Experimental Perfume Club | Creating our own fragrance

In todays seminar we were guided by the Experimental Perfume Club, to create our own fragrance. I was extremely excited to get hands on and learn about how scents are created and the work put into it to make the desirable smell.

We were taught about a selection of 'old factory notes' in fragrances, this is where raw materials can be grouped into clearly distinct types of smells. The old factory notes are what makes up a fragrances smell and are used to describe the particular smells that come from perfumes and aftershaves. We had the opportunity to smell some of the old factory notes that are most commonly used, to see what they smell like individually before mixed together to created the layers of a fragrance.

I was interested in particular about how perfumes are created in a pyramid of usually three layers (or sometimes maybe more). The first layer, at the bottom of the triangle, is the depth or 'the base's the fragrance. This is the layer that tends to linger, it is the lasting smell of a fragrance. Usually this will be a deeper smell such as a musky note, a woody note or an oriental note.

The next layer of the fragrance is known as the 'heart' aka the signature small that the perfume carries. This is one of the most important layers, because it shapes the perfumes main scent and characteristics. This layer could have a floral note, an aromatic note or a spicy note and many other spells to make its scent unique.

The top note is the initial smell of the perfume- it is the first impression that you get from the fragrance. This note is important because it is way intrigues you into purchasing, if you don't like the initial smell, you're not likely to want to buy it! This smell is usually quite fleeting however it is just as important as the other layers to make up the whole aroma of the fragrance. This smell could often be quite citrus like.

So with all that in mind, it was now time to begin creating our own fragrance! I really liked the idea of the D&G perfume that I wear, because it is a uni sex fragrance which is quite unexpected. Our idea was to create a scent for a young creative, who is very open to new ideas, androgynous, involved in social media and interested in experiences. With this in mind we decided to create a unisex scent inspired by our research and our target consumer.

Following the pyramid structure for our perfume we firstly created the base. We used 30% of a 'woody note' in order to give the perfume a musky, deep smell which is lasting and attractive to both male and female. We then added 30% of an ambery note to provide a vanilla/powder smell to the heart of the perfume. We thought this scent may be something attractive to both male and female. For the top layer we added 30% of a fruity note to make the smell 'typically' female. After smelling this all combined together, we weren't sure it worked to well in the terms of being unisex! To fix this we added an extra 10% of the base note which was a 'woody' smell. This made our perfume really unique and we thought it appealed really well to both sexes, so this was our finished design!

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