Perfume by Nature

Joy in January

2012-01-16T08:30:00.000+11:00

The Natural Perfumers Guild is hosting a blogathon esp. for the porr suffering people of the northern hemisphere who are currently dealing with the long, cold and grey miserable months of winter. Aprt from being cold and grey, the long nights and lack of decent sun and daylight also mean long months of misery and depression for many people. S.A. D or "Seasonal Affective Disorder" is the technical term for these winter blues, and affects most people to some degree or another. It is thought to be related to serontonin production, a neurotransmitter which our body produces in conjunction with exposure to sunlight. So obviously, no sun, no serontonin equals SAD. So the Natural Perfumers guild thought it might be a nice idea to tap into the collective knowledge of their perfumers on how this can be combatted with the help of perfume. And this is my post on the subject. We all know that nice smells make us feel batter, but Aromatherapy can help us take this concept a few steps further...and those of use who work exclusively with naturals of course work with the essential oils used in Aromatherapy...and many of us (including yours truly) actually come from an Aromatherapy background......

One of the very first perfumes I ever made was based on an essential oil blend I used to use in Germany to stop myself from wanting to slit my wrists during the long dark miserable winters.

I used to suffer terribly from what they now call "SAD" or Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the winters in Berlin were particularly long and grey.

Each year, as soon as the days became shorter, my mood would start to darken too, and I would only begin to pick up as the days lengthened and the sun came back out of her hiding place below the equator.

When I discovered aromatherapy, I of course started to research which esential oils were good for depression, and discovered that Patchouli was one the the best and longest used for this in India. It is used in Ayurvedic medicine to treat everything from melancholy to outright mania, and it's deep, earthy scent seems to have the immediate effect of making you feel safe and grounded...

So I started burning it in my little oil burner and to my joy found that I felt much more peaceful and even started to smile again....I experimented all that first aromatic winter with blends of different things, and found my best blend was a simple combination of patchouli with bright clear lemon!

Some years later when I started to make actual perfumes, I took a break from the complex floral formulas I was experiementing with, and started to think: Why shouldn't it be possible to combine Aromatherapy with Perfumery and create Perfumes that actually have therapeutic effects as well as smelling beautiful?

I dug out my notes on my favourite aromatherapy blends and rememberd how happy the patchouli and lemon mix had made me....the combination of the two is somehow so warm and friendlyas a scent, the lemon doing something really remarkable to patchoulis dark duskiness and the patchouli giving the short lived lemon a depth and warmth that is just yummy....but they didn't quite work together as an actual "perfume", so I decided to experieiment a bit more. After delving back into my herb books, I decided that an obvious choice would be Sandalwood, beloved the world over for it's soothing comforting effects, as well as one of the smoothest and most beautiful of all perfumery ingredients! Like Patchouli, it has a long history of being used in traditional Auyuveda for treating depression. It also happens to work seamlessly with both patchouli and lemon, and added an elegance and gentleness to the perfume which was just what was needed! I also added a touch of Tahitian lime to give it an extra twist and a few other ingredients to round off the scent, and "Happiness" was born.

I started taking it with me to the various trade fairs and cosmetics shows had stalls at, and was delighted to find that my customers liked it just as much as I did! It seemed to have an incredible unisex appeal, men and women both liked it and wore it, and you could see from the happy grin after the first sniff just how direct an effect it had on peoples moods!

People bought it, and came back and bought more, telling me they found it to be a great pick me up scent...they wore it to help them get going in the morning, as a pick me up after work, and one guy even told me it was the best cure for a hangover he had ever found, grin!

After nearly 20 years, it is still one of my most popular perfumes. It's simple yet elegant scent is refreshing, uplifting and just incredibly friendly! It's a true inisex scent, and one of those you can wear to the office without ever worrying about offending anyone...

But best of all, it simply works. Wearing it makes you feel better.

And what I am particularly proud of is that for me, "Happiness" proved once and for all what I have been saying for years: You CAN combine Aromatherapy and modern Perfumery. And create Perfumes that have a therapeutic effect, and are also GREAT perfumes!

If you'd like to try "Happiness", I'm giving away samples to the 3 most interesting or enthusiastic Australian and 2 Overseas customers who post a comment here!
(Winners will be chosen and announced on friday!)

Otherwise you can also order samples and full size bottles of "Happiness" directly from my webstore!

Get yourself some "Happiness"!

Or post a comment below to win a sample!

Other Blogs writing about Joy in January:

Liz Cook of "One Seed"

Noelle Smith

Staphanie K Naturals

Arlys Naturals

Avalon...an adventure in mystical apples

2011-10-01T11:50:00.000+10:00

A few years ago, I went back to England and visited the area where the mystical Isle of Avalon is supposed to be...the coastal area around Tintagel and Glastonbury....the birth place of King Arthur, and the legendary Merlin, Vivianne, the lady of the lake and Morgainne, priestess of Avalon...
It was late summer and there entire area is full of apple orchards...ancient gnarled trees full of wisdom and a sense of antiquity...sourounded by the lush scent of ripe apples, hanging heavily from overladen boughs.....

