Admittedly, I have not cracked the code on this one yet, but I’ve made some strides I’m proud of and I think a natural perfume from our garden (and yours) is highly possible!
My most successful extraction was with Everclear and peach blossoms. I covered the peach blossoms in the Everclear and switched them out after 48 hours three times. when I was done, it still basically smelled like Everclear. But, after it was left to evaporate on its own, it developed more and more fragrance until just the concrete was left. It resembled something like when you leave a glass of wine too long on the counter and it sticks to the vessel, but the remnants of the peach extract smelled like heaven.
The peach concrete compound smelled amazing, but it caught a wild yeast on it when the Everclear wasn’t there to hold it back!
Not knowing enough about the nature of these little interlopers, I’m hesitant to add Everclear back to the glass and then spritz it into the air.
I faced a similar dilemma with the wild violet extract I had been working on when it didn’t evaporate quickly enough, and a biofilm was able to form on top and the yeast was able to grow there, too.
I realized that part of this natural perfume experiment was working, but I needed a faster way to evaporate the alcohol to protect the flower extract from microscopic decomposers.
After a conversation with a fellow master gardener and retired chemist, we came up with a plan to evaporate the alcohol faster by putting the fragrance-laden Everclear in a heat resistant jar, and nesting that heat resistant jar into another slightly wider vessel with tall sides. Then we will pour boiling water around the compound until the bulk of the alchohol evaporates.
This will allow us to get the concrete faster, and renature the compound into an absolute for storage.
After we collect a few of these compounds, we’ll experiment by combining them into a natural perfume, and adding more alcohol until the fragrance mirrors an eau de toi·lette or eau de parfum.
Stay tuned for updates!
