How to Make Perfume and Cologne

1 · What this guide is

This is about everything that turns a fragrance blend into something you can wear: the alcohol it sits in, the concentration you choose, what happens while it rests, how it comes out of the bottle, and what you may safely put on skin.

It is not about choosing which oils to blend. That has its own guide — How to choose a fragrance oil covers notes, tiers, accords, and why two oils sold under the same name are not the same product. This page assumes you have something you want to wear and tells you how to make it wearable.

I am not a perfumer. My background is thermal systems — Navy submarine nuclear service, and Senior Reactor Operator at civilian nuclear plants since 2020. What I bring is training in heat transfer and evaporation applied to a field where the published guidance is often inconsistent, poorly sourced, or repeated without anyone saying where the number came from.

Where a supplier's instructions or an IFRA standard differ from anything here, follow theirs. They are working from the specific material in front of you; this page is not.

2 · Before you start

Skin contact changes the rules

If you have come here from the candle guides, this is the most important difference.

IFRA sets usage limits by category, and the category is decided by how the product is used rather than by what is in it. A candle is Category 12. Fine fragrance applied to skin is Category 4.

For many materials, Category 12 shows a high limit or none at all — but not for all of them, because some restrictions are driven by systemic toxicity rather than skin contact and apply regardless of category. Category 4 binds in ordinary use for a great many materials a candle maker has never had to think about.

The same aromatic material, at the same percentage, can be within limits in a candle and over them in a perfume. Nothing about the material changed. The intended use did. Section 11 gives a worked example with real published figures: one material sits at 16% in Category 12 and 1.4% in Category 4, a factor of eleven.

Alcohol

Perfume is mostly ethanol, and you will be handling it by the hundred millilitres.

Skin testing

A patch test is not a safety assessment. A small self-test cannot establish that a formula is safe for repeated use, or for anyone else. Reactions can also be delayed, so a clear result at 24 hours does not settle the question.

If you test, use a small amount on the inside of the forearm, on intact skin, and leave it 24 hours. Stop immediately if anything reacts. Do not apply an untested material over a large area.

Repeated exposure can contribute to sensitisation, and once sensitised, later exposure can produce reactions at levels that previously caused no apparent problem. That is the direction to err in.

One piece of vocabulary, and why it is a mess

You will read that a perfume needs to macerate. Three different things get called that, and the word tells you nothing until you know which one someone means.

• Extraction. Historically, maceration means steeping botanical material in fat or alcohol to pull the aromatics out. That is a production technique, not a resting step, and it is the oldest use of the word.
• The concentrate resting, before alcohol. Widely called maturation.
• The diluted perfume resting, after alcohol. This is where the disagreement is. Much of the professional literature calls this maceration; a great deal of hobby writing calls it maturation or just aging, and some sources reserve aging for what happens in the bottle after sale.

⚠️ So the label is useless on its own. When a source tells you to macerate for four weeks, the first question is which of the three they mean, and often the text does not say. This guide names the steps by what physically happens — concentrate rest and alcohol rest — and you will have to translate when reading elsewhere.

⚠️ What actually changes during either rest, at a chemical level, I have not established from a source I trust. Plenty of writing asserts a mechanism; what I have found tends to be brand blogs citing each other. The observable part — that the smell changes over the first days and then settles — is not in dispute.

3 · A first perfume, start to finish

Before anything else, fix three numbers: your target concentration, the limit for every material in the blend, and your batch size.

A formula is a mass balance, not a recipe in drops. If your finished batch weighs 100 g and contains 15 g of fragrance concentrate, the concentration is 15% by mass. The other 85 g is carrier.

1. Decide the concentration

⚠️ The percentages behind those names are not standardised, and sources disagree about all four. Published ranges overlap so heavily that the same 15% blend is called an EDT by one house and an EDP by another. Treat them as marketing conventions, and never infer a formulation from a label.

What matters is the actual percentage, and what constrains it is the Category 4 limit for every material in your blend — not the name you want on the bottle.

For a first attempt, lower is more forgiving. A weak blend can be strengthened. A strong one has to be diluted, and while that does not change the ratios within your concentrate, it does change the oil-to-alcohol percentage you were aiming for.

