Laurie Shonk, age 10, of Saratoga, California, for her question:

How do they make perfumes?

The recipe for every perfume is different and only the experts know all the secrets. For example, to capture the scent of roses, layers of rose petals are sandwiched between greasy sheets of glass. It takes tons of petals and a whole summer to make just a few drops of concentrated rose perfume. The fresh fragrance of lavender is captured by boiling the tiny blue flowers and catching the steam. Nowadays, many of the ingredients are man made chemicals that smell almost like the original flowers. .

A good perfume recipe may have 20 or 30 different ingredients, all blended perfectly to give a pleasant, unusual fragrance. Some of the ingredients are flower scents, such as violet and rose, carnation and orange blossom. Some are rare scents from the Far East, such as tangy sandalwood. Others are blending ingredients such as oak moss and man made coal tar. Other ingredients, such as musk, are added to make the fragrance last a long time