It’s the subtle things that separate a house from a home. Like the fresh scent in your drawers and your closets. Or perhaps the spice undertone that warms up the kitchen. Remember, it’s your space. Make sure you enjoy everything about it.

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Stretching Your Fragrance Oils in 2008 & Making Gift Sets Making a Room Spray, Reed Diffuser bottle, Hand Sanitizer & having scent left over for Aroma warmers and/or even bath salts or a body spray-with mainly a 2 ounce Boston Round of Fragrance oil and one 8 ounce Boston Round Bottle of Fragrance oil! An extra 8 ounce Boston Round of fragrance oil if you want a sanitizer bottle too. Cost? under $20.  Value as a gift set?  $48 And your scents are far superior than commercial scents, and can be simply refilled for each season.  Follow the purple font if you want to go right to "how" and skip "why" it works.

You can stretch your fragrance oils for everything but candles and aroma warmers with alcohol.  The key to doing it right includes starting out with a quality scent that possesses the crisp, top and clear notes that you just love.  My favorite comfort scent is Fresh Cut Grass fragrance oil-I developed in 2004, very crisp and uplifting, not made from a muddled floral, but made from essential oils.  Unfortunately most manufacturers copies of my signature scent have been gross.  Mine is based on essential oils and I find it heaven, like being taken away to the country-even if you are in a tall high rise with no green anywhere in sight.  Fresh Cut Grass can also be blended with clear florals, such as Lilac fragrance oil or Rose fragrance oil.  So, your dilutions are only as good as your base.  This is true with just about anything.  I also like the crisp and clean top notes of McIntosh Apple Fragrance Oil.  Lavender fragrance oil and Clean Cotton fragrance oils are also big sellers.

Stretch them with what?  De-natured alcohol for anything but aroma warmers and candles-use straight oil in those.  You can basically take a good scent, use 1/2 for candles and/or aroma warmers, and the other half for room sprays-using the bottle it came in-and any left over for reed sticks. 2 ounce bottles of fragrance oil came in can be made into a room sprayer and 8 ounce bottles the fragrance oil came in can be made into a room reed diffuser - that will artfully hold reed sticks!  So you would just need an extra sprayer 20/410 neck size and reed sticks to make a few matching items.  You can take just a few drops of the fragrance and make a general counter/handle sanitizer.

A quick summary on making perfume and you will understand that can mean room sprays and other scent related final products:

Making Perfume or Any Fragrance

Perfume and cologne are always dropped into an alcohol base which makes them "bloom."  When making perfume you create your scent in an oil base-using essential oils or other scent soaked oils and keep working at it until you find the pleasing "scent."  When you have done that-20%-30% of it gets dropped into alcohol which makes it even more glorious and pronounced.  It does not take from your creation as you would think.  When I am making perfume, I use fragrance oils as well as essential oils and even oil I soak in incense and woods!  I make careful notes as to what scent, how many drops and the source.  I do this on a small level.  A few drops of this and a few drops of that.  When it is perfect-I duplicate it in much larger amounts.  Sources of your esters and scents are important.  This is because very sources vary on their "interpretation" of say even a vanilla note-and may throw your final creation "off" if you make the next one from a different source.

Stretching for Room Sprays, Reed Diffusers and Sanitizing

Not really stretching because alcohol enhances all of the notes in your scent and is the "throwing" agent in any good reed kit.  Since you use about 1/2 fragrance oil I will call it Stretching.  De-natured alcohol is Ethanol with maybe a small change so people do not drink it.  You can buy denatured alcohol for as little as $14 a gallon from a science supply house. Do make sure it is not denatured with notes of cinnamon.  I always call first.   It is VERY flammable in large sizes-so be careful where you keep it and how you store it.  When I am in a hurry-I just buy 191 proof Everclear or Mohawk from the liquor store.  It is about $20 for 30 ounces.  If I could get a gallon of Ethanol I would do that, but I think it has been denatured with the fragrance oil gasoline.  Gasoline does not smell bad!  They scent it with a standard yucky scent.  Setting 1/2 your fragrance aside for direct use-such as aroma warmers...and using the other 1/2 of the fragrance oil and your bottle too!

Room Sprays  50-50 Fragrance & alcohol is GREAT for Room Sprays.  It disinfects where it lands and prevents any oil slicks on floors or linens. You do not need Polysorbate 20 or Polysorbate 80 to keep it clear. It WILL be clear!  And you do not need to use a preservative because the alcohol kills anything.  Although I do love the Polys, I watch expenses these days-when you can get alcohol local and avoid needing a preservative-GREAT! If you can buy 2 ounce Boston Rounds a sprayer will fit with the right neck size which is 20/410.  You cut the bottom tube down to size. If you buy our scents you already have these empty bottles!