2. Get your materials

Aromatic material — a fragrance oil sold for fine fragrance, or an accord you have built. If buying, buy something sold for skin contact with an IFRA certificate available.

Alcohol — perfumer's alcohol: ethanol denatured for cosmetic use, at a grade intended for perfumery.

Do not substitute rubbing alcohol or isopropyl alcohol. Ordinary vodka is a poor substitute for three separate reasons: its water content is far higher than perfumer's alcohol, it carries congeners and impurities that vary by product, and it is not denatured to a cosmetic standard. It is not that vodka cannot dissolve a fragrance oil — it is that you cannot reproduce a result with it.

3. Weigh, do not measure by volume

Formulas are given by weight, and materials have different densities. A millilitre of one oil is not the same mass as a millilitre of another, so a formula reproduced by volume is a different formula.

A scale reading to 0.01 g is enough for most work. To 0.001 g if your blend contains anything potent at trace levels — and section 8 explains why a material at a fraction of a percent can dominate one at fifty.

Weigh into the vessel you will keep it in where you can, rather than transferring between open containers. Ethanol and light materials evaporate off an open beaker fast enough to move the reading.

4. Build the concentrate

If you are blending your own accord, blend the aromatic materials together first, without alcohol. Weigh each into the same vessel, in order, recording as you go.

A formula you cannot reproduce is not a formula.

5. Let the concentrate rest

Before dilution, if you blended your own.

⚠️ Published times disagree — days in some sources, weeks in others — and I have not found one that explains what is happening well enough to justify a number. Rest it, and smell it, rather than working to a schedule I would not be able to defend.

If you are working from a single purchased oil, there is no concentrate for you to build. Follow the supplier's instructions.

6. Dilute into alcohol

Combine gradually, with gentle mixing rather than shaking.

⚠️ Common shop practice adds the alcohol to the concentrate; some formulators do the reverse, adding concentrate into alcohol in stages to avoid a moment where a hydrophobic material sits in too little solvent. I have not found a source establishing that one direction prevents a specific fault. Add gradually, mix gently, and watch for anything that will not go into solution.

7. Rest again

Out of light, away from heat.

⚠️ Sources disagree on how long, by a wide margin — a week to six weeks — and none I have found explains the mechanism. What they agree on is that the smell changes over the first days and then settles. There is no established universal aging time, so sample it periodically rather than treating a number of days as an endpoint.

8. Filter — only if it needs it

If the liquid is clear, skip this.

Some blends go hazy or drop a sediment, particularly when cold. If yours does, chilling and filtering while cold will clear it.

⚠️ Chill-filtering is not a required step, and treating it as one is a mistake. It removes material — that is what it does — and if your perfume is already clear you are filtering out nothing but time. Filter to fix a problem you have, not to complete a ritual.

9. Bottle, then wear it for a full day

Into glass, with an atomiser or a roll-on. Label it with the date and the formula reference.

Then wear it — not a strip smelled once, but a full day on skin. What you are testing is how it changes over hours, and that is a different question from what it smells like in the bottle. Wash it off if it goes wrong.

A worked example

⚠️ Not filled in yet, deliberately. A worked example needs a named alcohol grade, one fragrance oil that publishes a Category 4 limit, a target percentage below that limit, a batch size in grams, and a rest window given as a range. Those numbers have to come from materials you can name and buy. Inventing a plausible-looking formula would make this section the least trustworthy thing on the page, and a formula is exactly the part a reader would copy without checking.

Same rule as the candle recipe: change any one thing and it stops being this recipe.

What you notice, and what it might mean

4 · A perfume is not three layers

A perfume exists in more than one state. There is the liquid in the bottle, the liquid on skin, the material entering the air, and the signal arriving at someone's nose. They are related and they are not the same thing, and almost every persistent confusion about perfume comes from treating one as though it were another.

Every introduction describes a pyramid: top, heart, base. It is a useful picture and it is not a description of the liquid.

What decides the order

Vapour pressure is the main physical property governing how readily a material enters the gas phase — but in a perfume on skin, the actual behaviour also depends on the rest of the mixture, the carrier, temperature, and the skin itself. As a first approximation, higher-vapour-pressure materials leave sooner.