I climbed Glastonbury Tor one evening...and as the soft haze settled over the valley beneath me, you could almost hear the chants of the preistesses drifting over from the Magical Isle of Avalon....mystical incense, herbs and the wafting deep and fresh scent of ripe apples from the ancient trees......
When I got back to Australia, I sat down to try and capture this picture in a perfume. Fruit notes are particularly hard to capture with natural ingredients, as fruit (apart from citrus) simply doesn't lend its scent to extraction the way flowers do...Some years before I had scored a tiny bottle of apple essential oil, distilled from whole granny smith apples in South Afrika by a rogue distiller...it had the sharp apple topnote to it, but totally lacked the sweet depth of an actual apple, the way many essential oils do...and of course this tiny bottle wasn't going to be enough to actually make any quantity of perfume....
So I set out to find a way to create a scented picture of the real thing.
I found a number of different apple CO2 extracts used in the food industry, that gave a sense of the fresh sharp topnotes in apples even if it lacked the juicy lushness I was looking for, but at least it gave me a starting point. together with a few drops of my precious apple EO, I had an apple topnote for my perfume. To this I added Rose ...the most english of flowers, and a perfect partner to the sharp apple tang. I chose to use a particularly delicate Rose du Mai, as it adds an fairy like quality to the blend, a flower blossom touch....
Neroli adds further floral beauty, while I found a touch of mandarin added in the fruity sweetness needed to give a sense of ripeness to the apple top note....the perfume began to take form....The heart and base are a blend of hay, fresh mown hay lying out in the fields, drying for the winter feed... fir balsam from the trees of the forest around the orchards...and labdanum incense resin from the isle of Crete, used by the preistesses in Delphi, which seemed rather appropriate...labdanum is also such a soft, ambery sweet scent in itself, that blended perfectly with the floral fruity mid and topnotes.....re creating that sense of orchard and forest I had in my vision...priestesses burning incense in the temple of the apple isle on a late summers eve.......

"Avalon"
Scent family: fruity floral

Notes     top: apple CO2 and distillate, neroli
               midnotes: rose du mai, green mandarin, apple blossom accord
               base:    labdanum, hay, fir balsam, amber accord

Order your own bottle

of "Avalon" here:
(Orders outside Australia perfume oil only pls as we cannot ship alcohol based edp overseas!)

A Scented Visitor

2011-09-08T18:14:00.000+10:00

Yesterday I had a wonderful freind drop in on her way back up north from sydney....
Hanna has spent many years in the far East, and now imports a beautiful range of materials, clothing...and for me of course more importantly, Frankincense and Myrrh!
Her website "The Queen of Sheba" is full of amazing photos and stories about the places she has visited and where the resins and oils come from....tales about the people and the breathtakingly beautiful country...the secret locations where the ancient frankincense trees have been growing for hundreds of years...Her website also has pictures of the colourful pottery incense burners the women make by hand, and the gorgeous handwoven fabrics...This is Fair Trade in it's truest form! Hanna herself is a truly adorable radical greenie after my own heart...and we spend hours debating how to run businesses that are both ethical, and ecoplogically true, as well as making us a living!

She turned up with a car full of beautiful scented goodies as usual, and we spent a delightful few hours drinking coffee, burning incense and sniffing oils and potions.....
We always end up swapping booty, so I've got some of the amazing frankincense she gets from Oman ...it's so different from the Somalian stuff I've been useing for years...it has a fresh almost lemony scent to it that is truly luminescant...it's so different as an essential oil that I didn't even recognize it as frankincense at first sniff...and burnt as incense it's just amazing.....
This time she brought me a huge lump of pure styrax resin (which is what you can see in the picture next to that beautiful handcrafted traditional incense burner). We must have looked like drug dealers, sitting there on my verandah scratching small amounts of wierd powders off it with a penknife, grin! It has a strange burnt rubbery after smell when you burn it, so I'm not sure I like it as incense...but I tinctured some of the crushed resin in alcohol and Oh boy, what lovely stuff! It's sweet and vanilla and ambery and pretty dam luscious! totally different to the styrax essential oil I have....which is sharp and rubbery foremost and only has the soft luscious ambery scent right at the back....So I'm delighted to have this new ingredient to play with! Hanna left with more samples of my perfumes (She's in Love with "Sense of Honour" at the moment!) and a little bottle of the Styrax tincture...Sometimes I really do feel a bit like a drug lord...swapping little bottles of strange tinctures I've cooked up in my lab for lumps of interesting smelling resins in brown paper bags....no wonder Australia post opens so much of my mail at the border, grin!
Anyway, check out Hanna's website! I'm pestering her to add more of her stories about her adventures in Oman so hopefully you'll find more there soon! But you can see the amazing photos and browse her wonderful wares! The Queen of Sheba

New bottles for Spring!

