I was going to quote your post to compliment you on the photo. Interesting that you are asking about the separation as I was dealing with this myself last night in making my own aftershave. So, vintage aftershave and a lot of the new ones have two primary ingredients - Grain alcohol and fragrance oil. In the same way that oil and water don't mix, alcohol and oil don't mix. It takes an emulsifying agent to get them to do so. In your case, either they didn't use an emulsifying agent, or it has broken down, probably due to time. Regarding my adventure last night, I've discovered four ways of emulsifying that don't work.
Great pic! I'm having Chubby 2 envy.
I missed quoting
@jtspartan so will insert Jason here. I'm not selling aftershave yet as I haven't gotten it figured out. I bought some vintage aftershave and liquor bottles and am putting my home brew in them.
Making alcohol based aftershave can be really easy or really hard. The easy way is to purchase a bottle of cheap rum. I use Castillo Silver. You can hardly smell it, so it doesn't get involved with your scent. Good scents are very difficult, so the easy way is to buy scent that has already been formulated. Think of a scent you like, go to Google and search. For example, "Barbershop scent oil". Make sure that what you buy is approved for cosmetics use, which will be in their advertising. Next, mix the two, shake and apply. You can also add a little glycerin, which aids in mixing them when you shake.
The amount of scent oil varies, though 3% is a good starting point. Some scents, like Barbershop, leather, black pepper, etc... are more likely to burn than others.
Now for the hard part. Developing scent is difficult. There are various soaps from different artisans that have the same scent. The reason for that is because folks often leave the scent development to the pro's and buy the scent oil from the same place as other artisans. I don't view this negatively as using professionally blended scent increases the chances of the customer having a good experience as the product ages.
I'm working on developing scents myself, which is where the practice comes in. A blend formulated today might lose all scent in 4-5 months, or worse, it may smell terrible.
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