Fragrance making workshop!

Today we had Sarah McCartney from 4160 Tuesdays come in to give us insights into the fragrance industry, and honestly I found it so interesting! She started off in the morning giving us a lecture on what she is all about as a perfumist and what perfumes she made! It was really insightful finding out how perfume differentiates across the market from indie perfumes to designer perfumes. There is a few key perfumists in the industry who work for agencies who create perfumes for pretty much everyone! This wasnt something that had even crossed my mind so this was interesting ti find out! I really liked how Sarah works and this had made me feel more inspired with this brief! Before researching into perfume I never looked at it as telling a story, I thought of it as just smelly water but today has really opened my eyes to see perfume as something much more than that! Sarah works by creating a story and then creating the scent to fit this, for example she talked about a project she worked on with Peroni who wanted a unique scent for their launch party. Sarah then thought of a story that fit with Peroni - in this case 1960s Rome and thought of every scent imaginable that related to this - from tobacco to chocolate and white flowers, and the perfume was born from this story! I felt like this was a really interesting way of working.

When it came to creating our own fragrance I didnt really know where to start! All the different scents were a bit overwhelming and I had no clue what works with what but after a lot of sniffing I narrowed down what was my favourite scents personally and went round this! I wanted the fragrance to be something bright and fresh as these are the kind of scents I like to wear and future thinking is something I'd like to market.

After wafting about and sniffing about a hundred previous combinations we settled with a mix of - ISO E SUPER (50%) this was a very faint smelling mixture which made the fragnrance smell long lasting and airy rather than really sharp and overwhelming.

- Tangerine (20%) - this is the dominating smell in our fragrance and the one which most influenced our story.

- Creamy plum (20%) - This was sort of a musky smell but balanced out the sweet tangerine and vanilla notes to create a smooth smell, this also made the scent more grown up as the end product wasnt overlly sweet and childlike.

- Vanilla (10%) - Right from the offset me and my group decided one of our favourite scents was the vanilla but by itself was far too sweet and smelt like something you'd get in a kids magazine so we spent alot of time mixing this with different scents to get the scent we desired. We only put a small amount of the vanilla in because it was quite over powering we didn't want this to be the dominant smell.

OUR STORY