Homemade Oil/ Alcohol Perfume Troubleshooting: Carrier oil doesn't bond with alcohol.

Jojoba oil will not mix with alcohol; that is what you are seeing. As I understand it you are taking your concentrated fragrance and diluting it to 10.0% in Jojoba oil; then taking 30.0% of that and diluting it in 60.0% alcohol. If this is correct I have to ask why? Why not take your concentrated fragrance and dilute it to 10.0% in alcohol, you will stand a better chance of solubility.


"I'm making 10% diluted oil/ alcohol perfume ( 30% oil vs. 60 % alcohol), rest is essentials." I have no idea what you mean by this.

Commercial vodka has too much water in it for it to be any use as a perfume solvent. You need to get some Perfumer's alcohol, which has less water in it. And remove the Jojoba and any other fixed oil (e.g, Almond or Grape Seed) completely, they will not dissolve in alcohol but either turn the whole thing milky, or form to layers; as you have observed.

If you have access, 190 proof Everclear may also be a good choice. It is more available to me than perfumer's alcohol.

that's just proof that you can't trust the web. but you can trust david ruskin.

toss it, or use it if you like, but there's nothing you can do to fix it. and it might turn rancid at some point. as you probably understand by now, the problem is that there is too much water in there.

please do some reading on this forum before you go ahead. issues like these have been addressed before many times, you can learn a thing or two without making the mistakes yourself. a valuable lesson does not have to be expensive.

people like david campen, chris bartlett, janmeut and others share a wealth of knowledge here, and deflate a few silly myths every now and again while they're at it.

I think gido's advice is good (and thanks for the compliments!!); there is not much you can do with your cloudy mix. It is possible to remove some of the water but you will need to get a separating funnel and a couple of chemicals to help you. It's a two stage process. Look up "Drying agents" on Google, where there is a complete description of this process. However, I don't think it is really worth it. As you have your concentrated fragrance you can make up a new sample when you get your Perfumer's alcohol.

Just quickly to agree with the advice already given: I've seen some of the useless advice that seems to be constantly promulgated on the web, including in at least one case by someone claiming to be a qualified chemist, and it makes me very cross: so many people waste so much time & resources on this nonsense!

To make perfume you need ethanol, aroma chemicals, essential oils & absolutes. You don't need water, glycerine, jojoba, almond oil or any of the other things so often recommended by people who have obviously never actually made anything according to the "formulas" they publish!

Ok, rant over…

you need to learn a lot before you can make perfume. i you have a question on a certain subject, use this way to search: enter site:www.basenotes.net/ query into the google search box, query being some keywords to search for, like 'aroma chemicals'.

to answer one of your questions, aroma chemicals are the molecules we can smell, in particular the ones that are useful for perfumes and artificial flavouring in drinks and foodstuff (most of it is the same, for example raspberry candy can use largely the same molecules as raspberry lemonade and raspberry perfume).

essential oils and absolutes (please look up this current thread about the differences) consist more or less entirely of these. there can be hundreds of them in a single oil.

some of them are famous, like vanillin (think vanilla sugar, but also present in large doses in a vanilla bean; or caron pour un homme) but most of them aren't and have strange names like para-cresyl phenyl acetate (which is also know as benzene acetic acid 4-methylphenyl ester and a host of other names, but everybody seems to use the former).

there must be thousands of these molecules. i do not really know how many. new ones are constantly being developed. people probably still are discovering some natural ones, too.

in general, small molecules evaporate fast and these are topnotes, the big ones go slower, all the way up to the musks, and beyond that we can't smell them no longer and thus they aren't considered aroma chemicals any more.

aroma chemicals can come from a natural source, they can even be isolated from their source, or they can be manufactured synthetically. the result is in theory the same (impurities can make a difference though!) some aroma chemicals are not known to exist in nature, they where invented by men in white coats.


i think this should do for now as a basic introduction on this topic. there is a lot more to learn about them, and you will find a plenty to read when you browse and search this forum. use it to your advantage. good luck!

Dahlia, there is a basic introduction to Perfumery on this very site. Before you plunge into trying to create fragrances I think it would be a good idea to get to know the basics.

I didn't realise how very little you knew about the subject.

I'm afraid you are really asking for a whole lifetime training in perfumery with this question! Nevertheless I'll try to provide some pointers:

1). Gido has already given a good answer to this. I'll add this link to my blog post suggesting which ones are useful for a starting-out perfumer to experiment with first. There are about 3,500 aroma-chemicals currently commercially available for fragrance work and quite a lot more that are used in flavourings, some of which are occasionally used in perfumery. That's without the natural materials that, as guido says, are composed of multiple aroma-chemicals - anything from one (sweet almond oil) to many hundreds (rose oil contains over 700 aroma chemicals).

2) Absolutes are extracted cold, using a solvent to avoid loss of material due to deterioration caused by the heat involved in distilling an essential oil and also the loss into the water of those materials that are water soluble. There is a lot more to it, but the point is they are different and capture a different part of the scent of a natural material.

3) Yes. However denatured alcohol designed for perfumery use will do the job perfectly well at a fraction of the price, because you don't have to pay tax on it as you do for drinkable alcohol.

Finally, yes being in business alone means that I make everything myself, by hand. I use the sort of basic equipment that I've recommended to others on my blog and all my fragrances are hand made. Very occasionally my other half will help out with making something (she's also been trained in basic perfumery techniques) but the vast majority of things are made by me alone. And I'm chief bottle washer too . . .

I do however also design fragrances for other people, who may well have them mass-produced afterwards, but in that case they go out under someone else's brand and generally I don't get a mention in the marketing at all, much less my brand-name on the bottle.

I wouldn't throw away the failed mixture. The milkiness that you describe is down to a temporary emulsion being created. An emulsion forms when tiny particles or droplets become suspended in a medium. The milkiness is down to the suspended droplets scattering the light, which is known as the Tyndall effect. Your mixture is no good for using in a perfume but it can be incorporated into a liquid soap no problem. The soap will fully emulsify it and you'll end up with a nicely fragranced soap.

*IF* the cloudiness is caused by too much water, (which happens) then if you add 190 proof alcohol, and a bit more concentrate to make up for the added dilution, at the right ratio of water to alcohol, the solution will clear.