Free calculator
Dilution calculator
Tell it the strength you want and how much you want to make. It tells you what to put on the balance. Everything is weight for weight, because a milliliter of one material and a milliliter of another do not weigh the same.
The sum, in words
A dilution at a stated percentage means that percentage of the finished solution is material, and the rest is solvent. So the material is the total multiplied by the percentage, divided by a hundred, and the solvent is whatever is left of the total.
To make 10 g at 10 percent: 10 multiplied by 10, divided by 100, is 1 g of material. The solvent is 10 minus 1, which is 9 g. Weigh 1 g and 9 g and you have 10 g at 10 percent.
The two mistakes
Adding the solvent to the material rather than making up to a total. One gram of material plus ten grams of solvent is eleven grams of solution, of which one gram is material. That is 9.09 percent, not 10. Small, consistent, and it compounds every time you build a weaker dilution from that one.
Doing it by volume. A milliliter of one material and a milliliter of another do not weigh the same, and most aroma materials are not close to a density of one. Perfumery works weight for weight, and mixing the two conventions across a formula is how a blend drifts with nobody able to say where.
Then label the bottle properly
A dilution bottle should carry the material, the solvent, the percentage, the basis and the date it was made. A bottle marked only ten percent is nearly worthless a year later: ten percent of what, in what, and is the solvent ethanol, dipropylene glycol or triethyl citrate? Those three behave differently in a blend and one of them will not suit every product.
Record the lot of the material you diluted too. When a supplier tells you two years from now that a particular lot was off specification, the question you have to answer is which of your dilutions and which of your batches it reached.
Why perfumers keep dilutions at all
Not for convenience. Every balance has a minimum weight, stated in its specification and usually ten or twenty times its readability, and below that figure the display still shows digits that sit inside the instrument's own error. Weighing four milligrams of a powerful material on a three-decimal balance produces a number that looks precise and means very little.
A dilution turns that into an honest weighing: instead of four milligrams of the neat material, you weigh forty milligrams of a ten percent solution, which the balance can actually resolve. The dilution is a measurement decision before it is anything else.
What this calculator does not do
It works out one dilution. It does not track what you then weighed into a formula, which is where the number actually matters: two grams of a ten percent solution contributes 0.2 g of material and 1.8 g of solvent, and a formula that counts the whole two grams as material reports every limit ten times over.