2011-09-07T10:30:00.000+10:00

Finally found the right bottles to package my perfume oils in!
I've been looking for a while...
I love the round perfume atomizers I use for the alcohol based eau de parfums...and the smaller ones for the full size bottles of perfume oils...but I just wasn't happy with the little oil bottles...and a lot of people seem to like the idea of small bottles...
Plus we can't ship alcohol based perfumes overseas, so we're selling more and more of the oil bsed perfumes...and people do like roll on bottles....but the simple black lidded ones just don't look elegant and beautiful enough to do the content of a high end natural perfume justice...and the little cute ones I was useing, apart from not being roll ons, where very pretty, but didn't really match the range...and I do like consistency!
And then I found these.....and of course have now filled them with flowers and spices fitting to each scent!
Happy happy happy!

For all lovers of Orange Flower

2011-08-18T17:30:00.001+10:00

field of bitter orange trees

A few months ago I came accross an essential oil company I hadn't heard of before...
A Fahkry & Co, an Egyptian company that distills and sells an amazing collection of essential oils and absolutes, including a special organic collection the widest range of orange flower, neroli and petigrain versions I've ever come accross! The website is pretty impressive in it's description of it's various organic endeavours, from new organic farms to seed saving and gentle extraction methods...and it's so refreshing to see companies outside of Europe adopting green approaches! I'm always a bit suspicious of companies I've never heard of before, esp. those that make organic claims, but these guys are very forthcoming with information and sent me an amazing collection of samples along with sheaves of accompanying paperwork with detailed analysis sheets for all the oils! And I'm rather impressed with the quality too, no cheap synthetic knock offs here!
I'm going to review the oils I've got here in groups, because there's simply too many to cover in one post!
What really blew me away was the range of citrus products! Ive never seen so many forms of petigrain and biregarde in one place before!
I know that this is a particular love of many perfumers, so I thought I'd write about them in more detail with my own scent impressions!

Orange flower absolute Deep, fruity with almost nutty undertones

Petigrain bigarade absolute This one I particularly love! It has such lovely fresh twiggy notes along with the petigrain freshness and a wonderful tea note!
neroil egyptian a tangy neroli

mandarin petigrain wow, a petigrain with a touch of mandarin sweetness! It's also got that fresh twig sappy feel to it....a real natural sorta woodsy mandarin touched scent!
key lime petigrain and then a real tangy, citrus petigrain...almost lemon verbena notes!
biregarde flower extract this is a zingy floral, lighter than the orange flower absolute
petigrain bigarade earl grey notes...very elegant

bigarade green notes of green mandarin
bigarade rouge this is softer than the petigrain mandarin...it's just lovely...softly mandarin sweet fresh green....

distilled fruit birgarade this is soft sweet citrus, undefinable which one, and much gentler than the straight cold pressed oils....I want to use this one in a floral perfume, with maybe a delicate white rose....
Key Lime distilled I want to bathe in this one! Lime lollies on steroids! I've loved lime essential oil for a long time, but this key lime has an added tang, almost like a touch of grapefruit and lemon verbena...I'm in citrus heavan!

My nose is dizzy just from reviewing them all one by one! So much vareity within a simple theme...absolutely lovely!
They also have an impressive range of herbal oils, as well as some really nice rose and jasmines....which I'll be reviewing later on!
All up, I'm delighted to have found these people!
They also have one of the holy grails of hard to find oils: CAROB essential oil! They were out of stock when I contacted them so I'm still waiting impatiently!

Alchemy for Wytchy Ways

2011-08-02T21:36:00.002+10:00

Spent a wonderful day today with the lovely Suzanne Naseby of Wytchy Ways
Suzanne came up to my workshop to consult with me about creating two massage oils for her online store, and it was a true delight! I had met this wonderful woman previously, when I took part in one of her "Soul Collage" workshops and had been impressed by her warmth and knowledge as a counsellor, and was delighted when she approached me about designing the scents of her new products! We spent an hour gossiping on my sunny verandah before we got down to work, catching up on stories of all the people we know, and our lives as middle aged women teetering on the edge of menopause...

And then, after mislaying our coffee cups and being held up by dogs and cats demanding attention of my new guest, we settled down to the actual work.
Custom design is my favourite thing to do. It's always fascinating to see which scents a person is drawn to...to me it's almost as intimate as having a peek in their personal diary, and the session with Suzanne was decidedly fun!
She had two very different scents in mind: One for use on Sabbath celebrations, one for Esbats. For those non-pagans amongst you, Sabaths are the Solar celebrations in the Pagan calender, such as Eostre/ Easter, Samhain/Halloween and Winter Solstice/Chirstmas. The Esbats are celebrated on the full moon. So we are basically working on a solar and a lunar scent. Suzanne had brought a few of the oils she had already bought with her, including a delightful smelling benzoin, which proved too thick to work with this morning, even with the help of a warm water bath...but we came up with a few rather nice blends...on the solar side, Suzanne had something foodie and luscious in mind, seeing as good pagan celebrations always have great food and a feast as a central part of them....what we ended up with is a rather scrumptious warm spicy sweet melange which will work to stimulate and awaken all the senses.....ginger, cinnamon, fruit and more all combined to give it life and zing in a totally delicious way.....the lunar Esbat blend is much softer...elegant clarity built around the Rose of the Goddess, and the deep, sacred beauty of frankincense. She has also chosen a really interesting smokey base to underline the incense notes, which gives the blend a true "temple" feel...Each bottle will also have one drop of pur herbal oil of mugwort or wormwood, which Suzanne has magically charged during ritual herself, to give the oils an even greater effect.

