Start date: 12 May 2025

Duration: 12 months plus additional 18 months access to course material. All course notes can be downloaded. All virtual classes are recorded and available to watch online during the course.

Cost: £1250

Safety, good working practices and training your nose

• Your work environment and preparation of your workstation.

• Safety considerations and hazards of working with perfumery materials.

• Safety assessment (practical work).

• Shelf-life and storage of natural perfumery materials.

• Essential tools and equipment for your perfumery work.

• The sense of smell.

• Smell like a perfumer: organoleptic evaluation of perfumery ingredients and fragrances (practical work).

• Developing your olfactory memory (practical work).

• Perfumery language and Glossary.

• Recording your perfumery journey: organoleptic evaluations, trials, formulae and modifications (practical work).

Know your ingredients

• Raw materials in natural perfumery: The sources of aromatic materials, solvents, bases, waxes and oils.

• Extraction methods and their products: Distillation, expression, solvent extraction, CO2 extraction, enfleurage, maceration, tincturing and others.

• Odour classification into aromatic groups.

• The importance of aromatic groups in perfumery studies.

• Safety data sheets (SDS/MSDS), certificates of analyses (CoA), technical data sheets (TDS), allergen declarations, IFRA certificates, GCMS (practical work).

• Sustainability of natural ingredients.

Perfume Creation

• Working with dilutions vs. working with pure materials.

• Calculating percentages (practical work).

• Accurate measurement – weight vs volume (practical work).

• Perfume notes – What are they, what do they mean, how do we use them?

• Volatility and the fragrance pyramid; perfume structure.

• Accord creation (practical work).

• Formulation: Concentration, hydroalcoholic, oil-based and solid perfumes (practical work).

• Perfume evaluation: Modifications and corrections.

• Chilling and filtering.

• Essential maths for perfume creation.

The chemistry of perfumery materials

• Basic chemistry and glossary.

• Why is chemistry important for the perfumer?

• Hydrocarbons.

• Functional groups containing other elements.

• Stability of perfumes.

The history and classification of perfumes

• A brief history of perfume.

• Perfume classification into fragrance families.

• The Citrus/Hesperides family.

• The Floral family.

• The Ambrée family.

• The Woody family.

• The Chypre family.

• The Fougère family.

• Other fragrance families.

• Design formulae for each fragrance family (practical work).

Working with natural isolates

• What are natural isolates and how are they different from other perfume materials?

• Extraction and production methods.

• Using natural isolates in your perfumes (practical work).

Develop your creativity

• Creative techniques.

• Beyond the classic fragrance families.

• Explore the relationship between scent and texture, music, literature, history, nature, art and science (practical work).

• Creating powder, smoke, animalic, leather, musk, fruity, ozonic and marine notes using only natural materials.

Research methods

• The problem with the internet.

• The good, the bad and the ugly. Using critical thinking to assess what you find on the internet.

• Books, industry publications and scientific journals.

• How to find out more about perfume materials, investigate claims about them, and stay on top of new developments in the industry (practical work).

Final Course Project

• Bringing it all together: From a vague idea to a final perfume, stability testing and scaling up.

• There will be a special class dedicated to this topic with plenty of time for Q&As.

Additional Content: Introduction to safety and cosmetic regulations

• IFRA

• UK and EU regulations

• Other countries

Includes an online welcome event and ten live tutorials. Students taking this course will be given the opportunity to book one to one coaching sessions at reduced rates, but these are not necessary for the completion of the course.

IMPORTANT: Perfumery ingredients are not included in the price.

Perfumery materials studied include: ambrette seed, amyris, angelica root, benzoin, bergamot, bergamot mint and the mint family, black pepper, cabreuva wood, cardamom, cedarwood Atlas, cedarwood Virginia, cinnamon, clary sage, clove bud, coriander seed, fir balsam and the conifers family, frankincense, galbanum, geranium, ginger, grapefruit, guaiacwood, hay, ho leaf, jasmine Grandiflorum, jasmine Sambac, juniperberry, labdanum, lavender, lime, litsea cubeba, mandarin, mimosa, myrrh, neroli, nutmeg, oakmoss, orange flower, orange sweet, orris, osmanthus, patchouli, petitgrain, pink pepper, rose Centifolia, rose Damascena, rosemary, sandalwood, tobacco, tonka bean, tuberose, vanilla and other vanillic ingredients, vetiver, violet leaf, ylang ylang.

In addition, you’ll study 22 natural isolates during the course. However, we realise that some students don’t want to work with isolates and prefer to work with “whole” ingredients only. For this reason, students won’t be expected to work with nautural isolates but they’ll still be expected to study and understand the theory behind these materials.

Please note that, in many cases, you’ll study several extracts produced from the same raw material, e.g., red and green mandarin, lavender essential oil and absolute, etc. Please have a look the school’s perfumery kit to find out what perfumery materials we recommend for the course. Students enrolled in any of our courses can purchase a heavily subsidised perfumery kit HERE.

CLICK HERE for a list of suppliers.

CLICK HERE for a list of essential tools and equipment.

CLASS SCHEDULE to be announced.