(Serious) Beginner's List of Raw Materials?

I'm starting out in perfumery, but am willing to put a lot of time and effort into understanding and getting better at it quickly. I wanted to put together a list of beginner - intermediate materials, and am going to cap the list at 75 materials. Can I get some help perfecting the list? Which materials are overly redundant, which materials should be replaced with an aromachemical/EO of the same nature, which ones should be which dilution, which ones to cut entirely? The slash marks between multiple in the same line indicate that I would purchase one of the materials included, I just am not sure which. Thanks in advance. The ingredients are placed close to to materials I thought were somewhat similar based off research. The list is as follows:

1. Bergamot FCF
2. Orange EO / Limonene
3. Lemon EO / Citral
4. Neroli (Bitter Orange) / Methyl Anthranilate
5. Aurantiol
6. Methyl Pamplemousse
7. Nerolin Yara Yara
8. Mandarin
9. Oranger Crystals
10. Dihydromyrcenol
11. Anisaldehyde
12. Cassis Base 345b
13. Black Currant Absolute
14. Frambinone
15. Nectarate
16. Peonile
17. Aldehyde C11
18. Aldehyde C14
19. Aldehyde C10
20. Damascone alpha
21. Allyl amyl glycolate
22. Aldehyde C-18 (Coconut)
23. Gamma-Octalactone
24. Methyl Laitone
25. Green Tea
26. Phenoxyethyl Isobutyrate
27. Ylang Ylang (if you're into florals) / Farnesol
28. Lily of the valley / Hydroxycitronellal
29. Undercavertol
30. Iris / Alpha Isomethyl Ionone
31. Labdanum Absolute
32. Rose Absolute
33. Phenyl Ethyl Alcohol
34. Nerol
35. Jasmine Absolute / Benzyl Acetate / Sampaquita
36. Cis Jasmone
37. Cassia Absolute
38. Osmanthus Absolute
39. Geraniol
40. Florol
41. Florhydral
42. Indole
43. Petitgrain
44. Lavender or Lavandin
45. Cyclamen Aldehyde
46. Floralozone
47. Dimetol
48. Linalyl Acetate
49. Methyl Ionone
50. Ionone Alpha
51. Ionone Beta
52. Indonesian Patchouli EO
53. Cedarwood
54. Norlimbanol
55. Sandalwood (Santalus Album oil) / Javanol / Santiff
56. Ebanol
57. Sandela 85
58. Vertofix (Modern, cleaner cedar)
59. Vetiver EO / Vetiveryl Acetate
60. Velvione
61. Hexenol
62. Galbanum EO
63. Cypress
64. Juniper
65. Fir Balsam
66. Hedione
67. Benzoin
68. Methyl Ionone Gamma
69. Helional
70. Iso E Super
71. Farnesol
72. Vertenex
73. cis-3-Hexenyl Acetate
74. Stemone
75. Triplal Extra
76. Phenyl Acetaldehyde Dimethyl Acetal (PADMA)
77. Oakmoss Absolute
78. Amyl Salicylate
79. Black Pepper EO
80. Pink Pepper EO
81. Coriander EO
82. Cardamom
83. Eugenol
84. Nutmeg / Isoeugenol
85. Tonka / Coumarin
86. Cinnamon / Cinnamal
87. Cinnamyl Alcohol
88. Cinnamic Aldehyde
89. Methyl Diantilis
90. Myrr
91. Sage
92. Terragon EO
93. Tobacco Absolute
94. Kephalis
95. Galaxolide
96. Ethylene Brassylate
97. Tonalid
98. Cashmeran
99. Safraleine
100. Habanolide / Muscenone / Ambrettolide / Edenolide
101. Ambroxan
102. Ambrettolide
103. Velvione
104. Fixateur 505
105. Civet (0.1%)
106. Ambrarome
107. Vanillin / Ethyl Vanillin
108. Veratraldehyde
109. Heliotrope
110. Benzyl Acetate
111. Ethyl Maltol
112. Benzyl Salicylate
113. Ambermax 50
114. Linalool
115. Safraleine
116. Castoreum
117. Seaweed Absolute
118. Calone

Have you seen the list in the pinned thread?

Add naturals and adjust based on what you want to do or where you want to start. If you have a formula you want to do, buy materials for that. If you have a preferred style, prioritize useful materials for that style.

When I started I didn’t ask anyone’s advice- I just bought what sounded interesting or useful
i burnt threw money like crazy! Lol
What I would do differently, is buy to a formula or two. Fraterworks has A LOT of free formulas- even if you buy to just one, I believe that understanding the materials will come faster. When I started many pointed to accord making- which was probably a great idea, but there were so many , and so many places, and some materials were hard to find, and some were naturals that were arcane .
If this hobby takes ,you will eventually own almost everything - I wish that was a joke
There are many threads on what to buy- but understanding what they are used for and how to use them is practice-so making a formula, and perhaps accord building materials I believe will get you going

Hello and welcome!

