After an inspiring phone call the other morning, I'm finally going to be running the first of the promised workshops on perfumery on the 4th of July here in my Byron Bay studio!People have been asking me for ages when I'm going to be running classes...but it's taken me a while to work out what I can actually offer.
Teaching perfumery is a BIG project. Realistically, trying to condense my 30 years of experience into a few one day workshops just isnt possible.
But what I can do is offer lessons in where to start, and give people the opportunity to talk, ask questions, and above all to play with some of the essential ingredients and bases used in perfumery in a real perfume studio.
So that's what I'm going to do.We're going to look at the basic way a botanical perfume is created:
-the difference between aromatherapy and botanical perfumery
- the different types of scented ingredients (essential oils, absolutes, CO2 extracts, alcoholic tinctures)
-the different bases used and how to choose whether to work in oil or alcohol
-how a perfume is actually made
-the basics of scent design
-what top middle and base notes are
-how to classify different oils
and most importantly:
-how to evaluate individual oils to see how they will work in a perfume
As part of this,we'll be looking at a number of commonly used ingredients and I'll be talking about the botanical and aromatherapy effects of each oil, their historical and spiritual uses, as well as their qualities from a perfumers point of view.And we will then experiment with combining them in different ways to achieve different effects.
The idea is to give you a real understanding of how to approach the process of creating a perfume useing botanical ingredients.
Each participant will go home with a hopefully much better understanding of the process of perfumery, notes and hints on the ingredients we've used and some little bottles of the perfume blends we've worked with to further work with at home.
The cost for the workshop is $500 which includes all of the materials used in the class and the finished blends to take home.
If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, send me an email at
[email protected]
