Scents versus Ratios—Update :)

Welcome back!! This week we continued on the making of the perfume—it’s taking a while, I know. But I think if we trust the process, we’ll eventually get there. Not sure about the situation with the later perfumes due to somewhat of a time crunch, but most definitely we will get this one done and ready for surveying!

Finally—

I do have a pretty important update: the perfume notes seem to be on the right track now!

How I came up with the first draft for this painting was actually that I was just randomly dropping specific but also kind of non-specific oils onto one scent strip in ratios I didn’t remember too clearly, for the purpose of testing the new oils out and mixing them with some of the original ones. Then I came back to it a few hours later and…wow! It actually smelled 1) kind of similar to the painting, 2) good-in-a-“I’m kind of satisfied with it”-way. Immediately after, I rushed to note whatever I remember I did down in my notebook in case I forgot or missed something.

Later the process was mainly just trying to remake it as accurately as possible multiple times and waiting a few hours for the notes to settle on the scent strip before smelling. Taking inspiration from different sections, feelings, and also opinions this painting gave off, I mixed new and old notes together and wrote the changes down. So the two main things I focused on this week were adjusting the ratios of the “original” notes and adding new notes.

The Setup

I realized I didn’t really need the initial scent strips I used to gauge what each oil smelled like, since I was narrowing down on which ones I was thinking of incorporating at this point. So those could be cleared away, and what was left was my trial mixture scent strips plus the used pipettes and some small glass bottles. For those bottles, I put a ratio of 1:9 oil (the ones I was using) and fractionated coconut oil. I decided against using alcohol at least for this perfume due to safety/access concerns; coconut oil was just more accessible in smaller amounts and more skin safe. We’ll see how blending goes next next!

Until Next Time

I hope you enjoyed this update on my Senior Project. Thanks for sticking by!

See you later,

Alina : )