It sounds like you are in a similar position and kindest to myself two months ago. I’ll share my thoughts and advice with the caveat that I’m obviously no expert.

Personally, I don’t think you need absolutes when starting out. They’re expensive and most of what you make won’t be usuable at this point.

Check out Fraterworks. Jamie’s bases are a great alternative to more expensive naturals and are consistently great.

You’ll want Lilial/Lyral or more likely their replacers (Fraterworks has those too), as you’ll find those materials in a lot of older formulas.

You’ll probably want a greater variety of musks than you have listed.

@mnitabach gafe me great advice which I’ll pass on to you, pick out a formula or formulas that you want to be able to recreate in their entirety and make sure you buy everything you need for them even if a couple of those ingredients weren’t exactly on your must have list. One thing I did was search this forum for formulas and made a list of about 20 I wanted to try and made note of which materials appeared most often. I used that to build my buy list.

To keep your list to 75 materials you might also want to focus more heavily on specific styles of frangrences to start out. Maybe you aren’t going to go fruity or spicy or heavily floral or whatever to start out and filling out those scent profiles can wait for future orders.

Good luck and have fun! And you can always reach out to me if you have any questions you don’t want to pose to the whole forum, just be prepared that my answer might be ‘I dunno’ lol

Jolieo said:

When I started I didn’t ask anyone’s advice- I just bought what sounded interesting or useful
i burnt threw money like crazy! Lol
What I would do differently, is buy to a formula or two. Fraterworks has A LOT of free formulas- even if you buy to just one, I believe that understanding the materials will come faster. When I started many pointed to accord making- which was probably a great idea, but there were so many , and so many places, and some materials were hard to find, and some were naturals that were arcane .
If this hobby takes ,you will eventually own almost everything - I wish that was a joke
There are many threads on what to buy- but understanding what they are used for and how to use them is practice-so making a formula, and perhaps accord building materials I believe will get you going

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This is excellent advice! I can’t recommend Creative Formulas highly enough for this. @filipeleira is very active in this forum and does amazing work. If you are worried about the ingredient list for a particular perfume on his site you can just message him and he’ll help you out so you know what you’re getting into before you buy the formula.

Also, definitely check out Fraterwork’s free demo formulas. Depending on your style what you like here may vary but I really recommend the Fahrenheit and Aventus formulas personally.

Lucs said:

I'm starting out in perfumery, but am willing to put a lot of time and effort into understanding and getting better at it quickly.

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Trust me it doesn't happen quickly... Time, effort and enthusiasm will help you, but you can't bypass maceration times.
Perfumery is a slow art.

Hey guys, appreciate all of the feedback. I cut down on some of the more extra stuff and duplicates (oranger crystals, etc.) and figured out what "feels" I want to home in on (kind of). I know that I don't really want to explore fruity fragrances, other than the very basics. Are there any more complex/advanecd "fruity" scents that I should cut out?

I don't know if this was your intention, but bear in the mind that these are not equivalent:

Lucs said:

Lily of the valley / Hydroxycitronellal

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Lily of the Valley (aka muguet) chems are a whole world unto themselves and hydroxycitronellal is but one element. Starting out, you may be better off getting a muguet base like lilyflor instead of building your own base from scratch. It's rather like buying jarred tomato sauce when you're learning to make lasagna vs making the sauce from scratch: it let's you focus on the big picture of composition without getting lost in the minutia.

The same is true of this:

Lucs said:

Jasmine Absolute / Benzyl Acetate / Sampaquita

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(Noting that sampaquita *is* a readymade base), and this:

Lucs said:

• Orange EO / Limonene
• Lemon EO / Citral

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Limonene and citral are not substitutes for orange and lemon EO, and they have much broader use than just replicating orange and lemon scents. In this case, I would say that while the EOs are more Immediately useful for a beginner, limonene and citral are such heavy lifters that they're worth having on hand, too.

Re sandalwood:

Lucs said:

• Sandalwood (Santalus Album oil) / Javanol / Santiff
• Ebanol
• Sandela 85

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IMO, in the same vein as above, get Dreamwood sandalwood base and call it a day for now. It's a pretty complete sandalwood synthetic, whereas you'll need buy a combination of sandalwood chems to make a realsitic sandalwood.

