I’ve been making natural bath and beauty items using essential oils for years now. It’s fun to experiment with different essential oils and natural fragrance recipes. Below I’ll cover some of my favorite recipes for natural perfumes / colognes, but first I want to share some things I discovered about synthetic fragrances.

I have a weakness for Black Cashmere by Donna Karan. I’ve always been a little sensitive to synthetic fragrances -I sometimes experience mild asthmatic reactions when someone with a particular perfume or cologne walks or sits near me. This has taught me to be wary of synthetic fragrances, for my own sake, as well as others. That said, the delicious warm aroma (sandalwood, patchouli, pepper…) of my Black Cashmere was overlooked because I was just happy to have found a nice smelling perfume that wasn’t as harsh and perfume-y smelling… or so I thought.

I decided to try and find out what the ingredients in my favorite commercial perfume, and found this nifty site: http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/ where you can type the name of a perfume or other cosmetic and if it’s listed in the directory, you can find a list of the main potentially dangerous ingredients. I found the ingredients for Black Cashmere:

Truth be told, I only use a tiny little spritz of this perfume, but especially considering that it’s right near my face and I probably breathe in a small amount, it makes sense to try and create a similar aroma using essential oils and other natural ingredients.

How to Make Natural Perfume

Really the simplest natural perfume or cologne can be as simple as adding essential oils to a very light carrier oil like sweet almond oil, or lighter yet, jojoba oil (which is really a wax that is liquid at room temperature). If you want to create a more traditional perfume, all it takes is the addition of some alcohol to help the oils evaporate, and a bit of glycerine can help the fragrance last longer.

Blending Essential Oil Fragrances

Just like with music, a balanced fragrance will have low, middle and high notes. Often you smell the middle notes first, the basenote comes in a little later and adds a warmth. The high note is for adding secondary tweaks to the overall scent. The high notes tend to dissipate more quickly.

If you find a combination you like, keep a mixture of it in a larger dropper bottle so that you can add the same fragrance to shampoo, lotion, etc. For example, my husband really likes the mixture of balsam peru, cedarwood, black pepper, juniper and grapefruit that I made for his castille shampoo, so I have a bottle of just the essential oils for making up new batches of shampoo. He also uses it in a lotion base in the wintertime.

Some of my favorite basenotes are:

sandalwood, cedarwood, frankincense, patchouli, and balsam peru (great for masculine colognes). These all have deliciously warm, comforting (cedarwood) or mysterious (patchouli, balsam peru) aromas.

Good middle notes include:

black pepper (good stuff for adding depth), lavender (also top note, classic scent works well with everything), and rose geranium (same as lavender -works with everything, nice rosy scent).

Top notes  I like are:

grapefruit, eucalyptus, sage, spearmint, bergamot and peppermint.

Blending Tips

Typically you’ll want to add more of your top notes because those tend to be more volatile (they dissipate more quickly than middle and base notes). You will quickly get a feel for the ‘note’ that each essential oil has, so you don’t have to use perfume guides or anything like that, just trust your nose. that said, if you’re looking for a handy chart of essential oil fragrance notes, see this article.

Natural Fragrance Supplies

There are lots of great online shops that carry essential oils, natural cosmetic bases and even the bottling/packaging supplies, so by all means, shop around. I tend to bring up Liberty Natural (US-based) because they carry all these things (plus dried flowers, herbs, butters, oils, flower waters, you name it). They have the hugest selection of essential oils in all sizes and have the very lowest prices (minimum order of $50). My reasoning is that I can stock up on essential oils, natural bases for castille soap, lotion, hair conditioner, etc, and also get some bottles to store my creations inside, all at one place, so I’ve been a loyal customer for a while now. I’ve also enjoyed the products from Mountain Rose Herbs.

If you’ve found another great supplier, by all means, let us know by leaving a comment below.

Cosmetic Bases

If you visit Liberty Natural, be sure to check out their cosmetic bases and soap bases under the ‘botanical ingredients‘ section of their products. Several other natural ingredients stores provide similar bases. These provide an easy means for using your essential oils to also create natural home bathing items, such as scented lotion, shampoo, liquid soap, hair conditioner, the list goes on…

Bottling / Packaging

This gets a little trickier because there are several different types of plastic bottles as well as glass. Liberty Natural and Mountain Rose Herbs carry only PVC and HDPE bottles for plastic bottles, neither of which are great choices for eco containers, but they can be recycled in many areas. If you’re making lotion or shampoo, you probably want a plastic squeeze bottle, so perhaps you can use old shampoo bottles. Liberty Natural also sells amber and beautiful cobalt blue glass bottles. I tend to use these because they are great looking and can be reused. At any store where you can purchase bottles, you can also choose from a variety of tops: droppers, sprays and pumps. Spray tops are good for perfumes and air  fresheners. Pump tops are great for lotion, and can even be used for shampoo.

If you decide to really dive into making your own natural bath and beauty preparations, be sure to check out the resources below. You can also get containers for lip balm, lotion bars/sticks, and all kinds of jars, bottles and tubs from Liberty Natural or

More Natural Recipes

I’ll be adding some natural beauty recipes to this site, but in the meantime you can check out the sites below, or try one of the two better books I’ve found on on natural beauty recipes.

Sites

http://www.makeyourcosmetics.com/

http://www.a1-natural-beauty.com/

Books

Natural Beauty At Home: 250 recipes to beautify your face, hair, and entire body that you can whip up at home for practically pennies!
This one can also be used by beginners. Must have -tons of different recipes!

Skin Deep: Natural Recipes for Healthy Skin and Hair
This one is a good basic book for beginners. It’s rather thin, but covers basics and has nice images.