Creating a fragrance | The Perfume Series

Before even starting the course this was probably the project that I was most excited about doing. I absolutely love perfumes and experimenting with different scents, and so being able to create my own fragrance was absolutely amazing. It's not exactly a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity because there's quite a lot of places that offer fragrance workshops now, but it's something that you can't do on typical uni degrees, which makes me love my course even more!

Karen Gilbert, the guest lecturer we had the day before, was the one who led the workshops and she talked about all the different notes fragrance and made us think about the 'story' we were trying to portray with the scent. My group and I went for the 'older business man' story, so a man who wears a suit and is pretty powerful in whatever it is he does. 

We ended picking three 'heart notes', two 'accessory notes', two 'fixatives' and two 'harmonisers'. Every perfume or fragrance will have a combination of these because it's what gives it the beginning, middle and end of a scent (aka, what you smell first, second and the after effect of it). Because we were creating a mens fragrance we felt that notes like 'tobacco, natural home and woody' were essential because of the amount of depth they had and they were quite musky. It was interesting to find out that fragrance was genderless until someone decided to advertise it for specific genders. Now we just immediately associate the fruity and floral scents with a woman and the dark, musky scents to a man.