In summary, an important part of your initial collection is gaining exposure to a wide range of basic categories, both from the standpoint of odor and function.

cdieguez said:

hydroxycit

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As there is both an aldehyde and an alcohol for Hydroxycit, it is best to spell it out fully, instead of making assumptions.

Hydroxycitronellol
vs.
Hydroxycitronellal

Or I will abbreviate them like this
HDXYCT-OL
HDXYCT-AL

pkiler said:

As there is both an aldehyde and an alcohol for Hydroxycit, it is best to spell it out fully, instead of making assumptions.

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Fair point. I edited my original post

cdieguez said:

Starting out, you may be better off getting a muguet base like lilyflor instead of building your own base from scratch.

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If you are talking about lilyflore, this is a single molecule, not a base. Firmenich also sell Beyond Lilyflore, which is a very simple base of florol, lilytol, lilyflore, and a muguet aldehyde (I forget the name of it).

mnitabach said:

If you are talking about lilyflore, this is a single molecule, not a base. Firmenich also sell Beyond Lilyflore, which is a very simple base of florol, lilytol, lilyflore, and a muguet aldehyde (I forget the name of it).

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Mimosal? https://basenotes.com/community/threads/mimosal-firmenich-anyone-tried-it.543914/page-2#post-6018100

steventeddy said:

Mimosal? https://basenotes.com/community/threads/mimosal-firmenich-anyone-tried-it.543914/page-2#post-6018100

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Yes, I think that's the one.

I bought my first 66 materials 3 weeks ago and if I would give one advice is the one which to some extent I also got here... Buy smaller and buy in one or two directions YOU would like to experiment.

Focus on 1 or 2 things, and buy in that direction more heavily (not to heavy). I think in this hobby you have to be quit systematic so you'll probably be doing a lot of adding and subtracting one and the same material day in day out. At least at the beginning when you don't know what every single material does in blend.

Buy also essentials for beginners so you get to know other basic scents but don't buy, in my opinion, 100 aroma chemicals of which a lot, as was said above, are only a part of more complex scent. Starter or beginner kits (usually first 20 or 30 materials) are good start and then you can add some stuff in your direction.

If you'll buy heavy in all directions what will happen is you will only use maybe 10-20% of your materials more or less constantly and other 80% will be left there to sit around and collect dust. If you, god forbid , get tired of newly acquired hobby, probably happens to 90% of new starters, all that money and materials will go to waste.

Shelf life for these materials isn't unlimited so you'll quickly find out that 10ml of most materials is more than enough to explore and have fun for whole year. Especially if you'll work with dilutions (10% and 1% in example) so you don't waste to much materials at the beginning, which is great advice in my opinion. Research which materials have very high impact so you don't mistakenly buy 50ml where in reality you would need no more than maybe 5ml. Which brings to my last point... buy most things in 10ml quantities. Buy larger only materials which are used constantly like Iso E Super (or any of his siblings), Hedion, Galaxolide (or other white musk) and Methyl Ionone Gamma.

These are more or less all the advice's I got here and my observation what I would do differently if I would have to buy from scratch again. If I would start again I would probably bought only around 50 materials.

Happy smelling

mnitabach said:

If you are talking about lilyflore, this is a single molecule, not a base. Firmenich also sell Beyond Lilyflore, which is a very simple base of florol, lilytol, lilyflore, and a muguet aldehyde (I forget the name of it).

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Ah yes, I'm indeed thinking of Beyond Lilyflore.

I would definitely pick up some oranger crystals - they smell amazing on their own (if you have smelled reflection by amouage, well, that's what they smell like). Very strong too, so a little goes a long way.

I would recommend buying as many musks as you can. One of the big problems I had when I first got into it is - the majority of aroma chemicals stink on their own. This is not a hobby where you can throw a few things together and it randomly smell nice, it doesn't work like that at all.

By far, musks are the easiest notes to work with because they smell nice on their own. Notes like ambroxan and iso e are also easy to work with because they smell good.

Like a lot of other people in here have mentioned, I would recommend buying as many high quality naturals as possible - don't bother with cheap essential oils as you will be wasting your money. Naturals are much easier to work with and blend - once you have a scent you like, you can then begin to add the aroma chemicals afterwards. It's very easy to make a nice natural amber blend which can easily be turned into a very simple (but wearable) scent by just adding a musk and some ambroxan.

I definitely wasted a lot of money on notes I never use. There's no way a beginner will have enough skill to make a fragrance from scratch - much better to make a natural blend then use aroma chemicals to enhance the parts of the scent you want to enhance.

The daddy said:

I would definitely pick up some oranger crystals - they smell amazing on their own (if you have smelled reflection by amouage, well, that's what they smell like). Very strong too, so a little goes a long way.

