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A Method For Getting Boutique and Variety Store Owners To Take Your Perfume
Learn to mix your own perfumes
Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!
61 Basic Strategies For Selling Your Own Perfume!
Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Perfume's Name
Are you among those with such an intense interest in perfuming that you have already spent perhaps $1,000 or more on books and bottles, yet know that something important is missing in your quest to understand the art of making perfume?
Today I am going to explain to you what, up to now, you have been missing and offer you an opportunity to get over that hurdle. Then, within a few days you can begin creating the perfumes you really have been wanting to create — your own absolutely original fragrances, or "your version" of designer fragrance favorites.
But to discover this solution you have to read on and you have to read carefully because what I am offering you is not magic. Nor is it effortless. But if your desire to create perfume is strong, your efforts will be rewarded. To get started, let's look at what you already know —
Have you been mixing essential oils? We all start that way, myself included. But you quickly realize that there's a world of difference between what you are mixing and any famous brand fragrance. Some dismiss this difference by saying, "Oh, they use synthetics!" — which is true — but has nothing to do with the case. So if you're serious about wanting to create fine perfumes of your own, you have to look a bit deeper.
In the training professional perfumers receive, two student exercises are of vital importance. The first involves training the nose to recognize the aroma materials used in perfumery. The second involves using this newly developed ability to create "matches" for classic perfumes and modern designer fragrances.
In the first case, the student is taught to recognize about 200 aroma materials and is introduced to as many as 2,000 more. Then, with this basic working knowledge of perfumery materials, the student is challenged to "match" — to create their own version — of an existing perfume such as Summer Romance, Tommy Girl, or Chanel's No.5.
All this takes place within the first six months of a student perfumer's training. You may wonder how they do it but the fact is they do. I want to introduce you to a method that will allow you to begin to match famous fragrances yourself, but instead of needing six months of training, you will be starting to do it in just three hours. But let's not put the cart before the horse.
As mentioned above, your first task as a student of perfumery would be to become familiar with about 200 aroma materials and aware of about 2,000 more. In major fragrance houses these materials are available to students but I'm guessing they are not easily available to you.
I am guessing also that your situation is exactly like mine was when I first wanted to create my own perfume. I had bottles of this and bottles of that but I didn't really understand them. Some of these materials were so gummy that I wondered how anyone could measure them out by drops. These perfumery materials were taking me nowhere and I still have some of them today. But . . .
Since the 19th century perfumers have worked to simplify the recognition of aroma materials by grouping them into categories by their odor. It's like organizing your wardrobe. Shoes go here, slacks go here, blouses go here, undergarments go here — so when you dress in the morning and are thinking about what to wear, you don't have to go through every closet and drawer.
The problem for perfumers has been that every odor organizing system proposed for a century was unhappily complex, awkward to remember, and often quite difficult to use.
At this point you may suspect that the websites that teach fragrance creation by mixing a few essential oils do so because they don't want you to get bogged down in all this difficult smell memorization of aroma materials — materials that you not only don't have but wouldn't know where to get. But, by ignoring all these aroma materials, you limit your ability to create and this limit may just some day rule out the most beautiful fragrance you have ever visualized.
Thankfully today a system exists that gives people like you and me a simple but very effective odor classification tool, and the use of this tool allows you and I to build glorious, wonderful, stunningly beautiful perfumes of our own, because . . .
In 1998 a British perfumer named Dowthwaite introduced a system he had been using to train professional fragrance evaluators from large companies in the Asian market in classes where a multiplicity of languages were spoken but where all of his students — regardless of what country they had come from — were familiar with the English "ABC's."
To take advantage of what these students already knew and simplify dramatically their introduction to odor groups, Dowthwaite devised a method by which each odor group was assigned a letter of the alphabet and each letter, A to Z, was given an easy-to-remember name that associated it with the odor impression of members of that group. For example, "W" became "Wood" and stood for the many woody notes (patchouli, sandalwood, cedarwood, etc.) found so commonly in perfume. [You can read more about this in the "Short Course" at PerfumersWorld.]
Because you may not have heard of Dowthwaite, you may think this is not a system professionals would use. But when Dowthwaite submitted it to the leading trade magazine, he was told by the publisher it was one of the most important articles they had seen in the last thirty years. [See Stephen V. Dowthwaite, "The ABC's of Perfumery", Perfumer & Flavorist, May/June 1999.] In U.S. workshops, this method has been used to teach advanced students including Ph.D. chemists and others from leading U.S. fragrance houses.
While it only takes about 20 minutes to learn Dowthwaite's 26 odor groups, it's pretty obvious that you can't learn them simply by reading a book. You need a representative sample of each to smell. But once you've memorized these 26 smells, you can categorize just about every aroma material you'll ever encounter — plus all the smells of nature — into one or a combination of these twenty six groups. That means you can now start to recreate those aromas ... yourself!
To give students the 26 representative samples they need — the building blocks of every perfume that exists or could exist — in effect Dowthwaite compressed the knowledge of 2,000 aroma materials into just 26 bottles ... bottles that are now available to you.
With your knowledge of these 26 odor groups, each emblazoned in your memory thanks to the 26 "A-Z" sample bottles, you will now be able to ...
Using Dowthwaite's kit of 26 primary smells, your first task is to sample each and memorize its odor. Out of these 26 sample bottles, perhaps the aromas of ten are easy for everyone to learn quickly. If you have spent any time in the kitchen or in a garden, another ten will be quite obvious to you. The final few, odors that are less familiar, may take a bit longer to memorize but some become very hard to forget!
