Beginner perfumer · 20
Can you make perfume with just ethanol and essential oils — yes, and the molecules you were avoiding are still in the bottle
· 26 min read
Someone bought a batch of oils and absolutes and asked whether that makes a usable EDP. The 53 replies moved quickly from "can you" to "is what you bought real". I measured the natural content of 953 public formulas: a median of 4.5% by weight, 30% contain no naturals at all, and not one is entirely natural. More interesting still, ylang ylang oil is itself 35.49% linalool — the single most frequent material in the corpus.
Someone posted a list of oils they had just ordered to r/DIYfragrance: agarwood, rose absolute, honeysuckle absolute, benzoin, juniper, vetiver, oakmoss, beeswax, ylang ylang, plus lavender, frankincense, chamomile, eucalyptus and tea tree already in the cupboard. The question: I plan to use Everclear as perfumer's alcohol at 20% oils to 80% alcohol — can I make a usable EDP this way, and did I pick the wrong vendor?
Fifty-three replies. And the discussion moved quickly from "can you make it" to a different question: is what you bought real?
Both questions are worth answering, and both can be checked.
The short version
- You can make something. This is not an attempt to talk anyone out of it, only to be clear about which road you are choosing.
- But across 953 public formulas, naturals account for a median of 4.5% by weight, 30% contain no naturals at all, and not one is entirely natural.
- Working only with naturals does not mean avoiding those synthetic single molecules. Ylang ylang oil is itself 35.49% linalool and 11.63% benzyl acetate — the first and second most frequent materials in the corpus. You have only bought them bundled, at a ratio you do not set.
- The thread's claim that "honeysuckle absolute doesn't exist" is wrong (the database lists 4 suppliers), while the suspicion behind it was right: reconstructed honeysuckle has 13.
About a 10 minute read.
How much natural is in a published formula
Taking that corpus formula by formula, a row counts as natural if its name carries an extraction word (oil, absolute, resinoid, concrete, balsam and so on) and no reconstruction word (replacer, base, specialty and so on).
| 953 formulas | |
|---|---|
| Median natural share by weight | 4.5% |
| Mean natural share by weight | 13.0% |
| Median natural share by row count | 8.7% |
| Formulas with no naturals at all | 285 = 30% |
| Formulas made entirely of naturals | 0 = 0% |
The percentiles say more: the 25th percentile is 0.0%, the 75th is 18.5%, the 90th is 39.0%, and even the 95th percentile reaches only 55.0%. The most natural-heavy band of this corpus is still about half single molecules.
That "zero" needs careful reading, and the closing section explains why. What it does show is that within this set of published formulas, all-naturals is not a practised approach.
The molecules you meant to avoid are in the bottle you bought
This is the section worth keeping.
Looking up materials that record natural occurrence in ylang ylang oil, the largest are:
| Constituent of ylang ylang oil | Content |
|---|---|
| Linalool | 35.49% |
| Benzyl acetate | 11.63% |
| Methyl benzoate | 6.50% |
| Benzyl benzoate | 6.19% |
| Germacrene D | 5.55% |
Linalool and benzyl acetate are precisely the two most frequent materials in our corpus, appearing in 35.4% and 33.2% of formulas. Both are also sold as single molecules on any supplier's shelf.
Which means: buying a bottle of ylang ylang oil buys a mixture that is a third linalool. Choosing not to use synthetic single molecules has not removed those molecules from your formula. It has bundled them at a fixed ratio you cannot adjust.
Patchouli oil behaves the same way: patchouli alcohol 33.74%, alpha-patchoulene 22.20%, beta-caryophyllene 20.64%, beta-patchoulene 13.75%. Four constituents cover ninety percent of it.
One reply in the thread put the consequence well: essential oils contain dozens to hundreds of natural aroma molecules, and mixing too many produces what people call mud, with no longevity and no diffusion. Another added that oils generally contain upwards of 50 aroma chemicals. That figure is conservative. Our database holds 155 materials recording natural occurrence in lavender oil, 132 in lemon oil, 110 in bergamot oil and 91 in ylang ylang oil. Follow the oils-only road far enough and the bottleneck is not the flowers, it is that 95%.
So "a formula with five essential oils" is not five variables in chemical terms. It is closer to several hundred.
The honeysuckle dispute
The thread produced a clean factual disagreement worth adjudicating.
The poster had bought honeysuckle absolute for around sixteen dollars. One reply: honeysuckle absolute doesn't exist. Another: it does exist (Hermitage has it) but it's very, very expensive.
The database says the second is right, and that the first's suspicion was also right.
| Name | Type | Suppliers |
|---|---|---|
| honeysuckle fragrance | Reconstruction | 13 |
| lonicera japonica flower extract | Extract | 7 |
| lonicera caprifolium extract | Extract | 5 |
| honeysuckle absolute | Absolute (CAS 8023-93-6) | 4 |
| honeysuckle specialty | Reconstruction | 3 |
| honeysuckle absolute replacer | Replacer | 1 |
| honeysuckle concrete | Concrete | 1 |
Honeysuckle absolute genuinely exists, CAS 8023-93-6, recorded as sweet, fatty, floral, jasmin and orange flower. Beside it sit honeysuckle concrete and honeysuckle flower wax — the other two links in the concrete-to-absolute chain, which is itself evidence that the material is real.
