Making a simple perfume (orange blossom)

2011-03-27 17:45 by Ian

Every spring, the citrus trees in Arizona bloom. The blossoms are the origin of a volatile oil that smells wonderful. I decided to make a simple perfume from them. The girlfriend will approve.



Megan and I filled a 1 liter jar with blossoms we picked from the trees in our yard. This quantity of blossoms weighs about 160g.



This is a separate sample I used to test the efficacy of the solvent. This sample (now expended) was soaked in 200mL cold ether for about 24 hours. The solids were filtered off and the ether retained:



This is the ether midway through the evaporation process. Notice the greenness. It is lightly fluorescent under soft UV.



The idea is to evaporate enough of the ether to make the volume small enough to fit within Megan’s choice of perfume bottle.

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