Sunday, June 24, 2012

Tackling the 5 Elements

My Quest for perfection is bogging me down.....
I was supposed to be taking part in Monica Miller's wonderful perfume project around the 5th Sacred Thing..."Primordial Scents 2012"
A Challenge to design perfumes around one or more of the 5 Elements, Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit...
A Project really close to my heart as a) I love and adore Starhawks book "The 5th Sacred Thing" and b) designing scents around the elements is what got me started in perfumery in the first place....
but Life this year has been pretty....emotional. Upheavals, depression, relationship changes and other stuff have been either dragging me away from my workshop or making me too tired and confused to focus properly....
Plus I was stupid enough to want to make a full set of scents, covering all the Elements.
"Should be easy", I thought, after all I used to actually make and sell Magickal Oils along these lines...
But when I actually sat down with my old recipes and starting looking at them properly, it dawned on me that my skills have come a long way since then...and that what may be a perfectly apt blend as say, a FIRE oil, does not translate as easily into a wonderful perfume! I mean, you gotta look for longevity, wearability, generlal wonderfulness and all there...
So I began to rework the formulas...and the collections of little sample bottles for each element got larger and larger....
Whether it was the sheer magnitude of what I was trying to achieve, or the muddled self doubting mess in my head over the last few months, nothing seemed to be good enough. Time rolled on, the deadline grew closer and closer, and I became almost paralized with indecision. And finally gave up, took a job contract for 2 months to get away from the house and the dramas, and left behind my project bottles unfinished...
Now I'm back, brain heart and soul refreshed from 2 months out in the desert, the project is rolling out, and I'm sitting in my workshop staring and sniffing my little bottles. And here is the big question:
Do I just stop dithering, pick the best out of each lot and send 'em off to Monica? Or do I give in to my need to have them "just right" and thereby miss out on the project alltogether?
I have a pretty damm good "Air" that is like a fresh seaside breeze, with tads of seaweed and driftwood in the background...I have a very watery "Water" that I'd love to fiddle with to make it a wonderful perfume as well as a great representation of the element...my "Fire" again is very firey rather than perfumey...and I'm tempted to send in my "Love Potion" which is applied Fire incarnate and maybe PAN as the ultimate Earth elemental...but is it acceptable to add to older perfumes to the set?
Both of these are great perfumes...whereas the Fire and Earth in my experiments are primordial rather than rounded perfumes....arrrggghhh!!!!!!!!!

5 comments:

  1. I can totally relate to this post Ambrosia, for I too started out making magickal oils(Blessed Be Mr. Scott Cunningham!) and I just had to grin and nod when you mentioned looking at your old formulas and thinking how you've changed. Yes, there is quite a difference between a magickal oil that just smells nice(and is effective) and an actual perfume. I've often thought of trying to rework or come up with more 'perfumey' blends based on the elements, planets, signs, and magickal goals. It's hard. I succeeded, I think, in once instance(I made a planetary perfume based on Venus, with more 'masculine' type oils used, including cumin). I remember the topic came up once on the Natural Perfumery group on Yahoo about this very same subject and one member mentioned that everytime she made elemental blends they tended to smell 'unbalanced', which is sort of the point when working with elemental smells and energies, but not what you are looking for in a beautiful, wearable perfume!

    ReplyDelete
  2. you've hit the nail on the head Goblinboy!
    I was originally planning on making a layerable set...but it turned into such a massive project...the individual elements need to be compatible with each other...and thats where it bcame messier and messier...
    I'm now working on one I've named "Flora" which is inspired by the beautiful painting that spearheads Monica's "The Fifth Sacred Thing" project...a lovely leafy green floral with a touch of fruitiness, a bit like the abundantly flowing Life pouring from her cornucopia....

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi! How do you think what is your common reading audience?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Such a wonderful post. Thank you for shearing sacred.

    ReplyDelete
  5. interesting post, thanks for share.

    ReplyDelete