How To Make A Custom Perfume At Home

There's almost nothing as personal about a beauty routine as the scent a person chooses to wear. Just smelling a perfume you wore in high school can bring back waves of nostalgia.That's why I was intrigued by the idea of making a custom perfume. As much as I love my go-to scents, a million other people in the world also wear them. What if I could create a perfume that was 100 percent unique to me? A scent that no one else in the world could recreate?

I was intrigued by the idea, and became even more intrigued when I heard about Demeter Fragrance Library, a new custom perfume company that sends you the tools to blend and bottle your own perfume creation right at home. Demeter's custom product is the My Foolproof Blending Trio. The company has a list of 10 fragrances (think Sunshine, Clean Skin, etc.), and you pick three of them to combine into one blended fragrance. Though the scents aren't all similar, they're designed to work well together and be usable no matter which three you choose.

Once you select three scents from the list, the company sends you bottles of each scent and an empty one to bottle up your custom perfume. These are the options.

Once you make your pick, your package arrives.

Here's what the package looked like when it landed on my door step.

The three scents I chose were Sunshine, Clean Skin, and Salt Air. Considering the beach is my happy place and I'm a sucker for a clean scent (my OG favorite perfume was Marc Jacobs' Daisy and I currently flip over the fresh and floral Molton Brown Gingerlily eau de toilette), I knew these three scents were right up my alley.

The other box contained the empty bottle and blending tools — fragrance strips for me to test out my combinations, pipettes to move the scents from the full bottles to the empty ones and an empty bottle for my new custom fragrance.

I smelled all three of my base fragrances and honed in on what I liked about them — with its fresh and clean scent, Salt Air was my favorite. Clean Skin was the most neutral of the three, and Sunshine had some powdery undertones. Luckily, the "foolproof" part of the package was right. They blended pretty seamlessly.

I worked on my fragrance for a few days, taking breaks when I thought my nose might fall off if I had to smell one more fragrance strip. When all was said and done, I had a brand new perfume that was made just for me, and I love it.

Images: Jessica Thomas (3); Courtesy of Demeter Fragrance Library