Reddit reviews Homemade Perfume: Create Exquisite, Naturally Scented Products to Fill Your Life with Botanical Aromas

Decades of devouring everything I could read, especially technical writing about fragrance and olfaction. And taking every possible opportunity to smell everything that I could, both "perfume" and "non-perfume".

Natural perfumer Anya McCoy has an online course that I've heard is wonderful. You won't learn everything that there is to know about aromachemicals, but you will learn a TON about perfume-making as far as measuring and working with materials, writing reproduceable formulas, testing and creating a finished product, etc. and that is knowledge that is applicable to all perfumery. You can add in synthetics as you desire, but these basics would be an awesome foundation. Also you would learn all about how to turn raw materials into compounds you can work with, like tinctures and enflurages. Here's the link to the course: http://perfumeclasses.com/index.php

A great first start, though, would be to buy her book on Amazon and try some things out at home. It's a great first step for the "home-experimental" type perfumer, who wants to start out by making scents with things you already have and are familiar with. And, it teaches you how to take the scents you create and make other things out of them, not just perfume but also room sprays, bath & body products, etc. Even if you have no interest in becoming a "natural perfumer," it's super-exciting to be able to create a tincture or enflurage of fragrant things that you encounter along your journey. These are skills that all perfumers should have, and she explains how to do it simply, without expensive equipment. The book is called Homemade Perfume.