The fragrance oil guide sets out the vapour-pressure bands and the chromatographic alternative in detail. The short version here: the tiers are ranges of a measurable physical property, not categories assigned by feel.

A note pyramid is a prediction, not a description. It says what you will probably notice, in roughly what order, given how those materials evaporate. It does not say what is in the bottle, and it cannot — the same three-tier pyramid is compatible with an enormous number of different formulas.

Why this matters for what you are making

You cannot evaluate a perfume from the bottle. The first impression is strongly influenced by ethanol and by the more volatile materials in the mixture. That is not the whole perfume; it is the first stage of it.

And a blend that smells balanced in the vial will not stay balanced. The proportions you smell at any moment are the proportions still evaporating at that moment, which are not the proportions you weighed. A blend that is 5% of something very volatile can be overwhelmingly that material for the first minutes and effectively none of it by hour two.

This is the most common reason a first perfume disappoints. It was evaluated at the wrong moment.

5 · Concentration

Concentration is the percentage of aromatic material in the finished product, by weight. Everything else is carrier.

What raising it does

If the concentrate itself stays unchanged and you simply increase its fraction of the finished product, more of every material reaches the skin. That means a more intense initial impression, and materials that were sitting below their detection threshold may cross it and become perceptible for the first time.

Whether it lasts longer depends on what is in the concentrate. More material takes longer to exhaust, but perceived persistence depends on which materials are present, not on the percentage alone.

Extrait strength is therefore not simply a louder eau de toilette. It is a different formulation, and it is not automatically better.

The ceiling is not aesthetic

You cannot raise concentration until you like it. The Category 4 limit for the most restricted material in your blend sets the ceiling for the whole formula.

This arithmetic is why compliance is a design-stage question rather than a final check. A beautiful accord you cannot use within the rules that govern that material is a wasted afternoon — and which rules those are depends on where you are and what you intend to do with it, which section 11 separates properly.

6 · What is actually in the bottle

Most of a perfume is not perfume.

The carrier

Perfumer's alcohol is ethanol, denatured, usually with a small and specified water content. It does three things.

It dissolves the aromatic material. Most fragrance materials are not water-soluble; ethanol is the solvent that holds a mixed blend in one phase.

It dominates the first seconds. Ethanol is far more volatile than the aromatic materials, so the headspace immediately after application is ethanol-rich, plus whatever else in the blend has the highest vapour pressure. That is why the cap and the first spray both lie.

And it is why alcohol-based perfume projects. A concentrate in ethanol and the same concentrate in jojoba are not equivalent delivery systems. The alcohol version produces a much larger initial release; the oil version sits and releases slowly. The aromatic composition is identical. The carrier changes what reaches the air and when.

Water

Perfumer's alcohol usually contains some water, and some formulas add more.

Do not add water unless the formulation calls for it. Water and ethanol dissolve different things, and adding water narrows the range of materials that will stay in solution. Non-polar materials can drop out and cloud the perfume.

If a formula does call for water, add it last and slowly. The point at which it goes cloudy is information: you have exceeded what that blend will tolerate.

Other carriers

• DPG — dipropylene glycol, used to dilute concentrated materials. Far less volatile than ethanol.
• IPM — isopropyl myristate, used in oil-based and roll-on formats.
• Fixed oils — jojoba, fractionated coconut. The basis of oil perfumes and attars.

None behaves like ethanol. The same concentrate in alcohol and in jojoba are two different products, and a formula built for one does not transfer.

Everything else

Depending on the formula you may find antioxidants, UV absorbers, and solubilisers. For a first perfume you need none of them. They exist to solve problems — oxidation, light degradation, a material that will not stay in solution — and adding them before you have the problem is the chill-filtering mistake in another form.

7 · Fixation is not one mechanism

The standard explanation is that base notes are heavy molecules that last longer. That is part of it, and treating it as the whole story is why so much fixative advice does not work.

At least three different things go under the name.

Intrinsic low volatility

Some materials simply have very low vapour pressure. Sandalwood, patchouli, many musks. They persist because they are not going anywhere quickly, and they would do the same alone on a glass slide.

