When making your own natural perfumes, you have plenty of options to consider. What scent? What base? What container? Most perfumes will either have a base of oil or alcohol, unless you are making a solid perfume which also requires oil but also beeswax, or carnauba wax for a vegan option. If you want a spray perfume, that makes it pretty easy to decide on your base because only alcohol will work with a spray top. There are other ingredients you can mix in with the alcohol, but the fundamental base should be an alcohol that is 80-100 proof, with vodka being the most common choice because it has the least amount of scent. You can find perfumers alcohol if you look around, but I like to follow the rule of ‘if you wouldn’t put it in your body, don’t put it on your body’ when making my own products.
I always have a perfume body oil that I use first thing in the morning and right before bed at night. I put it all over my torso and arms, sometimes legs too, and then it has to soak in before I put clothes on so that makes it confined to the above mentioned applications. Spray bottle perfume is something I like to keep on hand for applying before I leave the house or when I just need a mood lift from the scent, because no matter what is in there, it always lifts my mood. I even spray the inside of my coats because they need a little refreshing after so much use in the winter, especially since I tend to wear my coats inside quite often. I’ve actually tried to break that habit by putting a warm sweater or hoodie or something always accessible in the kitchen near the coat closet to make myself change out of coat. My aversion to being cold is a mighty one. Here’s the current situation here by the way:
Even my 15 year old son asked if I had any sprays he could use to freshen up before leaving the house last week and since I’d just used the last of my perfume I handed him a bug repellent spray that we had leftover from the summertime, and he thought that just fine. After spraying it he said that it smelled really good so I hope I wrote that recipe down in my notebook!
For the spray perfume I’m making today, I’m using homemade rose-vanilla extract and vodka with some of my favorite essential oils for winter. It’s a two ounce bottle, which means 12 teaspoons, and the general rule is 5 to 20 drops of essential oils per teaspoon. That means I’ll want between 60 (12X5) and 240 (12X20) drops of essential oil in my two ounces of alcohol base. (I made the extract with vodka, rose petals, and vanilla beans, so it is indeed an alcohol base, just an enhanced one.) I’m using about an ounce each of the two bases.
I decided to make this focused a bit more on mental and emotional well-being while my normal perfumes are usually all about the scent. January through March is not my favorite time of year so I thought some uplifting essential oils were in order. Here’s what I made:
2 oz dark glass spray bottle
A little less than 1 oz vanilla-rose extract
A little less than 1 oz vodka
50 drops sandalwood
40 drops ylang ylang
10 drops clary sage
20 drops bergamot
10 drops frankincense
5 drops rosemary
This turned out to be a really refreshing scent. I might add more rosemary once the blend settles, but for now I like how it smells. I won’t know for a few days if it needs any changing as it takes time for everything to mix and mingle and meld together.
Thank you for reading and let me know if you have a favorite essential oil blend for the wintertime!
