The Chemistry of Scents: Creating Perfumes🫧🌸

Today, we will be making perfumes! Perfumes are a combination of natural scents, human-made chemicals, and alcohol. They are designed to leave a pleasant smell on your body!

When you spray perfume, scent molecules float in the air and enter your nose. Inside your nose, special olfactory receptors, which allow you to smell, detect these molecules and send signals to your brain.

Creating perfume is a chemical experiment. Different molecules mix and interact in oils or alcohol. Some molecules evaporate faster, some slower, changing the scent over time. This is why a perfume smells different when you first spray it and after a few hours.

The Experiment

Materials

• Clear Jar

• Mini Spray Bottles/Roller Bottles/Mini Bottles

• Scissors

• Water

• Herbs and Flowers

• Citrus Fruits

• Food Coloring/Watercolors

• Glitter

• Smelling Salts - made of salt and baking soda

• Funnel (Optional)

• Stickers (Optional)

Procedure

1. Cut up the flowers/herbs, and put them in the clear jar

2. Squeeze the citrus fruits into the clear jar

3. Spoon some of the smelling salts into the jar

4. Add food coloring or paint into the jar with some water

5. Put some glitter into the jar

6. Decorate the mini glass jar with stickers and drawings

7. Funnel the perfume into the mini jar from the larger clear jar

8. Depending on the bottle you have, you can cap it and use it in different ways

How to use: you can dab or spray some of the liquid on your wrists and neck.

If you want to see what you learned during this experiment, take this quiz right here!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdl-fJph1Pzvno02gPIA9E5D6rLxJDZuZpgFNjPUEMVNQCIIw/viewform?usp=header