This is the “heavy molecules” story. It is true, and it is the least interesting of the three, because it explains only why a material lasts — not why adding it changes how long other materials last.

Mixture effects — the part that matters

A fragrance solution is not an ideal mixture. Materials interact, and a component's tendency to escape into the air depends on what else is in the liquid with it.

This is not a hypothesis. It is why the published modelling of perfume evaporation uses UNIFAC — a method for estimating activity coefficients — rather than simply reading off pure-component vapour pressures. Teixeira and colleagues treat fragrance solutions as non-ideal liquid mixtures explicitly, because treating them as ideal does not predict what actually happens.[1]

What that means practically: a material's volatility in your perfume is not its volatility on its own. Adding a material changes the evaporation behaviour of everything else in the bottle: one physically established mechanism by which a material alters how the others evaporate, and therefore one measurable contributor to what perfumers call fixation. It is why a fixative can slow down a material it never touches chemically.

⚠️ A great deal of writing gives specific chemistry for this — acetal formation, Schiff bases, hydrogen-bonding networks. Those reactions are real chemistry, but I have not found a source establishing how much of the observed fixation in a finished perfume they account for, as opposed to the physical non-ideality above. I am not going to assert a mechanism I cannot support.

The substrate

A perfume on skin is not a perfume in a vial. Materials partition into skin lipids at different rates, and something absorbed into skin is not available to evaporate from its surface.

This is also why the same perfume behaves differently on different people, and on fabric versus skin — which section 10 returns to.

Ambergris and what replaced it

Ambergris is the classic fixative: a metabolic product of sperm whales, found weathered at sea, historically prized for both its own smell and its effect on everything around it.

It is essentially no longer used. What replaced it are materials providing aspects of the warm, ambery profile traditionally associated with ambergris — Ambroxan and Cetalox among them — which are available, consistent, and do not require a whale.

Worth noting as an illustration of the last section: Cetalox is sold as a single-material fragrance. People wear it alone. A material whose main commercial role is to fix other things is also a complete perfume by itself, which tells you the categories are looser than the pyramid suggests.

8 · Why percentage does not predict smell

This is the most useful thing on this page.

The arithmetic

Every material has an odour detection threshold — the concentration in air at which people begin to detect it. Thresholds vary across an enormous range, and the gap between materials is far wider than the gap between typical formula percentages.

Which means a material at 0.05% of your formula, with a very low threshold, can dominate a material at 20% with a high one. Not contribute comparably — dominate.

This is why the scale matters. A blend can be transformed by a quantity you cannot measure on a 0.01 g scale. If you are working with anything potent at trace levels, you need to weigh it accurately, because being out by a factor of two on a material with a threshold in the parts per trillion is not a small error.

Compiled threshold values exist — van Gemert's is an extensive compilation — though coverage is uneven and different sources report different figures for the same material.[2]

And it is not the same for everyone

Thresholds are population figures. Individual thresholds vary, and for some materials they vary enormously.

Specific anosmia is the inability to smell one particular material while smelling everything else normally. It is not rare and it is not a defect. Reported rates vary enormously by material — around 12% for Exaltolide, a macrocyclic musk in common use, and substantially higher figures published for others.[3] ⚠️ Those higher figures are contested on methodological grounds rather than settled; the fragrance oil guide sets out why a screening method built to find detectors overestimates non-detection when run in reverse. The mechanism is genetic — variation in the receptor genes themselves — and how humans smell follows one gene end to end, from two point mutations to three different reported experiences of the same molecule.

So your perfume does not smell the same to everyone, and that is measurable rather than a matter of taste. If a material you built the formula around is one someone cannot detect, their perceptual version of the perfume can be substantially different from yours — and how different depends on how central that material is to the composition.

The fragrance oil guide goes further into thresholds, including a published paper that contradicts itself about one by three orders of magnitude.

What to do about it

Get someone else to smell it. Not because your judgement is poor, but because your nose is one sample.

And be sceptical of your own assessment after prolonged exposure. Olfactory fatigue — you stop noticing a smell you have been in for a while — will convince you a perfume has faded when it has not.

