If you’re just getting started in natural perfumery, you’ve probably noticed that different instructors have very different approaches. Some work with materials at full strength, while others rely heavily on dilutions. I fall firmly into the second camp. And in this post, I’m going to walk you through why.

Diluting your natural perfume materials isn’t just a matter of preference. It’s a foundational practice that will help you train your nose, preserve your health, save money, and create better perfumes. Here’s why I think it matters so much:

1. For health, safety, and longer work sessions

Whether you're actively formulating or just keeping your nose in shape, natural perfumery involves a lot of smelling. Like a marathoner who runs daily or a musician who practices scales, a natural perfumer is constantly training their sense of smell.

But here’s the thing: your nose and brain can only handle so much at full strength. Strong smells lead to faster fatigue, and too much exposure to undiluted materials can irritate your nose and even affect your health. If you’re always smelling everything neat, it won’t be long before your nose taps out.

To paraphrase Santa in A Christmas Story: you'll burn your olfactory bulb out, kid.

Diluting your materials (typically in ethanol) lightens the load on your nose. It lets you evaluate more materials in a single session without becoming overwhelmed or nose-blind halfway through.

2. To evaluate materials more effectively

Let’s say you’ve just received some new natural perfume materials - maybe a few absolutes, resinoids, or essential oils. Of course you’re excited to smell them, and dipping a blotter directly into the neat material can give you a sense of what it’s like in its raw state.

But here’s the problem: natural perfumes are always diluted to some degree. What you smell in the bottle isn’t what you’ll smell in the final perfume. Dilution reveals new facets and interactions that just don’t show up when the material is undiluted. If you want to understand how a material will behave in a finished natural perfume, you need to evaluate it the same way it will be used: diluted.

3. To manage potency and overcome biases

Some natural perfumery materials are intensely strong. A tiny amount can completely dominate a blend, and in some cases, materials must safely be used at low percentages.

Other materials may have a challenging scent profile and aren’t exactly love at first sniff. But that doesn’t mean they’re not useful. When you dilute a strong or off-putting material, you might uncover something beautiful or subtle you hadn’t noticed before. And you’ll start to see how it can support and enhance other notes in a blend.

Diluting is also a good way to work past personal bias. Just because you didn’t like a material neat doesn’t mean it won’t play a valuable role in your natural perfume compositions.

4. To save money and reduce waste

Here’s a reality check: natural perfumery is expensive. Even small quantities of high-quality absolutes, essential oils, and CO2 extracts can add up quickly.

If you start blending with materials at full strength, you’ll waste a lot more than you need to. That makes an already pricey hobby even more costly. Diluting your materials means you can do more trials with less product. You’ll stretch your budget further, and you’ll develop your formulas more efficiently.

5. To handle sticky or viscous materials

Some natural perfume ingredients are a pain to work with. Cocoa absolute, vanilla absolute, myrrh resinoid, immortelle, clary sage absolute, and the list goes on. They’re thick, sticky, and slow to pour. Getting even a small amount out of the bottle can be frustrating.

By diluting a portion of these materials ahead of time, you make them easier to measure, easier to evaluate, and much more pleasant to work with. You'll spend less time struggling and more time focused on the creative process.

6. To build better perfumery habits

Working with diluted materials helps you adopt professional practices from the start. You'll get used to weighing materials, writing formulas in a consistent way, and creating blends that are scalable and reproducible.

Then, when you’re ready to create a final perfume based on your experiments, you can use neat materials in your concentrate and let them mature before going through the maceration (final perfume dilution) process.

Good habits early on will save you time and headaches down the road. If you're serious about natural perfumery, this is the path to confident, consistent creation.

So if you’ve been wondering whether to dilute your materials, here’s your answer: yes. Your nose will thank you, your formulas will improve, and your wallet might sigh in relief.

In future blog posts, I’ll walk you through how to calculate dilutions, how to use a scale in your perfumery practice, and how to handle materials that are notoriously tricky to dilute.

If this post was helpful, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss the next one.