Overwhelmed with my new oils

I personally really love vetiver but I agree - it doesn't necessarily smell good straight out of the bottle.
A trick that you can try in between smelling things is coffee beans. Sticking your nose into a container of coffee beans helps to cleanse the 'palette' for the next fragrance.

My S.O. loved it far more than I did initially, honestly. But I do find it useful with rose and jasmine fragrances. It seems to 'ground' those a good bit. I've also used it in bases with tobacco accord, and leather.

I`m a lover of both Amyris and Hatian Vetiver oils. Try evaluating them at 10% dilution.Vetiver from the bottle will wear you out quickly.Aryris reminds me of Casuarina trees on a rainy day or at the beach.

Philip

Where is the origin of your vetiver? Vetivers can vary significantly from different regions. Haitian is sort of the standard, although I really like indonesian vetiver too for its much dirtier and smokier qualities. It is overwhelming if undiluted but once diluted, and used in small proportions (say, 1% or less of the blend), it has a wonderful effect.

Guaiacwood is a whole 'nother beast when diluted. Then it becomes sort of a creamy woods with smoke. It is often used in leather accords, to extend peppery notes into the base (as gaiac dries down on the skin it becomes less creamy and more peppery), and also can impart tea notes to a scent when used in small quantities. I'd recommend a 10% or even 5% dilution of it.

The gaiacwood you have is semi-solid at room temperature, right?

Also, do you have a scale for dilutions? With solid or semisolid material like mimosa aboslute, gaiacwood, benzoin absolute, a scale is essential. It's more accurate than going by volume, too.

Lots of good advice in here already, so I’ll just chime in re scales as this one comes up often.

Key considerations:
1) Buy the most accurate scale you can afford. The cost is driven mainly by the accuracy, less by the capacity and for perfumery work you really need to get down to 0.001g accuracy, 0.01g will do if necessary but I really wouldn’t compromise further - better to save up a bit longer.

2) Many scales have an auto-correct function designed to prevent drafts, dust and so on from disturbing the reading. The trouble with these is that in perfumery you are often trying to deal with very tiny additions and the autocorrect software will often wipe them out altogether. So look for a scale that has a minimal autocorrect: these will often come with draft shields.

3) A repeatable tare function is essential.

4) Perfume making often takes a long time and I find that the phone rings or the doorbell goes in the middle of making a blend nearly every time I start! So battery operated scales that automatically switch themselves off to save power are a very bad idea: get scales with a mains option that don’t auto-off when plugged in.

The type I use is from Radwag but there are plenty of other good manufacturers.

This information plus some waffle about why you should work in weight rather than volume is now included in this blog post

If you cannot afford lovely scales yet, a cheap jewellery one will suffice until you can. If alcohol has to wait too, then maybe you can muck about with dropper bottles and Fractionated coconut oil in the meanwhile. I keep mine at 10% in this for messing with. Have a bit of fun learning, smelling and blending without too many restrictions at first. I use stinkers as low as 1% in blends. Guaiacwood being one of them. Vetiver is fantastic and when playing with florals, you will find out why.

in the 100-200 dollars range you can get pretty decent scale for home use. professionals like scales that work really fast. you will need at least 100 grams, i have a 100 gram scale and sometimes that's a limitation.

My scale is also up to 100g and I often find this a limitation when I want to have even a medium bottle on there. The issue is the micro increment value versus the top weight of the scale. Get the one that does both best. I'm not sure you need to worry about a scale at the very outset. Bide your time and play first. Have loads of fragrant baths with all your creations.

Does anyone know how to dissolve carrier oil-based perfumes with alcohol tinctures? I know that oil and alcohol don't mix, but there must be some compound (other than detergent) that will get render them miscible. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Why do you want to? Just curious. It depends on the oil you have used. Fractionated coconut is happy with tinctures up to a point. You can tincture in oils too. I often tincture in both.

Emulsifiers (the bit of a detergent that dissolves oils) will do the job and there are a selection of skin-safe ones that you can use. If you look at the ingredients list for high-water or all-water perfumes they often list some. Polysorbate 20 is widely available as is Cocamidopropyl betaine. There are more effective co-solvents you can use such as dipropylene glycol mono methyl ether but you wouldnt want to use too much of that as it imparts a distinctive metallic smell.

All of these solutions will result in some soapy feel to the resulting ethanol mix - youd need to experiment to see whether that would be a problem or not.