Perfume Making: Beginner's Guide to Making Natural Perfume By Mixing Different Essential Oils and Discovering Different Scent Combinations from the Comfort of Your Own Home Paperback – February 15, 2020

I give this book a rating of two stars simply because I am a beginner in this subject, so I will not take away from learning a few new details about perfume making. However, the format causes the book to not be very informative once information starts to repeat itself throughout the book. Instead of repeating information it would have been helpful if the author could have found a way to elaborate on the subjects that they wanted to emphasize !

I chose this book to help broaden my skills, and better help myself with the understanding of the art of perfumery.

This book offered nothing more than what one can find on a quick online search. The author repeated the same information over and over again. A waste of money.

I was expecting it to be more than it was based off the description. I read too much into it.

This book was a fool. Didn’t teach you a lot and EXTREMELY repetitive !!

Repetitive and nonsensical. You will learn MUCH more surfing the internet or even just using common sense and playing with essential oils.

Too simple

I would give this negative 10 if I could.This author gives completely false information. I’m a novice when it comes to creating natural perfumes (I’ve only been dabbling for @3 years) but even I know many of the things told here are absolutely not factual and make it clear this author did less than 5 minutes of research online to write this book. She learned just enough to tell you all the common misconceptions that permeate the internet these days. Things I learned in my first day’s foray into essential oils and later learned came from just more ignorant people passing on a proliferation of falsehoods based on knowing only enough to be dangerous. (Heck maybe she only read Amazon reviews, that’s where I 1st heard about the so called Paper Test!)1. The “paper test” for determining if EO’s are real is a huge simplification & misleading, it’s taken from a Portion of a valid article Without proper context & could lead you to assuming fake oils are real and vice versa. Certain viscous EOs can leave an oily looking stain, such as sandalwood, so not always true. It also misleads you to think if an EO doesn’t leave a stain it’s real - Also not true. Plenty of fake EOs don’t leave an oily stain. I got suckered into buying a bunch of fake EOs on Amazon because of all the people spreading this fake paper test around as truth. To see an author of a book about the subject spouting the same nonsense is reprehensible!It would have been better to give a generalization that is true, such as any EO company whose EOs are ALL the same color & thickness, i.e. clear & thin are selling fake or diluted EOs. EOs come in all different viscosities & colors, from water thin to paste thick. From clear to gold, green, orange, red, blue & every shade of brown there is, I think purple is the only color I haven’t seen, though Blue Tansy is a very dark cobalt blue. Also, the adage if the price is too good to be true, it usually is. Or the more exotic or rare the oil, the higher the price. You can NOT get a 10ml bottle of real Jasmine absolute for less than $75. & that’s with a once a year 20% off sale most likely! (Don’t lose heart, though, you can buy a smaller bottle for less or buy quality, properly diluted in a carrier oil version for much less. Note - if you use a diluted oil, you’d want to make an oil based perfume, not a water & alcohol base perfume, but personally, I think that’s even easier to do. Less messy & cheaper too)You’ll want to Look for EO company that is transparent, meaning they tell all - list the latin name & variant of the oil, the country of origin, the method of extraction & have Independent test reports Easily Available (MS/GC tests) - not just people who say they test, but those that have the tests - and not on their own letterhead!. That’s your most fool proof method of getting real & quality EOs. You don’t have to break the bank with the mega high prices of the MLM companies (multi level marketing = multi levels of unnecessary markup!), like Dotterra & Young Living but you don’t the cheap fakes like Lagunamoon, Artizen, Gya Labs, Radha, Florona, Hana, etc or Cheap & adulterated’s like Majestic, Woolzies, Guru Nanda, etc., the possibly suspect diluted like Now,& Healing Solutions, just to name a few. The most reasonably priced REAL EO’s that I’ve found here on Amazon are Plant Therapy, Edens Garden & Miracle Botanicals. The best that specifically supplies the perfumer’s industry that sells retail is Eden Botanicals. They’ll also have a bigger selection of variants & more obscure oils like Tuberose, Osmanthus, Violet Odarata, etc. & some exquisite variations of jasmine, rose & neroli that you can get 100% or diluted in a carrier oil at an affordable price for the novice perfumer to play with in oil based perfumes, as well as being a huge source of information that’s accurate, practical & professionalIf someone sells just ‘sandalwood’ or ‘‘Cedarwood’ or ‘jasmine’ etc. you don’t know what you’re getting & it’s a good tell something wonky is going on. Sandalwood comes in at least 3 types (Indian/Mysore, Australian & Hawaiian) & just fyi, most Indian Sandalwood isn’t grown in India anymore, but rather Australia, Caledonia & other places. Cedarwood EO comes in at least 4 plus variants - Atlas, Himalaya, Texas & Virginia. Jasmine is normally Grandiflorum or Sambac, the day or night blooming varieties & is not technically an EO but an absolute. Absolutes are made By solvent extraction as opposed to the usual steam distilled or cold pressed methods used for most other common oils. (You also want to be sure if it’s hexane free solvent extraction or not, if you’re planning on using your jasmine absolute for diffusing as well as perfume). If someone’s selling steam distilled Jasmine, dollars to doughnuts it’s not real. Even the relatively inexpensive Lavender comes in a whole slew of variants, mostly steam distilled, though absolute & CO2 extractions are available. See! There’s a lot more to know about EOs than a simple & inaccurate Paper test.2. She tells people about using distilled water & regular water with EOs & citrus peels to save on money. A. Regular water can have contaminants which breed bacteria over time & make your “perfume” not sterile. Never use regular water with EOs. B. Most Citrus EOs are among the cheapest EOs there are.3. She talks about using Vodka for making perfyme. This is incorrect. The % of pure alcohol in Vodka is too low. You need to use at least 95% neutral grain spirits, i.e. Everclear (name brand). In 11 states it’s illegal, in RI, you can but it. Otherwise you need to buy “ perfumers alcohol” - you do not want to use Vodka Why? Everclear is 190-proof. That’s 95% alcohol. By comparison, your basic vodka is around 40% alcohol or 80 proof. Everclear has more than twice the alcohol content of Vodka. (Yes some Vodkas are higher proof, but still not as high - only @60 % or 120 proof - as Everclear & they’re probably going to cost way more, so why would you? And to her credit, in one place the author mentions using grain spirits, but in the actual directions for infusing peels she says JUST Vodka. Anyone who akips or skims to the recipes (& don’t ttell me a lot of people don’t!) is going to miss that little fact & it’s the same recipe that has you using tap water, OK?Is that enough to let you know how unqualified this author is on the subject? I couldn’t even finish the book I got so infuriated by all the misinformation found in just the small bit I did read to have to stop & write this review asap, even though I didn’t really have the time, because I didn’t want people to suckered in by this pile of egregious errors.I think it’s great Amazon lets anyone self publish there days, but really, they ought to at least do a little fact checking when it comes to NON fiction because this book definitely belongs in the fiction category.If I had actually paid money, even $2 for this book, I’d feel really cheated. Fortunately it was included in my Kindle Unlimited subscription, so it was only a waste of time, not money, but that was waste enough.Hopefully you’ve learned a little more about how much is involved just in determining what using real essential oils actually is about reading this review than all the misinformation in that so called book. At least enough to know not to waste Your time on it. Here’s an even better source - check out the blogs by some of the reputable companies I mentioned above. They’ve got a lot of good information about amateur perfume making with essential oils than probably most of the books here - and they’re free! I’d start with Eden Botanicals as they’re geared for perfumers as opposed to the others, also good sources though, but their main focus is all the uses for EOs & there’s plenty!