RUŌOD Lab

Level 6 · Complete Perfume Creation

Create a First Formula: Study Guide

Follow our step-by-step formula guide to weigh your first draft, then judge it against your brief and write down the first three changes you will test.

Intermediate 15 min study By the RUŌOD Lab team Updated

In short

The reference guide walks through creating a formula from start to finish. Your job now is to do it once: weigh the draft you planned, smell it honestly against your brief, and decide what to change first. A first draft is expected to be wrong, and its job is to show you how.

What you will learn

  • Weigh and record a first complete draft
  • Judge it against a brief, and plan the first changes

Before this lesson: Write Your Own Brief: Study Guide

What to look for as you read

  • The order of work the guide suggests, and where your draft differs.
  • How it handles concentrate and dilution for evaluation.

Practical exercise: Weigh version 1 and plan version 2

About 60 minutes · You will have: a weighed and recorded first draft, and three planned changes in priority order

  1. Calculate a small batch with stocks, using your practical minimum.
  2. Weigh version 1, and record the actual weights.
  3. Let it rest overnight, then dilute a little to your working strength and test on strips over 24 hours.
  4. Compare with your brief. Write the largest gap in one sentence.
  5. List three changes in priority order. Test only the first.

You have done this well if you can name the largest gap, and version 2 differs from version 1 by one planned change. Keep this on strips: it has not been checked against any restriction, so do not wear it.

Knowledge check

1. What is a first draft for?
Show the answer

To be corrected, giving you something real to react to. Its value is in showing you where your plan was wrong.

2. Your first draft smells nothing like the brief. What should you do?
Show the answer

Name the largest gap and test one change. Start with the biggest structural difference and keep one change at a time.

3. When should you dilute and judge a draft?
Show the answer

After letting it rest at least a little, and on the same basis as later versions. Compare like with like, using strips of the same age and the same strength.

Further reading and materials

Written and reviewed by the RUŌOD Lab team. This is general education, not legal, regulatory, medical or safety advice. Example dilutions and exercises are for learning, are not validated products, and have not been safety-assessed. Completing a lesson confers no qualification. How we check these lessons.