredients. Try developing your own original perfume. Mix ingredients used in the experiment or think of your own ingredients. For example, you could try to combine cinnamon, orange peel, and vanilla all in one canister.
• Make perfumes with more or less alcohol than used in the experiment. Does the amount of alcohol affect the strength of your perfume's odor?

Reprinted with permission from Science Fair Success with Scents, Aromas, and Smells by Thomas R. Rybolt and Leah M. Rybolt. © 2002 by Enslow Publishers ( www.enslow.com ).

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