9 · What happens between you and the person next to you

This is where the words get used most loosely. Sillage, projection, throw — everyone in the industry uses them, and almost nobody publishes a measurement.

What is established

Odour intensity has been modelled as a function of both time and distance. Teixeira, Rodríguez, Mata and Rodrigues built a diffusion model based on Fick's law to simulate evaporation and diffusion from small volumes of perfume, using UNIFAC to predict vapour–liquid equilibrium, and applied it to mixtures including an ethanol matrix.[1] Later work extended and validated the approach.[4][5]

Two things follow from that work. Concentration falls with distance, which is unsurprising. And which material is still perceptible can change with distance and time, which is less obvious — a material that dominates near the skin may be below its threshold two metres away, while another is still above its own.

The mechanism, stated carefully

It is tempting to say light molecules travel further. That is not the mechanism, and it is worth being precise because the wrong version is repeated everywhere.

In air, the diffusivities of typical aroma molecules are not very different from each other. What differs enormously is how much of each material left the liquid in the first place — and that is governed by vapour pressure and by the non-ideal behaviour of the mixture, which is exactly what the modelling above computes.

So the far field is not enriched in volatiles because they outrun the heavy ones. It is enriched because far more of them entered the air per second, from a mixture whose composition is itself changing.

What is not established

⚠️ This is modelling, not measurement. I have not found a published study that sampled a real plume at varying distances from a wearer and reported its composition. Headspace analysis of fragrance on skin is well established and routine — but it samples at the skin, over time. The distance axis appears to have been modelled and validated against other measurements rather than measured directly.

That is a real gap, and it is worth knowing about, because every claim you will read about a perfume's projection rests on it.

What this means for you

You cannot design for projection from a note list. The model needs quantities — actual percentages of actual materials — and no consumer product publishes them. Neither does most of what you will buy as a hobbyist.

What you can do is recognise that the thing someone else smells is not the thing you smell, and that testing your own perfume by holding your wrist to your nose is measuring the wrong field entirely.

10 · Getting it out of the bottle

Everything up to here has been about the liquid. This section is about the moment it stops being liquid, which is where a good deal of received wisdom lives without much behind it.

Spray, roll, or dab

The three delivery methods differ in one measurable way: how much surface area the liquid has when it lands.

An atomiser breaks the perfume into a mist. A given volume divided into small droplets has far more total surface area than the same volume in a single drop, and evaporation happens at a surface — so spraying can increase evaporation during and immediately after application.

A roll-on or a dab puts the same volume down as a film or a bead. Less surface, slower ethanol loss, less initial release, more of the perfume still on the skin a minute later.

⚠️ The full release profile also depends on the atomiser, the formulation, the ambient conditions, and how much of the spray reaches skin rather than the air. Surface area is the mechanism; it is not the whole calculation.

Neither is better. They are different release profiles, and a formula that works as a spray may be overwhelming as an oil applied to the same spot.

Pulse points, and why they are not magic

The conventional advice is to apply to wrists, neck, behind the ears — places where blood vessels run close to the surface.

The mechanism is straightforward: those areas are warmer, and vapour pressure rises with temperature. A material evaporates faster from warm skin than cool skin. That is all “pulse point” means.

Warmth can increase evaporation, which would mean more projection early and less later. ⚠️ But whether ordinary pulse-point temperature differences measurably change perceived longevity, I have not found a study that establishes — the mechanism is plausible and the magnitude is unmeasured.

⚠️ The interesting question is not whether warmth affects evaporation — it does. It is whether the temperature difference between ordinary application sites is large enough to matter perceptibly. I have not found a source that measures that, so treat the practical advice as an expectation rather than a result.

“Don't rub your wrists together”

This is repeated everywhere, usually with the explanation that rubbing breaks the top notes.

⚠️ There is no reason to think ordinary rubbing chemically destroys anything. The energies involved are nowhere near what breaking a chemical bond requires.

The advice may still be sound for a different reason. Rubbing spreads the liquid over more skin, works it into the surface, and adds a little heat — all of which increase the rate of evaporation, and all of which would compress the opening rather than destroy it.

⚠️ I have not found a source that measures this either way. I am reasonably confident the usual explanation is wrong and moderately confident the practice is still worth following, which is an uncomfortable place to leave it, but it is where the evidence leaves it.