The bottles she has chosen are interesting too. Simple, elegant aluminium flasks which she is planning on decorating with swing tags and material. So we ended the session with 5 little bottles of potion, samples to go home with Suzanne to be sniffed and pondered at leasure...over the next week or so, each of the scents will undergo a further alchemical transformation as the individual oils blend and interact with each other, so we'll see how they settle down. It's quite an involved process getting it "just right", and I'm sure it will take a few more changes and trials to find the "perfect blend"...
But they are going to be pretty special!

'Twas all up a very nice day...Alchemical Scent Magic at it's best!

Pan's Midsummer Night Dream

2011-07-23T11:02:00.007+10:00

I recently took part in a wonderful perfume competition, "A Midsummer Nights Dream" run by the lovely Amanda Feeley from Essentual Alchemy. The idea was to create a perfume inspired by William Shakespear's play. The perfumes were then sent to a number of different perfume reviewers.
What I find really beautiful about this project, is the artwork the reviewers used to accompany their reviews! So I've reposted not only the reviews themselves, but also the paintings that accompanied them!
You can read more about my offering to this project "Pan" here:
"The Story of Pan"
and you can order samples of it in my webstore

Carol from WAFT wrote: LOVE THIS !

Sir Joseph Noël Paton - Evening

An intoxicating patchouli scent that could fit just as easily into the summer of Patchouli love , but this was created in honor of Puck = a tamer , gentler version of Pan in our Shakespearean play....PAN the scent is wildly gorgeous - a green earthy Rosemary and Patchouli scent , deepened with oakmoss and embellished with cinnamon , nutmeg and thyme....lordy lordy this is wonderful . Long have I searched for the perfect rosemary scent ( that doesn't remind me of lamb stew )...Dominated by rosemary , PAN is my favorite scent of the summer ! Earthy , resonant , spicy and just outright sexy in the best way .

The Windesphere Witch writes:
"I can't resist a perfume that claims...."If you don't want to get laid, don't wear it". Pan

is a perfume that I think could definitely live up to that challenge. It's very masculine, the horned God himself and the muskiness mixed into the delicious blend of rosemary, thyme, marjoram and Indian Patchouli is delightful and exquisitely sexy in a sort of "roll around naked and sweaty in the tall grass sort of way" and it smells incredible on my husband, better than it does on me and I think that this one takes a man to unleash it's potency. Pan is quite herbaceous but there's also something in it that reminds me of my horse Henry when we've been galloping around in the dense woods for a bit and he's fairly sweaty and so am I. It's that fine line between animal passion and human playfulness that I think that she's captured here and she's done it very well. At first sniff Pan seems simple and then suddenly you're enslaved by his lovely flutes. Follow him anywhere but at your own risk.....unplanned risky delightful sex in a bottle this one is:)

Donna from Perfume Smellin'-Things wrote:

"My next adventure was a frolic with Pan, the very naughty brainchild of Ambrosia Jones, proprietor of Perfume By Nature near Sydney, Australia. Pan is a wild fellow indeed, but as with many purportedly “masculine” fragrances, many women love to wear them too and this one really won me over. Pan reminded me of the more rustic perfumes from La Via del Profumo in Italy, which is saying a lot, because those are truly excellent compositions. It’s not as heavily animalic as my beloved Tcharas or as green and exhilarating as Hindu Kush, but it has its own distinctive character. Pan (The character of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a thinly veiled version of the mythical Greek satyr) has a dry, sun-soaked halo of herbal and piney warmth wrapped around its chypre base of dark oakmoss and resins. Rosemary and thyme combined with a spicy (yet not sweet) heart make this redolent of warmer climes, and it’s not hard to picture this mischievous being frolicking in the rugged hillsides above the Aegean Sea, chasing buxom women and laughing the days away. I don’t get too much of a “night” impression from this, but surely most of the trouble Pan/Puck gets himself into occurs in the midnight hour! He is up to no good and so is his namesake perfume, a lusty and rich concoction guaranteed to turn heads. In fact, I received an unsolicited compliment from a co-worker, who urged me to come closer so she could smell my perfume. Staying power is excellent, lasting all day with no problem at all and any confident man should really enjoy wearing it. However, he will have to pry it out of my hands first!

