Sourcing · 14
How do you afford this hobby — the biggest lever is not what you buy, it is how much you make at a time
· 22 min read
A thread asked how people afford this, and the 63 replies ranged from a few hundred dollars every other month to twenty-five thousand a year. Using median doses from 953 formulas: the same 10 g bottle makes one 100 g batch, or fifty 2 g trials. And 27 of the 79 most common materials are used above 5% — the recurring cost sits in the unglamorous ones, not the expensive bottles.
Someone asked r/DIYfragrance the question everybody wonders about and almost nobody asks: how do you afford this? Technical information is everywhere online, they noted, and the personal financial side is almost never discussed — with the result that it is easy to fall into self-comparison, because you never know what is going on behind somebody else's organ.
Sixty-three replies. The self-reported spending:
| User's own account | Amount |
|---|---|
| First order | over $600 |
| Every other month | a couple hundred dollars |
| Per week | $300 |
| Year to date | $25,000 |
Two orders of magnitude apart. This article will not tell you what to spend, because that number does not exist. It answers a different question: what actually consumes the money.
The short version
- The biggest lever is trial size, not material choice. The same 10 g bottle of a material used at 10% makes one 100 g batch, twenty 5 g trials, or fifty 2 g trials.
- The recurring cost sits in the unglamorous materials. Of 79 common materials, 27 (34%) carry a median dose above 5%, and most of those are basics like phenethyl alcohol, bergamot and benzyl salicylate.
- The expensive bottles that make you hesitate are usually used around 0.5%, where 10 g makes 20 batches. They are a one-off investment, not a running cost.
- This site's database holds no prices, so this article computes consumption. Prices come from supplier pages, but consumption is computable before you order.
About a 9 minute read.
Where the money actually goes
Taking the 79 materials that appear in 40 or more formulas across that 953-formula corpus, by median dose.
The heavy end:
| Material | Formulas | Median dose | Consumed per 100 g |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phenethyl alcohol | 274 | 10.00% | 10.00 g |
| Bergamot, bergaptene-reduced | 132 | 10.00% | 10.00 g |
| Benzyl alcohol | 43 | 10.00% | 10.00 g |
| Galaxolide 50 IPM | 82 | 9.80% | 9.80 g |
| Benzyl salicylate | 159 | 9.47% | 9.47 g |
| Ethylene brassylate | 59 | 8.33% | 8.33 g |
| Hydroxycitronellal | 161 | 8.00% | 8.00 g |
| Alpha-hexyl cinnamaldehyde | 157 | 8.00% | 8.00 g |
| Hedione | 165 | 7.00% | 7.00 g |
The light end:
| Material | Median dose | Per 100 g | Batches from 10 g |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beta-damascenone | 0.42% | 0.42 g | 24 |
| Cis-3-hexenol | 0.50% | 0.50 g | 20 |
| Ethyl vanillin | 0.50% | 0.50 g | 20 |
| Rose oxide | 0.50% | 0.50 g | 20 |
| Indole | 0.68% | 0.68 g | 15 |
The comparison is the point. What makes you hesitate is usually a name on the right-hand list, while what keeps running out is on the left. Of the 79, twenty-seven sit above 5%, and only thirteen below 1%.
The commenter who wrote that they badly wanted five-fold orange oil, decided sweet orange was fine at their level, and closed the cart, made the right call — with a reason that can be sharpened: ask first what percentage you would use it at.
The fifty-fold lever
Consumption is dose times batch weight. The formula sets the first; you set the second, and most beginners set it far too high.
How many times one 10 g bottle goes round:
| Dose | 100 g batch | 20 g batch | 5 g trial | 2 g trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10% | 1 | 5 | 20 | 50 |
| 8% | 1 | 6 | 25 | 62 |
| 5% | 2 | 10 | 40 | 100 |
| 3% | 3 | 17 | 67 | 167 |
| 1% | 10 | 50 | 200 | 500 |
| 0.5% | 20 | 100 | 400 | 1000 |
Moving from 100 g batches to 2 g trials makes the same bottle last fifty times longer. That decision costs nothing.
Seen across a whole formula: twenty materials, each at the 2.5% median:
| Batch size | Per material | Twenty materials |
|---|---|---|
| 100 g | 2.50 g | 50.0 g |
| 20 g | 0.50 g | 10.0 g |
| 5 g | 0.12 g | 2.5 g |
One reply in the thread described exactly this practice: buy only necessary materials, dilute at proper ratios, keep mods no larger than 5 to 10 mL, and stay focused on one accord at a time. The table above is the numeric version of that advice.
