This was a pretty no-frills kit, but with some pretty cool science fair type projects in it. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of chemist makes perfume, well, I guess it would be one who does stuff like you do when you experiment with this kit. The concept is pretty clever, and while it’s actually easy to do the experiments, I found it kind of challenging to make perfume that really smelled good. I don’t think the perfume makers are in any danger from me. But… my future chemist kid could be. My son, yes a boy, and I played with this kit. He wanted to make some perfume that his beautiful mom would love to wear. Well, that didn’t really happen, but we had a lot of fun experimenting with the scents we did make (even the stinky ones). And the learning that he got out of it made it one of the most successful science toys that we’ve played with yet.

In this one, we used sample cards called base perfumes to create our own “special blends.” Okay, that’s what the box called it. We called them our own “stinky blends.” But they weren’t really that bad. The real fun was the measuring and mixing the extracts, then separating and filtering them. He said he felt like a real chemist which I got a kick out of.

Overall, this was a pretty fun kit. It made Atomic Elephant Toy’s list of top 12 best selling toys of 2008 and I can see why. It was just pretty fun overall.