Skin against fabric

The same perfume on skin and on a shirt is not the same experiment.

Skin is warm, moves, and absorbs — materials partition into skin lipids at different rates, and what is absorbed is not available to evaporate from the surface. Fabric is a different substrate: fibres retain and release fragrance materials in their own way, the surface is chemically different, and it sits at room temperature rather than body temperature.

Which is why a perfume can last dramatically longer on a scarf than on a neck, and why the version on fabric often smells subtly different. The difference does not require the perfume to be chemically transformed by skin — substrate, temperature, absorption and release can change what reaches the nose without any reaction taking place.

Worth knowing when you evaluate: testing on a paper strip tells you about the perfume, and testing on skin tells you about the perfume on you. The second is what you will be wearing — and the fragrance oil guide makes the same point about why a blotter overstates longevity, since paper sits at room temperature and skin does not.

And you are standing in the wrong place

The point section 9 leaves you with. Holding your own wrist to your nose measures the field a few centimetres from the source. Nobody else will ever smell that.

If you want to know what your perfume does, ask someone at conversational distance. It is a different measurement, and it is the one that matters.

11 · What you are allowed to make

Three separate things govern this, and conflating them is the most common mistake in hobbyist writing.

• IFRA standards are industry safety standards. They are not law. They are developed by the fragrance industry's own association, and compliance is largely a condition of doing business through the supply chain rather than a legal requirement in itself.
• Regulations are law. In the EU, the Cosmetic Products Regulation[6] and CLP; in the US, the FDA's cosmetic rules, including the obligations introduced by MoCRA in 2022.
• Supplier documentation — safety data sheets, certificates of conformity, allergen declarations — is product-specific information about the material in your hand.

For anything you intend other people to use, you may need information from all three. IFRA compliance does not make you legally compliant, and legal compliance does not mean IFRA-compliant.

Category 4 in practice

For fine fragrance on skin, the Category 4 limit for each material in your blend is the constraint. Section 5 has the arithmetic; the practical points are:

• The limit is per material, expressed as a percentage of the finished product
• The most restricted material in your blend sets the ceiling for the whole formula
• A commercially compounded fragrance oil has its own product-specific documentation, which is not the same thing as documentation for each raw material inside it — and does not amount to a full disclosure of the formula

⚠️ If you build your own accord from individual materials, you become responsible for the calculation across all of them, including constituents that appear in more than one component and are therefore double-counted. That is a genuinely harder problem than it looks, and it is the main practical reason a first perfume is easier from a pre-compounded oil.

The standards move

This is the part worth internalising: a fragrance formula is not a static recipe. Materials that were unrestricted become restricted, and materials that were restricted become prohibited.

Lilial — where IFRA and EU law disagree outright

Butylphenyl methylpropional, sold as Lilial, is the clearest recent example, and it is worth the detail because the two instruments give different answers.

The IFRA Standard for p-tert-Butyl-α-methylhydrocinnamic aldehyde (p-BMHCA), published 2020 (Amendment 49), is a restriction / prohibition: prohibited outright in Categories 1 and 6 — lipsticks and oral care — and restricted elsewhere. Its published maxima include 1.4% in Category 4 and 16% in Category 12.[8]

That pair of numbers is the whole of “skin contact changes the rules” in one material. The same aldehyde, the same bottle, an eleven-fold difference in what you may use — decided entirely by whether it is going into a candle or onto skin.

EU law is stricter than both. Commission Regulation (EU) 2021/1902 of 29 October 2021 added it to Annex II — the prohibited list — of the Cosmetic Products Regulation, as entry 1666, “2-(4-tert-butylbenzyl) propionaldehyde”, CAS 80-54-6, applying from 1 March 2022.[9]

Oakmoss — restricted because of two constituents

Oakmoss is the older example, and the draft version of this section had it right. The IFRA Standard for Oakmoss extracts, 2020 (Amendment 49), is a restriction / specification with the intrinsic property driving the risk given as dermal sensitisation. The standard states the basis in its own words: “For Oakmoss and Treemoss extracts, the restrictions in the Standards are directly linked to the presence of Atranol and Chloroatranol in the finished products.” It sets 0.10% in Category 4, requires that atranol and chloroatranol each stay below 100 ppm in the extract, and requires that oakmoss extracts contain no added treemoss.[10]

Those two constituents are why the chypre family had to be rebuilt.