Now for the fun.
In May of 2010 I sat in a workshop with Dowthwaite in New Jersey as he explained his "ABC" system to eight students who had never heard of it before. His explanation along with a few other points on perfumery took no more than two hours. Immediately afterward each student (and myself, as I was sitting in on the session) was given a sample of a current brand name perfume and asked to use dropper bottles of these 26 "A" to "Z" scents to create their own match for it. We were each given a sample of our target fragrance on a smelling strip. In less than two hours everyone in the group had created their own very satisfactory match for one of these famous perfumes!
Don't get me wrong. These "matches" were far from perfect reproductions of the originals. My match for Givenchy's Organza used eight of the 26 "ABC" scents. I'm sure the original made use of at least 30 or more aroma materials. But the smell was a very good match.
The glaringly obvious fact is that in just a few hours, students who had never done it before were using their noses, brains, and these 26 scents in dropper bottles to create simple but very real perfumes. And by doing it they were opening their pathways to go on to create their own original fragrances which, in fact, they were doing in our 2010 workshop by Day Three.
But, if you are motivated and really serious about wanting to create your own perfumes, you don't need a face-to-face class to get started because Steve Dowthwaite has packed twenty years of professional perfumery experience into . . .
What I've been getting at is that Dowthwaite's "ABC's of Perfumery" system is available to you — now — with its 26 dropper bottles of smells that represent the 26 primary odor categories. Everything you need to begin matching classic fragrances and creating absolutely original perfumes of your own is included in Dowthwaite's course but this is just the beginning.
With the course's materials kit (K-26), along with your 26 dropper bottles of "A-Z" scents you get all the equipment you need to get started — mixing pots, smelling strips, and bottles to hold your first finished perfume. But that's not all.
With your K-26 kit you will also receive a licensed copy of The Perfumer's Workbook — a perfume development computer program on a CD that guides you through the creation of new fragrances and introduces you to hundreds of very useful aroma materials you may never have heard of, each categorized by its odor group within Dowthwaite's ABC's system. To use The Perfumer's Workbook you'll need a compatible Windows computer (sorry, it's not for the Mac) and you can test your computer for compatibility with The Perfumer's Workbook* by downloading the free edition from PerfumersWorld. But there's more.
In addition to your K-26 kit which is mailed to you promptly from my studio in Maybrook, New York, Dowthwaite has also prepared ten blocks of online lessons for students which cover a wide range of important perfumery techniques and technology, from strategies for visualizing and creating new perfumes to using your fragrance successfully in products such as soap, shampoo, anti-perspirants, creams and lotions, lipsticks, and more.
If your ultimate interest lies in natural perfumery or aromatherapy, you will find lessons relating to these topics and to essential oils that will help you in the future avoid buying adulterated and miss marked oils, oils that have been stored poorly, and oils being sold past what should have been their expiration date. You will also be introduced to the chemistry of essential oils and other aroma materials and learn how, with just a small knowledge of fragrance chemistry, you can make more odor-precise selections when choosing the best aroma materials to match your "scent vision."
The chemistry sections are not as hard as you might imagine and Dowthwaite recently published an article on this topic suggesting that you could, in just a few hours, gain an understanding of the seemingly complex chemical names for useful aroma materials — and use this knowledge to predict how each might smell. [See Stephen V. Dowthwaite, "Making Sense (and Scents) of Aroma Chemical Names," Perfumer & Flavorist, June 2010.] But you don't need that for now ... or for a long time to come because you can work creatively without a knowledge of chemistry. But please read . . .
Nothing in Dowthwaite's course conflicts in any way with what you would learn from the best teachers of natural perfumery and aromatherapy but driving schools don't put student drivers in a BMW. Natural materials, when authentic and uncut, can be very, very expensive.
Moreover, an insistence on learning perfumery with "all natural" materials eliminates several important odor groups. In one case by laws and respect for endangered species (musk deer and civet cat) and in another case because there simply is no "natural" representation in this group (aldehydes) and yet they have been of great influence in modern perfumery since the introduction of Chanel's No.5.
You can order the PerfumersWorld Foundation Course now. The K-26 kit will be sent to you from my Maybrook, New York, studio. Login information for your ten blocks of online lessons will be sent to you via email directly from Stephen V. Dowthwaite and his staff of "Angels" at PerfumersWorld.com.
Place your order now.
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Philip Goutell
(www.Bio-Byte.com)
Lightyears, Inc.
More help for you!Preparing your fragrance for marketOnce you've started to create your own new perfumes, you'll want to get them bottled and ready to sell. To help you do this we offer two books that guide you through the required steps. If you don't care to create your own personal fragrances, both of these books will help you get your fragrance from another source.
Marketing your fragranceUnless you are creating perfume simply because you love it and want to share a few bottles with friends, it is really important to put together a plan for selling your perfume before you invest a lot of time, money and energy in getting it ready to market. If you think you would like to be selling your perfume but don't yet have a clear plan for doing it — or if you have a plan but need a reality check before you start to spend significant money, I invite you to purchase and read ... "Basic Strategies For Selling Your Own Perfume!" Finally . . .Working with perfume can be wonderfully rewarding. There is a romance and a magic to perfume not found elsewhere in the world of fashion. As you learn to make perfume yourself, the magic becomes even more exciting because now you are the magician! — P.G. |
