The Perfume Making Podcast

The Perfume Making Podcast is Karen Gilbert teaching you to make perfume, one Monday at a time, across an archive of more than 120 episodes. Not reviews, not interviews with famous noses. Instruction: how to evaluate your own fragrance, how to make a mod and iterate on it properly, why buying more expensive materials will not make you a better perfumer.

The half of the brief that most perfumery content skips is the business. A good number of these episodes are about running one rather than composing: pricing without discounting yourself into the ground, building something that does not burn you out. If you blend at home and have wondered whether it could be a living, that is an unusual thing to find in a podcast about perfume.

Karen threads in something else again, and it is not filler. Scent psychology, meditation, the effect of fragrance on mood. It sits alongside the technical material rather than replacing it, and it matches the wellbeing angle running through the rest of her teaching.

The archive is the asset here. Because it is instruction rather than news, it does not date: the episodes were released weekly and in sequence, so they read as a course you can start at the beginning and work through at your own pace.

The credentials behind it are real. Karen has taught perfumery for years through the Online Perfume School, and her twelve-month Artisan Perfumery Mastermind is CPD accredited.

Start at episode one if you are learning. Dip in by title if you already blend and want a specific technique.