Allergen declaration

The EU requires certain fragrance allergens to be named on the label above threshold concentrations, and the list was substantially extended by Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 of 26 July 2023, which added new entries to Annex III of the Cosmetic Products Regulation.[11]

The transitional dates are worth knowing because the first has already passed: products not complying with the new requirements could be placed on the market until 31 July 2026, and made available on the market until 31 July 2028.[11]

⚠️ These figures are for cosmetic products under the EU regime. The fragrance oil guide covers CLP hazard labelling, which is a different regime answering a different question — do not transfer figures between them.

The US: MoCRA

MoCRA's obligations attach to cosmetic products on the market. FDA defines the responsible person as “the manufacturer, packer, or distributor of a cosmetic product whose name appears on the label”. Manufacturers and processors must register their facilities and renew every two years, and the responsible person must list each marketed product with its ingredients and update annually.[12]

FDA states that “MoCRA exempts certain small businesses from GMP, registration, and product listing requirements” — with the exemption not extending to products that contact the mucous membrane of the eye, injectables, products for internal use, or products that alter appearance for more than 24 hours without consumer removal.[12]

⚠️ FDA's overview does not address cosmetics made purely for personal use and never placed on the market, so this guide does not state a position on that. If you intend to give away or sell what you make, read the exemption criteria against your own situation rather than assuming a hobby scale puts you outside the rules.

Yourself, a gift, or a sale

If you make perfume strictly for your own use, the labelling and market-placement obligations that apply to products supplied to others do not apply in the same way.

⚠️ But the line is not “did money change hands”. “Placing on the market” is a defined regulatory concept — the first making available of a product on the market, where making available means supply on the market.[6] It is not simply whether money changed hands, and it is not simply whether the bottle left your house. A product supplied commercially, or distributed as part of a business, can trigger obligations without an ordinary retail sale.

⚠️ Where a genuinely private one-off gift falls is a question for someone qualified to answer it, and we are not. Read the current regulation rather than a secondary source — including this page.

The requirement that stops most people

A perfume worn on skin is a cosmetic product under Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, and Article 10 requires a safety assessment and a Cosmetic Product Safety Report before the product is placed on the market.[14]

The rest of the set, for a cosmetic placed on the EU market: a Responsible Person established in the EU, whose name and address appear on the label; the safety assessment and safety report; a Product Information File kept available to authorities; CPNP notification before placing on the market; and good manufacturing practice. None of those is satisfied by an IFRA certificate, which is the distinction the top of this page draws.

12 · Why any of this exists

Two hundred years ago, a perfumer's palette was largely constrained by what nature produced and what could be extracted from it.

Materials were pressed, distilled, or steeped out of plants and animals. They were expensive, variable between harvests, and limited to what happened to exist. A perfumer's skill was substantially the skill of sourcing.

Synthetic organic chemistry removed the constraint. From the second half of the nineteenth century, materials that had been isolated from plants could be made — coumarin and vanillin among the earliest — and materials that had never existed at all could be invented.

That changed three things at once.

• Consistency. A synthesised material is the same every time. A distilled one is not.
• Cost. Materials that had been the preserve of the wealthy became affordable.
• And range. Modern perfumery is built substantially on materials with no natural equivalent — Iso E Super, Ambroxan, Hedione — that a perfumer of 1850 could not have imagined because they do not occur.

That last point is why a home formulator cannot reproduce a commercial fragrance from a note list. Some of what is in it is proprietary, some is available only to the house that commissioned it, and some is described on the packaging by a name with no relationship to what is actually in the bottle. The fragrance oil guide covers why.

⚠️ Perfume history is told mostly through brand narratives, and the dates and firsts get repeated between sources without anyone returning to a primary record. I have kept this section short and general for that reason. Where you see a confident claim about the first perfume to use a particular material, treat it as marketing until you find a source that is not selling something.

Sources

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