Jenny HandBagz WorkZhop - How Perfume is Made

I Hope U Remember Me when you smell the same scent on the Scarf...

That is left from the Perfume Cream on my hands when I was knitting it...

I am interested to understand the process involved in making Perfume on my 1st visit to Cairo, my dad took us to the Perfume factory. There was long time ago, even the Egyptian seemed never see Chinese Ladies, they kept looking at my sis and me...
Perfume is something many of us wear, and most of us know it involves flowers to use to create a scent.

A Rose in the Grasse Region of France

Most fragrances on the market have a lot of synthetic ingredients. 

So let’s begin with the ingredients. Almost every perfume needs flowers in it, it is very difficult to make a unique scent without a floral essence. Flowers are the most expensive essence as they need to be grown and they have a small yield. Flower essences are actually quite similar to wines in that the flowers will smell differently every year depending on the harvest, like a wine vintage.

Rose yield in Grasse, France

Rose and Jasmine are the indispensable perfumery ingredients, it is really hard to make a perfume without them. 

The Grasse region in France where the rose was grown and harvested. The largest rose fields in the area, 70,000 square metres with 50,000 rose bushes. The fields are owned by Chanel and are used for Chanel No. 5. and they bought the fields, which were originally planted by monks, to ensure that there would be no issues about having sufficient product to put into their perfumes.
Did you know that Chanel is one of the only luxury brands that does not license out their perfume? Almost all luxury brands have specialty perfume companies make and market their perfume (and there are only a handful of big ones in the world, so most designer fragrances come from the same place), whereas Chanel does it in house…Chanel has a habit of doing this sort of thing, they also own seven of the top craft ateliers in France, including A. Michel et Cie (a hat maker), Les Broderies Lesage (one of the most famous embroiderers in the world), Lemarie (who makes feathers and flowers), and Desrue (a company that makes luxury buttons), which ensures they will always have craftsman to make flowers, feathers, and other handmade accessories for their collections. It also protects these crafts from disappearing.

The Rose Harvest

The climate and soil will have a huge impact on the quality of the flower, and therefore affect its scent. Once the rose plant is grown, it needs to be picked at a certain time, often very early in the morning, but late enough that the flower has opened. The rose harvest takes place in May, usually over a span of 3 weeks. Flowers are picked by hand and extracted on site. The harvest is a very delicate process, each bag can only contain a certain number of flowers, so that they don’t crush one another and lose the oils.

Bags of freshly picked roses ready for extraction

The next step is to extract the oils, which must take place immediately after picking. They start by putting layers of petals on a metal layered drum (again, quantities need to be precise, not too much, not too few,) so you end up with layers of trays of flowers. The flowers are then immersed in a solvent for five and a half hours in 30 degrees, usually this solvent is hexane gas. Then the hexane is removed, and what is left over is a floral wax, which looks like a mushy wax that has the oils in it. The oils are essential oils and fatty oils. The fatty oils need to be removed, so the wax is washed with ethanol, and what is left is a material called absolute. This is the process for extraction of rose essence, but they same process is used for jasmine.

Freshly-picked flowers being placed onto the layered metal trays, ready for extraction

Distillation is also another way to get the scent from the flower, plant matter would be inside a big lambic in water and the vapour would rise up. You would then skim the oil off. Rose can be extracted or distilled. Rose water is what is left from the distillation process, as you lose some of the scent into the water. In absolute, which is made from the extraction process, you get all of the aromatic matter in the plant whereas in steam distillation, there is a lot left behind.

Flowers when they are being removed from the extraction machine

A huge amount of plant matter is needed to get a small amount of essential oil, that is why perfume is expensive.

• 1 kilo of roses = 500 flowers
• 400 kilos of rose flowers = 600g of absolute
• a 7.5-15ml bottle of french perfume (not eau de parfum or eau de toilette) would have 20-30% concentration of absolute, so about 1.8ml of absolute which is approx 2g

That equates to about 660 roses to get the scent into that small bottle of perfume.

A few definitions…

• Eau de Toilette contains about 6-10% essential oils in an alcohol and water base.
• Eau de Parfum contains about 11-15% essential oils in an alcohol and water base.
• Perfume (which the highest concentration of essential oils), contains about 20-40% essential oils in an alcohol and water base. (Note that some scents do not have water added.)

Floral essences are also very expensive because they are so labour intense and fragile, a drop of rose costs 1 dollar, and prices fluctuate all the time.
The natural one, it only uses real extracts of rose and jasmine, no synthetics. Sourcing very high quality materials, which are often hard to find and need to be compared. It can take years of training to recognize a good rose and how it should smell. Have to make connections with suppliers around the world to buy the best and purest essences, it just like cooking, perfume starts with quality ingredients.

Chanel's guide to obtaining essence, on the top, using extraction, and on the bottom, using distillation