Felicia M Hazard of Fragrance Belles-Lettres

I must confess, I am a fan of chypre. It gives me a deep feeling of completeness and wholeness that is actually indescribable. Thank goodness for a fragrance that speaks for my indescribable feelings. PAN from Perfume by Nature leads you into a journey of a woody citrus forest that is guarded by Pan, God of Nature. You immediately notice patchouli that sings of a deep moment in the wild. Then you are guided into a forest full of oak trees covered in moss. The tall dark trees towering over the forest with a heavy passion for dark and intense moments that arise in PAN.

Quickly PAN dries on the skin into a sweet passion fruit state of mind. I really enjoyed this journey with Pan, God of Nature. It showed me that nature is better when left alone without the use of chemicals and pesticides to ruin what is really intended for its goodness.

Now, I understand why Pan is so wild about nature. It is a wonderful place to be and thanks to Pan, Ambrosia Jones was able to compose a beautiful perfume with a beautiful message through her knowledge of the God who is passionate and respectful of all Things Living.

Monica Miller from "Perfume Pharmer"
" Earthy, wild and spicy, I would say Pan would make a great men’s fragrance…but hey, PAN can go both ways, and often does. Definitely evergreen forest like, there is a camphor herbal lift and a playful, botanical and animalic, spiced apple cider- musky undertone. I say “try it!….if you dare….”

And this beautiful poem:

"Ah the Oft maligned and scorned God Pan! What has he done to deserve your wrath, O Christians, that you turn him into the Evil One? How strange to take a Pagan God, a nature spirit, and pit your hate against him, why?

Is it his sexuality you fear? His sweet pan pipe music that turns your heart to gold?

Do you fear to feel yourself as part of nature, as natural as the grass and the trees, as natural as life itself?

Fear not the divine spirit we call PAN. He is NOT the devil as you say. he is not dressed in red, nor does he live in a fiery abode. Unless the passion we call desire that drives the human race generation by generation is evil?

We ride towards our future on the back of PAN

We express joy, laughter, giggles and all things fun and good with PAN

We eat drink and make merry on our holidays with PAN

We revel, we intoxicate like drunken monkeys on fermented fruit, in a natural way..with PAN

We forget our troubles for a moment lifted by the music of PAN"

Carol from Waft is also selling sample collections from "The Midsummer Nights Dream" project through her online store The Niche Place , contact her directly to ask about this!

"Happiness" for the "Summer of Patchouli Love"

2011-07-01T15:27:00.000+10:00

My own Offering to the "Summer of Patchouli Love" is a perfume named "Happiness".
Why did I choose it for the patchouli challenge?
Originally I was going to start from scratch and create a totally new patchouli perfume...I was thinking I'd go for a floral patchouli, maybe Rose and patch with a touch of jasmine...something deep and sensual that would evoke the 60's indian headshop oils the way most of us remember them....(and also because previous perfume competitions seem to have shown that most women love floral perfumes over everything else!).
I started working on a few variations and they seemed quite promising...but I got talking to a few friends about the project, and one in particular remarked "I really HATE patchouli!". I almost fell on the floor laughing, as she is also a loyal customer of mine who has been buying and wearing my "Happiness" for a number of years now...and it's really heavy on patchouli!! "No way!" she said when I told her this, "I KNOW patchouli and there is definitley NONE of that nasty heavy moldy stuff in "Happiness", I'd KNOW!
So I dug out the recipe and showed her....but it got me thinking....
"Happiness" is actually one of my oldest perfumes...it started it's journey many years ago when I first discovered essential oils. I was suffering through a dark depressing winter in Berlin and looking for oils to use in my oil burner that would cheer me up a bit...I had just been reading about the anti-depressant effects of Patchouli and decided to try it out. I carefully dripped a few drops of the thick dark brown liquid into the buner and was enveloped by a sense of woody warmth....dark, comforting, woody/sweet...it definitely made me feel safer and less dejected...I then added a few drops of lemon oil, as the same trusty book had just told me that this was a good antiseptic to use to ward off colds...and as the two scents mingled, I sat back in amazement! Suddenly there was a beautiful, cheerful scent that was somehow something totally new in the air! These two completely different oils complemented each other amazingly well, and not only that, I found myself suddenly feeling hopeful, almost joyful and well, Happy!
10 years and a whole continent later, I found myself living on a hippie community in Nimbin, Australia. We were flat broke, and I was making up my first ever batch of annointing oils to try and sell at the local markets. And one of these was a blend I'd made based on my experience with patchouli and citrus in Berlin which I'd named "Happiness" which was meant to cheer people up!
I'd added sandalwood to the blend which is another soothing oil from therapeutic point of view, and it was pretty bloody yummy! (note for non Australians: "bloody" is a word commonly used by us Ozzies to describe everything good bad and otherwise. We do not regard it as a swear word, but as normal everyday language usage to replace the word "very".)

