I personally find many perfumes that are sold in department and specialty stores to be too strong. Instead, my daughter and I like to create our own perfume from scratch. This can be done using essential oils, which have health benefits in addition to smelling pleasant. Since this is a craft site, we'll just focus on using the essential oils for making the perfume.

• Age Guideline: 8 Years and Up
• Time Required: 20 to 30 minutes (does not include resting time)

The age and time guidelines listed above are estimates. This homemade perfume craft can be modified to suit other ages, and may take a little more time if you alter the craft to fit your needs.

Materials Needed:

• Old perfume bottle
• Jojoba oil
• Essential oils
• Vitamin E capsule

Instructions:

Clean out an old perfume bottle. If you don't have one, you can just as easily use a small jar, such as a baby food jar.

Start creating your perfume by picking out a carrier oil to add to the perfume bottle. I like jojoba oil, so I added that to the materials needed list, but you could use vegetable oil, sunflower oil, olive oil, grape seed oil, or sesame oil. You'll want to add about 3 ounces of a carrier oil to your bottle.

Now it's time to drip in a base essential oil. You can choose from cinnamon, jasmine, cedarwood, rose, vanilla, myrrh, or clove essential oil. I suggest using 15 drops of the base essential oil of your choice.

A middle note essential oil comes next. Pour 15 drops of either chamomile, geranium, juniper, pine, rosemary, ylang ylang, nutmeg, lavender, cypress, or bay essential oil.

Your top note is the last essential oil need to complete your perfume. Again, you'll want to add 15 drops to your perfume bottle. Some top note essential oils include eucalyptus, lemon, grapefruit, peppermint, spearmint, sage, tea tree, and orange essential oil.

Your homemade perfume is not complete without a fixative. A fixative is necessary to keep your perfume lasting longer than just a few days. I prefer to stick a small pin into a vitamin E capsule and squeeze the contents into the perfume bottle. The reason I use vitamin E is that it is very good for your skin.

Place the lid on your perfume bottle and give it a good shake to combine all of the ingredients.

Set the perfume aside in a cool dark room for a period of 2 weeks. This gives the essential oils time to blend so that you get a stronger scent that will last throughout the day.

If you make more than one bottle of perfume at a time, place a sticky label on the perfume bottle and give it a name so that you remember which scent is inside each bottle. You could go with something like "Lovely Lavender" or "Ravishing Rose."

for stocking up on essential oils.

Tips:

Try different combinations of base, middle, and top notes until you find a combination that you enjoy. Just keep in mind that top notes evaporate at a quicker rate than middle and base notes, and middle notes evaporate a bit more quickly than the base notes.

You can also experiment with adding a few drops less of one essential oil and a few drops more of another.

If you get good at creating desirable perfumes, you may even be able to make a small business out o it.