Perfume is a form of scent that is worn by a person as a personal fragrance. A perfume can also be used to give a characteristic smell to clothing or other items. The scent from a perfume is usually a combination of several ingredients, some natural and some synthetic. In addition, the way a perfume is worn and how long it lasts on someone will influence the overall smell. Perfume is often a part of people’s daily routine and can help to define their personality.
The first step in creating perfume is the extraction of fragrant essential oils from plants using a variety of methods, with distillation being the most common. These oils are then diluted with alcohol to make them last longer and act as a fixative that prevents the more volatile ingredients from evaporating too quickly. During this process, a lot of water and some other substances are lost, making perfume expensive to produce (up to 20 kilos of flowers may be needed for just one kilo of oil).
Once a perfume is created, it is tested for the sillage and projection qualities that people like or dislike. Sillage refers to how much of a perfume can be smelled as you walk through a crowd and projection is the ability of a fragrance to linger on the skin when a person walks past.
If you are happy with these aspects of the perfume then it is ready to be mass produced. If it isn’t then a perfumer will try to tweak it until it is, a process that can take years for a single scent.
When creating a perfume, the noses at perfume houses work with thousands of different molecules to create complex and unique fragrances. Fragrance molecules are essentially chemicals that can be made to smell like anything, from the scent of a flower to the smell of a person’s sweat. Each fragrance that a perfume house produces is then named after the name of its creators, the nose who created it, or an object associated with the scent (like a bottle of champagne).
The best perfumes are complex with top, middle and base notes. These are the three main parts of a perfume that will change on your skin throughout the day. Top notes are the light and fruity elements that tend to evaporate quickly and they make up the shortest percentage of the perfume. Heart notes are the herbal, floral and spice elements that will stay on your skin for longer, and then the base is what makes up the longest part of a perfume. The most popular base notes are woods, amber and musk.