Incense sticks are a popular form of home fragrance and make great gifts. They can also be used in a reed diffuser.
Making scented incense blends is easy with the right recipe and ingredients. The most important step is the selection of a base material.
Starting a perfume business can be both an artistic personal expression and a highly profitable enterprise if approached correctly. This requires the skills of a perfumer and a willingness to research wholesale suppliers and establish resale contacts with retailers or open a perfume kiosk in high traffic community gathering places.
1. Smell it
From religious ceremonies to aromatherapy, incense is used in a variety of ways to enhance mood, clear the air of unwanted odors and even purify the environment. Making your own incense is a fun and easy project you can take on with simple ingredients and tools you probably already have around the house.
Stick incense is usually made by coating a base of bamboo or similar stick with pastes that are mixed with additives and dipped into fragranced mixtures. While some companies use stick machines to complete this process, many sticks are still hand rolled.
Generally speaking, the best base materials for incense are those that have very little scent of their own and therefore won’t interfere with your aromatic mixtures. Sandalwood, alder and pine are examples of excellent low-scent base materials. Other resins like labdanum also come in a pliable form that permits molding into pellets (some recipes call for this type of incense called “neriko”). These are then dried before use.
2. Smell it again
Incense is a time-honored aromatic that has been used since antiquity for spiritual practice, odor control, purification and ritual. It can enhance our mood and our relationship with the natural world.
If you’re unsure about a scent, smell it again. Try stepping outside for a few minutes or smelling something else to reset your sense of smell and give your nose a fresh start.
Once you’ve smelt your incense recipe again, it’s ready to make into kneaded incense pellets or trails, sticks and cones. Make your incense in batches of 20-30 so you have plenty to gift all year. You’ll also have enough to keep experimenting with incense making! This includes adding more makko or less to see how it affects the final product.
3. Smell it with a friend
Since ancient times, incense has been used for purification, ceremony, devotion and pure pleasure. This creative, practical workshop rediscovers the ancient art of incense making using natural aromatic substances such as gums and resins; woods; herbs; fruits; seeds; spices and essential oils.
Perfumers often use paper blotters (fr: mauvettes) to sample the scents they are working with. These blotters are more accurate scent approximations of things that can’t be extracted, such as the smell of roses or hyacinths.
This process is a great way to learn about the chemistry of fragrance. It also helps you to see how important scent is in our emotional well-being and connection with others. Scientists have found that when people smell the same, they feel like they belong together. This is why it is so important to get your nose in the game and start to understand the world through its scents. This will make your incense recipes more effective.
4. Smell it with a stranger
In addition to perfume rollerballs that fit inside jewelry, solid fragrance for your purse and soap on a rope, there are many other ways that people can take their scent with them on the go. For example, there are fragrance sprays for cars, scented jewelry that smells like your favorite perfume, and even perfume-infused deodorant for your armpits.
Fragrance makers know that the modern world demands that their scent be a part of people’s daily lives, so they are developing scents for these new kinds of containers.
Starting a perfume business doesn’t require extensive knowledge of chemistry or science, only the desire to experiment with various scented essential oils, the ability to research wholesale suppliers for the necessary materials and the willingness to establish resale contacts. Having the right marketing plan is also important. Getting your perfume line noticed requires a lot of work, but it can be done. The key is to always stay positive and keep spreading the word about your product.