The hippie customers at the market seemed to think so too, and my career in scent was born!
As the years went by and the business grew, I played with the recipe and made "Happiness" into bath and massage oils and eventually into an alcohol based eau de parfum version. And it went on selling. My perfumes became more sophisticated as time went by, as I added more exotic flower absolutes, and clever gourmand notes and Chypres to my designs, but "Happiness" remained one of the most popular scents, wherever I went. Men and women both bought and wore it, and even those that went for the deeper sexy florals would often by a small bottle of "Happiness" to wear to work or as a "pick me up" perfume too.
And I think this is one of the things that makes it special.
"Happiness" was one of the first ever "Aromatherapy" perfumes out there. If you read some of the posts that conventional perfume critics have written on the subject of Natural Perfumery, they will use this term in a derogatory manner, as if somehow, the fact that a perfume designed to have positive effect on the body automatically makes it somehow dilletantish and crude. Personally I think they couldn't be further from the truth. I'm a hippie green revolutionary at heart, and Natural Perfumery to me is in essence a form of Cosmetic Permaculture. The art of making a perfume beautiful, organic, sustainable and healthy makes into an even more beautiful work of art in my books. And if the perfumer is skilled enough to make a scent therapeutic as well as delightful in smell....

And as I went on thinking about the concept of designing a perfume to embody the spirit of the 60's, I began to wonder if maybe "Happiness" might be just perfect...
After all the 60's were all about changing the world. Bringing back a sense of harmony between Nature and Humans, and also about Love, Peace, caring for one another and well, spreading a little Happiness!
So in the end I decided to submit the very perfume that I had been inspired to make by my own quest for inner Peace.
It's a slightly more sophisticated version of my original annointing oil nowadays... the patchouli is a particularly fine aged one...the sandalwood is a more eco-freindly Australian version from sustainable plantations....the lemon is a soft, fresh green lemon from unripe fruits, with a touch of lime to give it a fresh tang...and theres a tad of spice and a nuance of vetiver to give it body and depth.
But it's still based around Patchouli and Lemon, same as the first drops in my oil burner in Berlin, all those many years ago.
The 60's were all about hope, and humanities adolescant dreams of Peace and Love...
And "Happiness" grew from mine!

I'll be posting what the critics thought of "Happiness" in my next blogpost, and there will also be a number of giveaways you can link to if you'd like to win a bottle of "Happiness" to try for yourself!

Peace Love and Patchouli!

Peace, Love and Patchouli

2011-07-01T10:42:00.001+10:00

The Summer of Patchouli Love is finally here...
Some months ago I was invited to take part in a fascinating perfume event.The wonderful Monica Miller from Perfume Pharmer, had come up with a really great idea: To host a double blind perfume challenge based around Patchouli.
The idea was to see what a bunch of Indie Perfumers could come up with, when faced with the following brief: The perfume had to be:

a) completely natural
b) made with at least 25% of patchouli oil

To make it even more interesting, all submissions were re-bottled by Monica herself and given a number, rendering them completely igcognito, and then sent out to a huge cast of reviewers to be sniffed and judged purely on their scent alone.

This was a first in perfume challenge history. It was a double blind event, neither the judges, not he perfumers themselves had any idea who's perfume was who's, and the reviewers had to go by their own personal tastes, as they were not given a list of notes, or in fact anything at all about the individual perfumes to work from!
Monica also managed to orchestrate an amazingly diverse cast of judges, with two totally different groups: Firstly a more traditional group of perfume reviewers who regularly write reviews for various blogs.
And a second group of celebreties, ranging from International political activist and Witch, Starhawk, over eco clothes designer Deborah Lindquist , Cirque de Soleil members and musicians and actors the likes of Jodie Foster and Mary J. Blige!

With such a wide and stellar cast, us perfumers have been sitting there chewing our nails, wondering how our babies were going to be recieved.....I was a bit sceptical at first, as I know how a perfumes story is a huge part of it's appeal...and I wasn't sure how people would relate to a perfume without this, esp. as many of the judges were unfamiliar with natural perfumes.....
I am now a great believer! The "double blind" nature of this contest has made it far more fascinating...the judges perceptions and the descriptions they have found for the individual perfumes are absolutely wonderful! It has made the event absolutely fascinating to watch for me as a perfumer too!
And it is giving us all true feedback on the scents themselves, unbiased by stories, packaging or the perfumers reputation!

If any of you would like to be able to follow the story on an olfactory level, Monica still has a limited number of sample boxes of all of the PLAP perfumes for sale....email her for details!

(I'm now eagerly awaiting my own!)

Later today I'll introduce you all to the perfume I submitted for the event myself too!

