It's time to make your own perfume!

    So you want your own perfume? And you want it now? OK, you can have it. It will cost you some money (but not very much) and you'll have to do some work (but not very much) so if you are serious, let's get at it. Here's how.

    There's a fellow who stands ready to make your perfume for you, starting with a sample for your approval. The cost, to you, of getting this sample sent to you in the mail is about what it will cost him for postage.

    But here's the hitch (you knew it was coming!) He can't make a sample for you until you provide him with a formula. Yes, a formula. That's a recipe for a perfume listing the ingredients to be used and the correct quantity of each ingredient.

    If you're a perfumer already, you understand what I'm talking about. You understand that developing a perfume involves developing a formula. It's like a blueprint. It tells the manufacturing company how to make it. So for you, if you have your own formula, perhaps all you would need to get it made by this fellow would be a little standardizing, so that you both are on the same page on precisely what materials should be used and their precise quantities. He can help you with this and you might be quite pleased by what you learn in the process.

    But if you're not a perfumer and all this is completely new to you, what can you do? Don't despair. Let me walk you through it.

    First, since it's your perfume -- your idea -- your creation -- you must have a pretty good idea in mind as to what it should be. Your problem is that you don't know how to put your idea into a formula that the manufacture can work with. But don't despair. He has developed a tool for you, a tool that will translate your perfume idea into a formula that he (or anyone else in the industry) can work with. It's called The Perfumer's Workbook.

    The Perfumer's Workbook is a computer program for fragrance design and formula creation that runs on any desktop, laptop, or tablet computer, Windows or Mac. It prompts you with a number of questions and then queries a database of many hundreds of aroma materials -- even "all naturals" if you desire -- to produce a working formula, a professional perfume formula you can take anywhere to have made for you. But this person I am telling you about is probably the only one who will make a sample of your formula and send it to you all for around the cost of postage. Of course if you like what you have designed and the way it was made for you, he'll be happy if you ask him to make more. But that's up to you.

    The Perfumer's Workbook is not free but the cost, considering the language gap it will bridge for you, is very, very affordable. You can obtain it as an instant digital download. That means you could be ordering your first perfume sample just two hours from now.

    P.S. -- If you are already a serious perfume developer, The Perfumer's Workbook can help you in many ways. Read more about its other features here.