I would recommend buying as many musks as you can. One of the big problems I had when I first got into it is - the majority of aroma chemicals stink on their own. This is not a hobby where you can throw a few things together and it randomly smell nice, it doesn't work like that at all.

By far, musks are the easiest notes to work with because they smell nice on their own. Notes like ambroxan and iso e are also easy to work with because they smell good.

Like a lot of other people in here have mentioned, I would recommend buying as many high quality naturals as possible - don't bother with cheap essential oils as you will be wasting your money. Naturals are much easier to work with and blend - once you have a scent you like, you can then begin to add the aroma chemicals afterwards. It's very easy to make a nice natural amber blend which can easily be turned into a very simple (but wearable) scent by just adding a musk and some ambroxan.

I definitely wasted a lot of money on notes I never use. There's no way a beginner will have enough skill to make a fragrance from scratch - much better to make a natural blend then use aroma chemicals to enhance the parts of the scent you want to enhance.

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It is true that you can make decent fragrances by building the structure with naturals and then "enhancing" with aromachemicals like musks & ambrox. However, this is the opposite of how powerful good-performing fragrances are constructed in modern perfumery, which are built on a synthetic structure that is decorated with naturals. If one wants to learn modern perfumery (by which I mean since the advent of widespread aromachemistry, so early-mid 20th Century), then doing what you suggest won't get one anywhere along that road.

mnitabach said:

It is true that you can make decent fragrances by building the structure with naturals and then "enhancing" with aromachemicals like musks & ambrox. However, this is the opposite of how powerful good-performing fragrances are constructed in modern perfumery, which are built on a synthetic structure that is decorated with naturals. If one wants to learn modern perfumery (by which I mean since the advent of widespread aromachemistry, so early-mid 20th Century), then doing what you suggest won't get one anywhere along that road.

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100% true - but I also know many people give up this hobby because of the insanely difficult learning curve. Just using AC means the first few scents you make will smell absolutely disgusting, you get nowhere fast. In my opinion, especially for confidence, it's far easier to create a wearable scent with naturals, musk, and a bit of ambroxan / iso e.

I wasted a long time and got incredibly frustrated by using AC only, at the beginning. The only reason I didn't quit is because I went back to basics with the naturals and just enhanced them. This then gave me the much needed confidence to continue.

Think back to when you first started - it's a thankless hobby, very disheartening and it's just one failure after another. I didn't manage to make anything wearable for the first year - I was so close to giving up before finally trying to make a fruity fragrance using all naturals. Slowly I added aroma chemicals and it turned out to finally be a wearable scent. I don't think I'd still be doing this if I didn't get that win.

You can't put someone in a jet fighter and expect them to pilot it right away. Baby steps. I can't think of anything easier than adding a bit of musk, vanilla, ambroxan and iso e to a scent - it will improve 90% of them. Just about confidence really.

The daddy said:

100% true - but I also know many people give up this hobby because of the insanely difficult learning curve. Just using AC means the first few scents you make will smell absolutely disgusting, you get nowhere fast. In my opinion, especially for confidence, it's far easier to create a wearable scent with naturals, musk, and a bit of ambroxan / iso e.

I wasted a long time and got incredibly frustrated by using AC only, at the beginning. The only reason I didn't quit is because I went back to basics with the naturals and just enhanced them. This then gave me the much needed confidence to continue.

Think back to when you first started - it's a thankless hobby, very disheartening and it's just one failure after another. I didn't manage to make anything wearable for the first year - I was so close to giving up before finally trying to make a fruity fragrance using all naturals. Slowly I added aroma chemicals and it turned out to finally be a wearable scent. I don't think I'd still be doing this if I didn't get that win.

You can't put someone in a jet fighter and expect them to pilot it right away. Baby steps. I can't think of anything easier than adding a bit of musk, vanilla, ambroxan and iso e to a scent - it will improve 90% of them. Just about confidence really.

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The correct "baby steps" if one wants to learn modern perfumery is to start by assembling, testing & deconstructing known-valid accords & complete (albeit simpler) fragrance formulas. Taking this route to immediate success is, IMO & IME, more exhilarating & confidence-building than mixing together nice-smelling essential oils to obtain vaguely nice-smelling mud...

mnitabach said:

The correct "baby steps" if one wants to learn modern perfumery is to start by assembling, testing & deconstructing known-valid accords & complete (albeit simpler) fragrance formulas. Taking this route to immediate success is, IMO & IME, more exhilarating & confidence-building than mixing together nice-smelling essential oils to obtain vaguely nice-smelling mud...

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You are far more experienced than I am in this subject so I'll take your word for it. Lucs please ignore my posts, I have no idea what I'm talking about.