The Creation of Pan

2011-05-30T18:09:00.001+10:00

I have submitted one of my oldest perfumes to the "Midsummer Nights Dream" competition...and as I was trying to write short desriptions of the perfume for the judges, I realized how much a perfumes story is also part of it...
And the story of the birth of this perfume is a particularly interesting one.
The perfume I am submitting is called "Pan " I chose to submit it to the competition, as one of the main character's in Shakespeare's play is "Puck", who is actually an anglicised and slightly tamer version of the great Greek God Pan...so it seemed only fitting.
"Pan" the perfume was actually one of my first creative collaberation projects.
I wanted to create a perfume as a male counterbalance to the overtly female "Goddess" I had made, a sweet, enticingly sensual rose and jasmine concoction..."Pan", for those of you who haven't come accross him before, is the Wild Greek God of Nature. Untamed, Free, he is said to wander through the Greek countryside palying his pan pipes followed by a dancing group of delighful and sensuous nymphs...he loves good wine and sex and the word "panic" comes from his habit of creating mayhem wherever he goes.....At the same time Pan is the protector of all wild animals, and a great Lover and also protector of Women....

I had been reading the book "Jitterbug Perfume" by Tom Robbins and was completely taken by the olfactory image of "Pan" in it...wild, animalic and representing everything that is untamed and male....
But I was having problems with it. So I recruited the help of my sisters then boyfriend, who's nickname, fittingly, was "Puck". We sat down in my workshop and started sorting through the various potions and extracts to see what we both thought could make a scent that could call up a perfumed image of this wild make nature spirit...
We started with patchouli, which Tom Robbins married to the lad in his book. Deep, sensual, dark and with an interesting combination of sweet, woody, rooty and earthy...but it just wasn't wild or male enough by itself.
I had just bought my first tin of oakmoss resinoid some time ago. I had bought it blind, having no idea what it was, when looking for incense ingredients, and had been overwhelmed by the intensity of the scent of this dark brown sticky goo...and on sudden inspiration, brought down this tin of sticky stuff to show to Puck...it was perfect! So wild and earthy and downright rutting with natural muskiness! A tiny dab went into the patchouli, and then we started adding herbs and spices, from the fresh rosemary and thyme that grow wild in the Greek hillsides when Pan comes from to oriental cinnamon and nutmeg, which gave the wild thing a touch of exotic warmth and pizazz.....


"Pan is born" by Thorsten

The end result was pretty awesome. Somehow between us we managed to create something that was totally unlike anything either of us had ever smelt in a perfume bottle. And a far far cry from the beautiful elegant perfumes I had been making up until then.
The final test and Pan's first true debut was at a halloween party that happened a few months later. A friend of mine actually decided to dress up as Pan. Mike actually looked the part to start with, being dark hair and eyes, a furry chest and even a little goatee beard...but he was also a pretty gentle soul generally and usually fairly quiet and mild mannered.

"Pan is alive"by Thorsten Jones

So anyway, he dressed up in a homespun woolen jerkin, a goatskin tail, and a crown of horns and leaves and we doused him heavily in the "Pan" potion...and the musky scent spread over him and began to do it's magic. It was an interesting party, as halloween usually is, esp. when you get together a bunch of mad pagans who dabble in interesting things...the food and wine flowed freely, accompanied by an ever wilder creature dressed in skins and furs who cavorted and galloped through the crowd, leaving a feeling of unrest and general mayhem, along with a scent of musk, rut and wild herbs that spread through the entire house......he was spanking people with his little whip, poking his goats tail in their faces and generally behaving exactly like you would expect of, well Pan himself! It was an interesting party...and I'm not telling any more tales even though it was some years ago now...but I can tell you that "Pan" and his wife told an interesting story about strange aparations with horns and a cheeky grin appearing at the end of the bed later that night (Mike reckons he saw two of them because he was so drunk he was seeing double at the time), shortly after which they had a run of exploding condoms......
I've been selling the stuff as a perfume ever since. And it has grown to have a bit of a reputation, esp. amongst the pagan community...What really amazed me as I began to offer it to my more mainstream customers, is how many women love and wear the scent! It seems "Pan" speaks to an inner wild women that needs to be set free in many of us too! It's heavy Oakmoss base makes it a dry herbal Chypre with an exciting edge in modern perfume terms and is in some ways remeniscent of the older perfumes of the 1930's and 40's...
Whether or not you like it is of course entirely personal....I'm usually to chicken to wear it my self, but my husband, my ex husband and many of my loyal customers love it....
It's definitely not for the faint hearted though....

As the bottle says: "Wear it if you Dare!"

The photos were taken by Thorsten Jones whiteantstudios@gmail.com

Mike's wife Bev, who graciously convinced him to let me use the photos, is a great Astrologer who publishes regular "Astral Meanders"

Patchouli-a perfumers perspective

2011-04-10T16:49:00.000+10:00

I'm writing a book about Natural Perfumery...