The same reply mentioned another saving: buy a small fridge, so that materials like hedione and citrus oils do not spoil early. Material you throw away costs the same as material you use.
Trials you can skip
Beyond making each trial smaller, you can make fewer of them.
Rodrigues and colleagues, in Molecules in 2021, reviewed two decades of perfume engineering methods from their laboratory. One is the Perfumery Ternary Diagram, which determines the dominant odour for a given composition. They also build evaporation and 1D diffusion models from vapour-liquid equilibrium and Fick's law of diffusion to derive performance parameters, address matrix and skin effects and the trail of perfumes, and classify perfumes with the Perfumery Radar.
For saving money the implication is that some questions do not require mixing to answer. Which of three materials will dominate is, under some conditions, calculable in advance. You will not run vapour-liquid equilibrium models at home, but the attitude transfers: decide what you are testing before you start, rather than treating "let's see" as a workflow.
The other point is that you need fewer materials than you think. Cai and colleagues, building an automatic formula generator in Heliyon in 2024, extracted composition data from 210 working formulas and built their reference library from just 344 common materials. And we measured ourselves that the median formula runs 17 materials, while sorted by weight, a median of 10 carries 90% of it.
The thread mentions Jean-Claude Ellena making excellent work with fewer than five materials. I did not verify that claim, so treat it as community lore. The direction matches both figures above.
What else the thread got right
Beyond the numbers, several pieces of practice are worth copying.
Someone who has since launched a brand described starting very small with a notes set and a beginner's set, then expanding with painful hemming and hawing over what to cut from the cart each time; spreadsheets to find low prices; grouping orders across suppliers to minimise shipping; and making dilutions of everything to extend it as far as possible. Three to three and a half years from first materials to launching a brand, with the note that "two years minimum is typical around here".
Another turned the hobby into steady income creatively: running 90-minute DIY perfumery programmes at the public library. They bring a small curated set of inexpensive, non-finicky materials, recommend patrons limit themselves to five, and everyone leaves with a bottle. The fee from the first workshop covered its cost and more, and each subsequent fee has covered the next materials order.
And the most direct framing came from someone who treats it as a pure hobby: no different from playing piano or running marathons, and a set of golf clubs costs money too.
Three decisions you can make today
One: cut trial size to 2–5 g. It is the only decision that costs nothing and extends material life by an order of magnitude. You can tell as much apart in 2 g as in 100 g.
Two: before ordering, ask what percentage you will use it at. Fifty grams of an 8% material is reasonable. Fifty grams of a 0.5% material locks money in a cupboard for a decade. The frequency and dose article has the full table.
Three: buy the smallest pack of anything that is almost always used pre-diluted. That article measured it too: alpha-isomethyl ionone appears as a pre-dilution in 100% of its corpus appearances, indole in 74%. You will dilute it the day it arrives, so a large pack buys nothing.
What this doesn't establish
This site's database has no price data. I checked: neither the materials nor the suppliers table carries a price field. So this computes consumption, and any monetary figure has to come from supplier pages.
Median doses come from public demo formulas. That corpus is 74% patent or sourced examples, and reflects the habits of those documents rather than your formulas. Your own doses may differ considerably.
All spending figures quoted are users' own unverified accounts. The span from a couple hundred every other month to twenty-five thousand a year is itself the reason none of them works as a benchmark.
"Make it smaller" has a limit. Weighing error matters relatively more in a small batch — if your balance reads to 0.01 g, a 0.5% material in a 2 g trial is 0.01 g, which is at the edge of resolution. The stock-solution workflow in weighing and dilution exists to solve exactly that.
References
A. E. Rodrigues, I. Nogueira, R. P. V. Faria, Perfume and Flavor Engineering: A Chemical Engineering Perspective, Molecules, 26(11), 3095 (2021). PMID 34067262. doi:10.3390/molecules26113095
J. Cai et al., A rapid approach based on empirical formulas and graph traversal algorithms to automatic generation of fragrance formulas, Heliyon, 10(24), e40873 (2024). PMID 39720048. doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e40873
Related: Look up how many formulas it appears in, Weighing and dilution, Cost and sourcing, Storage and oxidation.