DIY fragrance: Can you make a cooling spritzer better than one you can buy?

As beauty products go, fragrance is often one of the most expensive, packaged and advertised as the ultimate luxury, with ads that inevitably involve a yacht, the Orient Express, a couture ball-gown worn with bare feet and plenty of swooning. Fragrance is the entry-level product for most luxury fashion houses, one that those of us without a cruise season budget can at least aspire to at Christmas.

All those little bottles add up. Last summer, Chanel revealed it’s full-year earnings for the first time in its 109-year history, posting revenues of $9.62bn. This apparently represented a growth of 11 per cent on the previous year; growth that Chanel explained was in large part fuelled by the launch of a new fragrance, Gabrielle. Meanwhile, Chanel’s No5 is the most recognisable fragrance of all time. Perfume is big business.

So, it’s interesting that Fragrance Direct have been encouraging their customers to get back to basics when it comes to scent and skin products, with a guide to “forageable beauty” using natural ingredients you can find for nothing in your own garden, if you’re lucky enough to have one. Or perhaps in your local park, if you’re fast enough on your feet to outrun the wardens when you’re caught pinching flowers.

The idea of natural beauty products made from free ingredients is certainly appealing. As a child, I had hours of fun creating my very own perfumes, filling empty bottles that once held my grandmother’s 4711 cologne with my own concoctions made from flower petals and tap water. My adventures in scent seemed to hold so much promise as the colourful petals floated behind the glass but, of course, they inevitably went brown, rotted and turned the liquid into something that looked and smelt like pond water. Not quite the effect I was after.

Would I have more luck following Fragrance Direct’s guide?

They’ve teamed up with vegan beauty specialist Em-J to create a variety of DIY recipes that you can make at home. Em-J’s seasonal recipe for the summer is a variation on my childhood experiment. It’s a rose face spritz made from seven roses – make sure your neighbour isn’t at the window when you pinch all the blooms from the Queen Elizabeth he’s been nurturing for the past decade – and 1.5 litres of distilled water.

Ah, distilled water. Not tap. My seven-year old self was going wrong from the start. And it turns out that you don’t just bung the rose petals in and give the whole thing a shake. Em-J suggests you wash the petals under warm water before adding them to the distilled water and simmering them over a low heat for 25 minutes, until they start to fade. Then you strain the petals out, before pouring the remaining concoction into a dark bottle and allowing it to cool. It can be used as a toner or as a spritz on hot days.

Em-J also suggests retaining those strained petals to sprinkle in your bath, to which I say: “Only if you’re not the person who has to clean the bath”. Have you ever tried to get rose petals off the side of the tub? Peeling off seven flowers’ worth would arguably wipe out the relaxing effect that is the whole point of a bath in the first place.

Roses are obvious but another of the plants Em-J suggests you look out for in summer is the much-underestimated pineapple weed. Unlike roses, no one is going to care if you gather vast handfuls of this. It’s a weed, after all, and it really does grow everywhere. You’ll see it at the edge of grass verges or even growing straight up through tarmac. It love cracks in the pavement. You’ll recognise it because although it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fruit, pineapple weed’s tight green-yellow blossoms do actually look like tiny little pineapples. You’ll know you’ve picked the right plant when you give one of those blossoms a squeeze and get a whiff of pina colada.

Oil from the pineapple weed is rich in antioxidants, aids healing and can minimise scars – though I can confirm that pressing a blossom straight on to a spot had absolutely zero effect for me. However, it’s also known as wild chamomile and indeed you can make it into a tea. It has similar effects to chamomile tea as you already know it, acting as a mild sedative that can help reduce anxiety. The tea can be used as a rinse to calm itching too. Just remember to wash it first. It does seem to grow well around dog poo bins.

Following the instructions on Practical Self Reliance, a blog by Ashley Adamant from Vermont, who describes herself as a “homesteader, homeschooler, home-fermenter and home-body”, I tried to make pineapple weed tea. Alas, even with Ashley’s advice as an expert fermenter, the resulting tisane smelt more of weed than pineapple and tasted like something I might have procured from a 16th-century witch with the purpose of poisoning a love rival. Perhaps American pineapple weed is slightly different from Hampshire’s best pub-car-park-grown.

Undeterred, I also decided to have a go at the rose water spritz. Disappointingly, this was not going to be a recipe for which I could forage anything. My backyard, which sees the sun for about an hour a day at the height of midsummer, is no place for roses, which need more than six hours’ sun in every 24. Since I draw the line at nicking flowers from other people’s gardens or public spaces, I had to buy seven roses from the supermarket for £5.99. Ditto I bought the distilled water at a cost of £6.99 a litre (I know I could have made it at home but, you know… deadlines).

I followed Em-J’s instructions. I plucked seven roses of their petals like I was playing a demented round of “he loves me not”. I washed them in the colander. I simmered them in the distilled water for the requisite 25 minutes, until they’d turned from a vibrant cerise into the pale pink of sushi gari. It was all very exciting.

But the rose water didn’t smell of anything much because, I suppose, the roses from which it was made didn’t smell of anything either. Supermarket roses never do. The leftover petals were much too sludgy to add to a bath for that spa-style effect. The plastic spray bottle into which I decanted the liquid was not subtle enough to make spritzing a pleasant experience. The nozzle designed for squirting cleaning fluid on to your surfaces, turned a fine mist into a jet that could take out an eye.

It was, if I’m honest, a complete and utter failure. An expensive one at that. For the £13 it cost me to make my on-trend sustainable rosewater (and how sustainable are roses air-freighted in from Africa anyway), I could have bought all three of the ready-made rosewater products Fragrance Direct hosts on its site. Perhaps that’s the point. But the little girl inside me had enjoyed playing apothecary again.