Oh my goodness, making perfume with kids is my new favorite thing to do.  This was actually all Didi’s idea, my 4 and half year old.  She has been watching perfume videos on youtube (don’t judge me) and has since, been obsessing over how to make her own perfume in art class.

It was a great idea I was happy to oblige.  Here’s what you’ll need.

Supplies…

a clear jar

a bottle for your perfume (These are cute)

scissors

herbs and flowers

citrus fruits

liquid watercolors or food coloring and water

glitter, of course, glitter (If you’re freaked out by glitter, or even if you’re not, consider putting it in salt and pepper shakers, way less mess!! Just make sure it’s the fine kind.)

stickers

droppers (aka pipettes) It’s a better deal if you just buy 100. Just give them out to your friends with kids and tell them to make perfume too : )

a funnel

Steps

Step 1

Talk about perfume.  Some kids weren’t familiar with the word perfume, but they all understood the idea of mommy or daddy spraying themselves with something that smells good.  Ahhh, perfume.

Step 2

Give out scissors and invite your child to carefully snip the herbs and flowers or rip or pluck the flower petals.  I demonstrated how to do this first, so the kids would take care when they did it.  This part lasted almost 25 minutes.  They loved it. We put all of our petals and nature bits into a clear jar that every student had.

Step 3

Bring out precut citrus fruits the kids can squeeze into their jars.  They loved this part too! We also had grapefruit in the mix.  All the fresh citrus smelled so good over the flower petals.

There was a lot of smelling going on.  “Smell mine Meri Cherry!”

Step 4

Next step was to bring out the special smelling salts, consisting of different bowls of salt and baking soda.  They spooned them into their jars slowly, with care.  I encouraged the kids to try squeezing some lemon on top and before long we noticed bubbles forming from the reaction to the baking soda.  It was a thrilling discovery.

Step 5

Next we brought out jars with liquid watercolors and droppers, followed by squeeze bottles of water and food coloring, and finally salt and pepper shakers with glitter.  This added a whole new dimension of excitement.  Kids were stirring, scooping, squeezing and shaking all over the place.  It was terrific.  You can see the two classes below totally engaged.  They did this almost in silence for about 45 minutes.  The concentration was intense.

Step 6

When we finally finished making perfume, we headed over to the perfume bottle making table, where we used some cool sticker paper to decorate our jars.  Stickers of any kind would work for the jars. Our stickers were marbled sticker paper we made the week prior that we cut into strips.

Step 7

Once we had our bottles covered, we made little tags and all the kids named their perfumes.  I think this may have been my favorite part.  We had names from “Crystal,” to “Jellybean.” Everyone was truly delighted by their perfume.

Step 8

Time to funnel in the perfume into your bottle.  Not all the perfume will fit but the kids didn’t mind.  They were so excited to have their own perfume bottles.  You can just put a cap on your bottle, or if you have something with a hole in it, you can glue gun it on top and stick some pipe cleaners through as diffusers.  This part was a little lost on the kids, but the parents thought it was super cute.  The kids just loved picking the different pipe cleaners for their bottles.

Overall, this was a killer process with a fantastic end result that all the kids felt so excited about.  Didi has been putting her perfume on everyday. A little dab here, a little dab there.  I don’t know how long it will last before getting stinky, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.  For now, it’s all roses.

Thanks for reading along! If you like this idea, check out our Flower Potions from last year, and our Nature Soup, from way back when.  Two favorites you can do over and over again.  Happy Spring! Meri