Perfume is often seen as a last-minute gift that requires little thought. But what if you made your own, unique scents?

Step 1: Materials needed

You will need a vessel to heat water in, a source of heat, gauze or muslin, thread, a delivery tube, a receiving vessel and ice.

You will also need a pretty bottle to store your scent.

For this example, we used a conical flask, a fabric bag of sprigs of lavender plus shredded, a plastic delivery tube and a test-tube in a beaker of cold water. The oil was stored in a film cannister. You may use whatever equipment you can find, at whatever scale you need to produce your scent.

If you are blending oils, you will need a dropper pipette for each raw oil you use.

<p>Here is an actual distiller if you can afford it that works a little better than this. This is a good distiller for normal use if you want to keep it simple.</p>
<p>Oh, that works well, but they usually run at a couple of hundred pounds/dollars (unless you make a lucky ebay find).</p><p>I was keeping it simple for pocket-money scale distilling.</p>
This makes no sense and the pictures are not helpful :(
<p>Which bit in particular is causing an issue?</p>
This looks great. Do you think it would work on catnip?
<p>I think it would, yes.</p>
does anyone know if the oil and water will separate after awhile allowing you to draw off just the pure oil? or could you simmer the extract to leave only the oil behind? (I would really like to try adding to candles, but I also heed the water content warning)
I think the product of this particular method probably more accurately hydosols (like rose water) vice essential oil. The typical yield is less then 0.5% (some cases much less), so really get very little without larger batches. <br> <br>Pretty good explanation here; <br> <br>http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Essential-Oils
OUrs didn't separate into layers, despite standing for nearly 24 hours. Maybe a centrifuge? Or maybe the layer of oil was just too thin to spot in the curve of the meniscus? Maybe you get separable layers in larger volumes?
I think the oil layer was probably very thin. In the sites I have visited about making perfume, they often state that it takes several pounds of leaves or petals to produce even one mL of essential oil. Thankfully, it only takes a few drops to make more than 100mL of perfume. But good instructable!
It doesn't take much to scent the lab, either. I generally arrive to a lab smalling faitly of sulphur and snails. The morning after I took the photos for the Instructable, my lab still smelled like a fresh pillow.
could this work with coffee beans?
I don't know, but I'd try with grounds rather than whole beans if I were you.
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I love this tutorial! However, I have a question...<br>My parents have a garden full of flowers (jasmine, rose, gardenia, geranium...) and I was planning on making a perfume with some of them. Would the distilled oils go off soon (soon=a month or two), or if I mix them with alcohol to make the perfume, would that preserve them? Did the oils you got smell strong enough to be make a good perfume when mixed with alcohol? Thanks
I haven't tried alcohol, so I can't answer that part.<br><br>If you store the oils in the fridge, they should last a month or two - after that, I've never tried.<br><br>Sorry.
in chemistry yesterday, we extracted the limonene from orange peel and lemon peel. 'twas a shame to leave the fruit, tho, so i ended up eating 4 oranges. i don't know why we bothered extracting the oil, really, I myself smell of oranges enough now....

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