teaching perfumery...and the natural perfume playset

Well, the question has reared it's head again....Ive been asked so many times over the years to teach classes on natural perfumery...and I'm still torn.
On one hand, I love teaching....and sharing my 30 years of perfume research and knowledge is a very tempting idea..
On the other hand, I've worked so hard to gain the knowledge I have...and I'm not sure how I feel about sharing my secrets and bredding my own competition so to speak.
Anyway, last week a lovely young woman walked into my shop and asked me to teach her. And I sort of got talked into it...

Ive been thinking about how I would do this for a long time. My methods and approach are a bit different to most of those I have seen out there. And beyond anything, I think you first of all need to educate your nose and learn how to "smell" really.
Ive had this idea of putting together a sort of "playbox" of premixed scent ingredients, so that would be perfumers can have a go at putting together scents of their own. And providing a booklet with it to guide them through approaching their experiments in a way that will teach them the basics of perfume making as they go along.
And I found these delightful little dropper bottles a while back which are just perfect (I'm such a sucker for pretty bottles!).

It's not easy deciding which oils to include in the set. I have so many favourites, but I don't want to make it too complex, because
a) it makes it too confusing and
b) too expensive
So I've chosen 9 of the most important oils in perfumery. I've picked a collection of oils that will almost all work together harmoniously, so that you can actually make really lovely scents with them. And I've also added a few that will work with some, and not with others. This is on purpose, to give you an idea of how easily you can go from a lovely blend to a yucky muddy clashing nightmare, and most importantly, to teach you WHY this happens.
It's a pretty versatile collection, allowing you to make everything from sweet musky florals to herbal men's colognes. Daniela will be the first person to receive one of these, so it will be interesting to see how she finds it!

Teaching Natural Perfumery

I've been asked many times if I teach classes on natural perfumery here in Australia....and I've finally decided to give in and do just that...
It seems there is a growing number of people out there yearning to learn how to play with all of these delightful natural ingredients...and realistically, there is a vast amount of stuff to learn about useing them safely and truly creatively if you want to make perfumes. And books can only take you so far.
There are a number of people running natural perfumery classes overseas, esp. in the States, but here in Oz, it's still a very new art.
So I'm now making lists and collecting ideas on what and how to do this....

Obviously Safety in working with natural perfumery materials would be one of the first and most important things I would want to impart, but beyond that there are so many different topics and different approaches I can think of...
I've read course descriptions from other perfumers, and they sound really in depth. Covering everything from perfume history, to details about every essential oil in exsistence, creating vertical accords and so much more....

I don't think it would be useful to teach another course along the same lines...some of these are already run by correspondence and easily accesible via the internet...(Anya McKoy has a very detailed one, and so do Mandy Aftel and Lyn Ayre)
And it would like re-designing the wheel sorta....

I would however like to share a bit more my own personal style and creative approach to making perfumes....
What I do think would be useful to teach is the actual hands on how to's of  perfume making. Introducing the individual components in small groups, and showing how combining them in different ways can create so many different effects...
In fact I think it may be the best to run a series....based around creating to certain themes maybe....each a day where you can smell and play with the ingredients that are used to create specific notes and genres in a perfume.....where you can also take home your own creation at the end of the day.

Themes could be:

-Flower perfumes, Scents for Blokes, Gourmand Scents....

And then of course there's the whole chapter of combining Aromatherapy and Perfume.....
Now that's really big chapter. 

My question to all of you now is :

What would you like to learn in a perfume workshop?

(And If you've taken part in other classes overseas, maybe you'd like to share what you thought worked well? What else would you have liked to learn?)