The supplier counts tell the rest. For comparison, absolutes that genuinely circulate: violet leaf absolute 39 suppliers, mimosa absolute 36, rose absolute 20. Honeysuckle absolute has 4, while reconstructed "honeysuckle fragrance" has 13.
So sixteen dollars on a non-specialist channel is far more likely to buy a reconstruction than an absolute. "Almost certainly fake" was good judgement; "doesn't exist" was the wrong reason for it.
That also hands you a check you can run yourself: look at the supplier count. A genuine, widely traded natural carries a double-digit count. Single digits mean rare, expensive, or both.
You cannot detect adulteration, and labs only catch part of it
The thread spent considerable effort guessing which bottles were fake. The bad news is that instruments only get so far either.
Simić and colleagues, in Food Chemistry in 2026, analysed rosemary and laurel essential oils from the Slovenian market, developing isotopic markers for adulteration detection using compound-specific isotope analysis.
They evaluated the method's sensitivity: a rosemary oil sample needs more than a 19% synthetic linalool fraction before falsification is near-certain to be suspected (95% probability); for α-pinene in laurel oil the threshold is 47%. Analysing commercial oils declared as natural, the δ¹³C values indicated possible falsification of several volatiles.
Read those thresholds carefully: with isotope ratio mass spectrometry, in a laboratory, a synthetic cut below roughly 19% to 47% may not be caught. Your nose at home will not catch it.
Park and colleagues open their 2026 review in Critical Reviews in Analytical Chemistry by stating that natural flavourings are highly susceptible to adulteration. The methods they evaluate involve enantioselective GC-MS, comprehensive two-dimensional GC, isotope ratio mass spectrometry and machine learning pipelines — industrial-grade equipment.
The practical conclusion is simple: you cannot verify, so you choose suppliers instead. The thread's recommendations of reputable naturals houses are worth more than any amount of sniffing.
So can you do it
Yes. This is not an argument that naturals cannot make perfume — an entire category of brands is built on them, and one commenter in that thread works only with naturals and is pleased with the results.
What matters is knowing the trade:
What you gain is complexity in the raw material. A good natural arrives with dozens or hundreds of molecules of built-in texture that single molecules do not stack up to.
What you pay comes in four parts, and all four are measurable:
- Reproducibility. Same botanical name, ratios differing tenfold. A new lot is a new formula.
- Control. You cannot take the benzyl acetate out of ylang ylang without the 35% linalool that comes with it.
- Longevity and projection. The naturals-only commenter reported their work lasting longer on textile than on skin. That is a common observation and I found no measurement study to cite, so treat it as one user's report.
- Verification. You cannot find out what you bought.
The middle road, also raised in that thread: build direction with naturals, then add a handful of single molecules for structure — usually space-makers like hedione and Iso E Super, plus a musk or two for the back. That is also the shape of the corpus: a 4.5% median, but 70% of formulas contain some naturals. Most published formulas are not avoiding naturals. They are using them sparingly and precisely.
What this doesn't establish
That "zero all-natural formulas" carries a severe selection bias, and this is the most important caveat here. 74% of the corpus carries a patent or source row, and a patent example usually exists to claim a use for a new synthetic molecule. An all-natural formula has no patent value, so it never appears in that kind of document. The correct statement is "no all-natural formulas appear in this patent-heavy set of public formulas", not "naturals cannot make perfume". The latter is plainly false.
The natural classification is a keyword match. Spot checks found no obvious misfires on words like "essence" and "extract", but naturals whose names lack those words get missed, and some reconstructions may slip in.
Isolates are a third category I did not handle. Linalool, geraniol and citronellol can be isolated from naturals or synthesised, and a formula sheet does not say which. My classification counts them as non-natural, which is right for the question "can I do this with essential oils", but they should not be read as purely synthetic.
The isotope study tested rosemary and laurel. Those 19% and 47% thresholds are the sensitivity of that method on those two oils, and do not transfer to others.
I have no evidence for "naturals project less". It is a forum observation, included because it is worth knowing rather than because it has been demonstrated.
References
P. Simić et al., Characterisation and authenticity assessment of rosemary and laurel essential oils using compound specific isotope analysis, Food Chemistry, 517, 149404 (2026). PMID 42068807. doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2026.149404
J. Park et al., Integrated Chiral Volatile Organic Compound, Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry, and Isotope Ratio Analyses with Interpretable Machine Learning for Flavor Authentication: A Critical Analytical Review, Critical Reviews in Analytical Chemistry, 1–25 (2026). PMID 42095887. doi:10.1080/10408347.2026.2661750
Related: Are naturals gentler, Eucalyptus globulus oil, Ylang ylang oil, You bought thirty materials and froze.