Aroma Diffuser 50-50 Fragrance & alcohol is GREAT for Aroma Diffusion  You would use an 8 ounce Boston round bottle and tie something cute around the neck-such as a ribbon. Use the cap while in transit and the ribbon around the sticks while in transit. A ribbon around the sticks makes the "gift" look like a gift.   You can cut sticks down to size.  I use about 18 sticks.

Disinfecting Solution  90 Alcohol and 10 Fragrance ratio works best for this.  We scent our alcohol to make a great disinfectant.  We buy 90% proof or higher and just add a few pipettes of any scent we like such as Lemon essential oil.  The higher the proof the better.  It will smell great.  We keep these solutions in pretty hand painted finger glass bottles near all sinks.  We wipe anything "touched" down with that.   The musical chairs game of flu stopped in 1996 when we started this practice.  No one has caught anything from our work areas in years.  A squirt top would be most handy for this-if you want to use the 8 ounce Boston Round fragrance bottle.  Neck size is 24/410 if you can find a squirt type top. These are also known as "PolyTops."
 

Leftover scent:  You can take a bit of scent and mix them into bath salts, lotion or creme.

Everything starts with a good fragrance oil, whether you are making candles, potpourris, oil warmers, bath products or other home scenting.  What we see consumers fail to understand most is the fragrance oil they get in local shops is only 30% as strong as what we sell.  After using true high quality oils, we are pretty shocked to see the watered down versions offered in commercial environments.  You can use our high quality oils for bath products as well as candles and in the home aromatherapy section.  If you are willing to spend $19.95 on a Yankee Candle that lasts a week, why not buy a pound of our oil that will last you a month or better?  Cutting is different than "stretching."  We do not cut our oils with DPG or any other agent.  Many fragrance houses do because your nose only has a certain threshold to smell scent.  DPG is cheap-like $5 a gallon.  Ask if they cut their fragrance oils before you spend money on junk.  How to tell if you have been DPG'd?  The fragrance starts to smell awful after just a few hours in an aroma warmer and does not last for a few days as it should.  Another obvious way to tell if is your fragrance oil generates smoke.  You can also put some on a piece of paper and see how that smells a week later.  It should still smell like what you bought a week later on paper.  Our fragrance oils are good for body as well as home use.   Click here to see our new fragrance line or here for a Fragrance Co-Op we started.  Co-Op Link.

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Bamboo Reeds

Here is  a new and fashionable idea for fragrance throw.  Pour about 4 ounces (about 1/3 way up the bottle) of your favorite fragrance oil into a pretty old fashioned apothecary bottle.  Insert ten 18" Bamboo reed sticks.  Arrange the reeds to fan out.   I placed the artsy object in my guest bathroom so I could really tell if this works.  It was splendid.

Within 24 hours you will notice the Bamboo absorbed the oil and did a great job on throwing fragrance.  Quality fragrance oil should throw scent for about 4 weeks. Click here for our Bamboo Reeds and here for our fragrance oils.

Fragrance Oil Blending: Making 200 Scents from 30 Basic Scents   

The idea had so much merit to me, I conducted much research on the web.  At one point I was getting very frustrated and started searching for a two week school that may teach the fine art.  I was willing to go wherever a school was, even if in another country.  Long story short, there is no such school!  Back to the web,  I noticed that no one really writes about how to make the blends.  After grueling research and real life experimentation, I came up with about 30 base fragrance oils that make over 200 scents, using the best oils possible.  Based upon this data I made a fragrance oil blending chart.  To mix your own full line of oils, you need larger quantities of some fragrance oils than others.  For example, vanilla is in so many formulas, that to carry a full mixing palette you need more of vanilla than any one oil.  I came up with 84 ounces total in the amounts needed to mix any of the 200 scents.  This is just short of six pounds of fragrance oils.     I created a Fragrance Oil Blending Chart in the back of the newly revised "Self Apothecary"  Book.  Click here for that book.   

Custom Fragrance Oil Blending is so handy, you could almost offer a good shampoo, bath gel, or lotion base and custom mix them with fragrance oils as needed.  This means you would not have to mix any base item unless you know it is sold. Even I change my personal tastes, so I would mix a new batch every few weeks with perhaps a new fragrance.  Customer's and/or family members love to know that an product has been custom made for them.  I think this is how Bath and Body Works got their start until they began selling ready made tubes of the best sellers. Personally, I am happy to know how to blend just for my own home use.  The knowledge of fragrance oil blending is truly the most empowering area of making your own candles and soaps.  I add fragrance oils to just about everything but shampoo these days.  I am finding I have to draw the line on my seriously processed hair leaving that to the experts. 

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This book shows you how to use a small amount of essential oils for the maximum benefit as well as how to easily formulate other natural cleaning solutions.  From the vacuum cleaner, to the kitchen sink, this is an excellent and comprehensive book.  Once the theories are applied you can smell the wonderful benefits!