Noob needing designer cologne recipe for essential oils.

Sorry to disappoint you, but you cannot make "designer colognes" using an oil base and essential oils. To even come close to replicating them, you would need a whole range of synthetics and an alcohol base. The formulas for designer colognes are proprietary information, so I doubt that you'll be able to find anything useful in your searches for "recipes".

If you found a site that lists top/mid/base notes of designer colognes, this has little or nothing to do with what's actually in them.

Check the DIY forum.

It is very difficult to recreate modern perfumes as they contain many synthetics, semi synthetics and (sometimes) processed naturals.
Some older "classic" perfume styles can be acheived. It is possible to make decent eau de colognes, chypres, orientals, florals, lavenders, sandalwoods etc with natural oils. It takes some serious patience and you will need to be prepared for many failures.

You can get pretty close to many fragrances using essential oils. But an even better idea is to figure out what fragrance elements are pleasing to you and come up with your own blend. The pricing in the one place referenced in a previous message is pretty outrageous. If you are paying $45 for .25 ounce (which is basically a sample size) you'd be better off just buying the the real thing. Essential Oil mixes are stronger than your run of the mill EDT, but there is no way .25 ounces of oil will get you near the usage of an 100 ml EDT. I don't know what they are thinking.

If you want to sample some examples, eBay would be a good place to track down what is possible. There are a number of aromatherapists running around with interpretive mixes -- they'll usually call them "designer type" essential oils. I've tried a couple and was quite pleased with the products. If you have a problem with the longevity of a particular fragrance, it is many times worthwhile trying to come up with an essential oil version since longevity of the oils is usually superb.

If you want to delve into it more and try your hand at it, there are a number of books with aromatherapy recipes available. Just a superficial search of Amazon turned up "The Essential Oils Book", the "Aromatherapy Bible", "Perfumes, Splashes & Colognes: Discovering and Crafting Your Personal Fragrances", etc etc etc.

-T

I was just looking around a bit and I found a great site you might want to look at for fragrance oil mixes. Look at [ www.sweetcakes.com ]. To give you an example (and perhaps you'll understand why $45 for a .25 ounce bottle of ready to apply fragrance oil is absurd), you can get 16 oz of concentrated fragrance oil for around $35. This is CONCENTRATED fragrance. They sell smaller sizes as well -- like a 1 oz size of the concentrated fragrance for $5 -- but a minimum order is $25.

You'd normally mix 1% by weight of fragrance oil to a carrier oil (e.g. almond oil or similar) to apply as a skin fragrance. That would be around .2 oz (two tenths of an ounce) of fragrance oil to a pound of carrier oil. This particular site is setup to support soap making, lotions, bath gels, shampoos, fragrances, and so on. The fragrance oils are all cosmetic grade products.

To make an EDT you'd simply mix with alcohol instead of a carrier oil. You are not supposed to (because of liquor laws) but if you get some Everclear grain alcohol and mix the fragrance into that you have an instant EDT. Most colognes use a denatured alcohol (SD Alcohol which stands for "Specially Denatured" Ethyl Alcohol) that has additives to prevent people from drinking the stuff.

These fragrances are interpretations of name brand fragrances so they will be close to the original but not exact. I would think they probably might miss some of the subtle aspects of a more complex fragrance. And of course dry down, silage, and longevity would probably be entirely different.

This site actually gave me a good idea for holiday gifts this year. I am thinking about asking people I want to make a gift for what their favorite fragrance is and then making a batch of soaps for them. They sell the molds and the "melt and pour" glycerin soap. Ought to be fun and a very affordable gift.

-T