Creating a perfume, or any scented product, is both an art and a science. Whether you’re crafting a personal fragrance, a room diffuser, or a linen spray, keeping detailed, organized notes is key to refining your formulas and tracking your progress over time.
To help you streamline your process and capture every vital detail, here’s a comprehensive perfumer’s worksheet outline that I personally use and recommend. Feel free to adapt it to your own workflow or use it as inspiration to design your own system!
Why Use a Perfumer’s Worksheet?
A detailed worksheet helps you keep track of every batch with clear codes and dates. It allows you to understand how your formula evolves during maceration and compare scent impressions on blotter versus skin. You can record important performance characteristics such as sillage, longevity, and projection. Additionally, it helps monitor allergen content and INCI for safety and compliance. Managing supplier, cost, and sourcing information for each raw material becomes easier, and you can plan packaging, target audience, and marketing concepts effectively. Finally, it enables you to document adjustments and improvements for future iterations.
You don’t need to document every single step, but after years of perfume making, I’ve found these detailed elements to be essential. Even if you fill out only half of the worksheet, you can still benefit from the information when working with other formulas in the future. Having a detailed worksheet is a plus in any case.
Copy and paste all the sections, or just the ones you need, into Excel, then turn it into a PDF printout that you can always have on hand when needed. Keep a few printouts ready for whenever you feel inspired to create something new. Alternatively, you can keep all your notes handwritten in your journal, which I personally do most of the time, without using Excel. This allows you to access your notes without relying on any device, which might be preferable for old-school perfumers.