Fragrance Material IndexBeta

Dilution Calculator

Enter 3 of the 5 values and the remaining 2 are calculated for you.

Filled fields: 0 of 5 (required: 3)
%
%
g
g
g

What this calculator does

Perfume is almost never used neat. A compound is diluted in ethyl alcohol to the strength the finished product needs, and dilutions of single materials are the normal way to work with anything strong enough to overwhelm a trial. The arithmetic behind that is always the same relationship between five quantities, and knowing any three of them fixes the other two.

The five values

Initial concentration is how strong your material is right now, in percent. Neat material is 100. Target concentration is how strong you want it to be. Fragrance compound is the amount of that material you put in. Ethyl alcohol is the amount of solvent you add. Total amount is what you end up with. Fill in any three and the calculator supplies the missing two, in grams or kilograms.

A worked example

You want 20 g of a 10 percent dilution from neat material. Enter 100 as the initial concentration, 10 as the target and 20 as the total amount. The result: 2 g of material and 18 g of alcohol. The same three fields answer the question from the other direction as well, for instance how much alcohol a given amount of compound needs to reach a target strength.

Weigh rather than measure by volume wherever you can. Densities differ between materials, so a millilitre of one is not a millilitre of another, and a formula written in grams reproduces years later.

Browse the material index · All materials A to Z