How To Make Perfume -
About Designer Duplications
Making designer smell-alikes is a great introduction to
home perfuming. With just a few ingredients and
instructions, it's almost impossible to get wrong.
Naturally, it builds confidence when you're holding your
own recreation of $90 perfume - a duplication you made for
less than $10!But how is it
possible to get such accuracy for so little money? After
all, these perfumes are expensive. They must have some
kind of 'secret formula," right?
The knock-off market is nothing new.
Counterfeiting and duplications are a built-in part of the
art and fashion market. It's not always illegal black
market stuff, either. Most of us can't afford an original
Picasso, but we can certainly afford a nice reprint from
an art poster shop! Perfumes are no exception. While it's
illegal to pass off duplicates as originals (counterfeiting),
people can and do sell knock-offs.
Historically, designer perfume
duplications haven't been that great. You may remember
Designer Impostors from the 80's and 90's: "If you like
Obsession, you'll like Compulsion," etc. Well, Compulsion
may have been in the right ballpark - the same general
fragrance family - but it wasn't that close.
This is because, just like computers,
the technology needed to mature. They were using the
equivalent of an old Pentium 35 laptop to make smell-alikes,
which didn't produce accurate results.
Now, there are machines where you can
analyze a sample of anything, even if it's incredibly
delicate and subtle. The air around the sample, which
contains the scent, is sucked up and sorted into scent
molecules. Using sensitive gas chromatography and other
methods, including human judgment, scent scientists can
use the profile returned by the machine.
Whether the scent is snow, fresh-squeezed
orange juice, new apple blossoms, or the latest creation
from House of Creed, it is possible to get quite close to
the original. Like all things, there is some variation. If
you make a lot of duplications, you'll get a few misses or
duds. But most of them - especially the most popular
designer perfumes - are so accurate that most people can't
tell the difference.
Once a scent is recreated, companies
sell them in concentrated form so that you can dilute them
for your own use. It's as easy as making Kool Aid!
Can you recreate a designer formula from
scratch? Anything is possible with enough time and trial-and-error
power, but your time is better spent creating original
blends. Designer duplications are just the beginning in
hobby perfumery. Why spend your valuable time reinventing
the wheel? (Hey, it's a cliche because there's a lot of
truth to the phrase.) The truth is, you may not be able to
get accurate duplications without technological
assistance. At least, it would take you a very long time!
During that time, you could be blending
your own scents that you like even better than the latest
Calvin Klein or Thierry Mugler creation. And the cost of
the machines is about what you'd pay for an electron
microscope. Not in the range of most people's household
budgets.
Instead, leverage your existing designer
duplications and use them to further their perfume making
abilities. Mix them together, or add your own special
twist. You can get a fragrance made just for you. Isn't
that better than a mass-produced scent any day?