So as part of the "Summer of Patchouli Love" project run by Monica Miller of "Perfume Pharmer" I thought I'd add a few of my thoughts as a perfumer on this strange and wonderful oil...In one of the chapters I've started a kind of reference series for budding perfumers to use when selecting ingredients for a perfume. And this is my entry for patchouli:

Patchouli

Forms it comes in: trad. EO, iron free distilled EO and absolute distilled from the fermented leaves of the pogostorum plant
Appearance: A thick, dark brown liquid, clearer in iron free eo
Origin: India and Asia
Therapeutic uses: Traditionally used in Asia to treat depression, as an antiseptic and to repell moths. Patchouli is grounding, soothing and also quite sensual.
Scent profile: Dark woody, sweet amber, earthy, musty with a touch of fruit and spice (lighter in iron free version). Aged Patchouli is softer than fresh, which can have a sharp, biting by note to it.
Colour profile: (note:This is my own visual imagery of what a scent "looks like" to me! Kinda wierd I know, but that's how my brain works!) Dark soft rusty brown, with black and grey shadows and a few distinct purple and bright rust coloured streaks through it! Depending on the kind of patchouli, there may also be some greenish touches as well...and if it is the clear distilled patchouli you have, it will have a metallic touch and less of the dark brown and black, and also less of the rust.
Effect in blends: Used as a fixative basenote, it "sweetens" and deepens blends. Great for musky florals such as jasmine. Adds depth to citrus. Spice note can clash with some ingredients. Can also make blends overly sweet

Patchouli is one of my favourite ingredients.
Growing up on the tail end of the 60's revolution has left me with a nostalgic love of the sweet and heavy scents that accompanied the long flowing psychedelic flowered dresses of that era...Deep pungent oils from little Indian bottles, Patchouli is truly the scent of those years.
Which is why of course so many people have a Love/Hate relationship with it.
For me, it brings up the image of good times. My teenage years where I still believed that anything was possible...where we all dreamed of changing the world, and the ideas of “Peace” and “Love” were more than just slogans to write on a rainbow coloured t-shirt.
From an Aromatherapy point of view, it is a truly magical ingredient. Patchouli has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for centuries, as it has wonderful healing properties. It is soothing and antiseptic in skin care applications, and it makes a wonderful insect repellent (which is part of the reasons that the scent became so much part of the 60's...all those long flowing dresses came over scented with it from India to keep them from being eaten by bugs on their long journey in packing boxes!).
But for me the most interesting of it's properties is use in depression and anxiety!
The scent of patchouli is fundamentally soothing. In ajuveda it is used to”settle disharmonies of the Mind”, and has a long history of use in psychiatric illnesses ranging from depression to outright mania!(It's also used as an aphrodisiac in perfumery blends...but more of that later on...)
So the first time I used it, was in an aromatherapy blend I made to use myself in the middle of a particularly dark and depressing winter in Berlin, Germany. I combined patchouli with some lemon oil in my trusty oil burner, and was amazed and delighted to feel how much the scent lifted my mood!
When I first started out as a perfumer, I fell in love with patchouli all over again. It makes a wonderful base note in floral and oriental scents, with it's deep, sweet musty tenacity. I must have combined it with every other base note in existance over the years, an have used it in a number of my commercial perfumes too:

My original Aromatherapy experience with patchouli led me to create one of my very first commercial perfumes: "Happiness". It's based on Patchouli married to a delightful lime topnote, with sandalwood and other citruses rounding off the scent. It's a remarkably light, fresh scent and the patchouli isn't really noticeable as an ingredient (even though there's a lot of it in there!) In fact a dear friend of mine was chatting to me about the Summer of Patchouli project the other day, and remarked "I really hate Patchouli!" Which had me in fits of laughter...you see, she's been wearing my "Happiness" almost every day for years and constantly tells people how much she loves it!

Patchouli is like that. in perfumes, it is truly the skill with which you choose your ingredients and your deft hand with blending which makes the difference between a musty sweet mess, and a truly delightful elegant concoction. Patchouli can ruin a blend really quickly. It has some rather contradictory notes in it that you have to work with carefully, and this is where many perfumers go wrong when trying to use it.
For starters it has a strong musty note to it. Patchouli oil is made from the fermented leaves and flowers of the patchouli plant, and this fermentation process always leaves a very earthy, musty touch to it. The fermented leaves look like shrivelled, brown slightly moist, well, mess really! I was horrified the first time I imported a large quantity of the stuff and at first thought my oder must have gone "off" duiring the shipping process!
This mustiness is something you have to be careful with in blending, along with the sharp, acrid bynote you don't really notice on first sniff. If you pair patchouli oil with any ingredient that has similar notes somewhere hiden in its makeup, you will amplify them tenfold!

But you can also use them!
The second perfume I made with patchouli was "Love Potion". Here I used patchouli solely for it's renowned aphrodisiac qualities. Here it is patchouli's deep, sweet and musky qualitites that seem to play on our deepest senses... I wasn't seeking to make the perfume gentle and sweet here, so I played up the wilder side of the herb by adding liberal amounts of spices like coriander and cardamon to a heavy oriental blend with a deep, sultry jasmine heart, all on a deep sexy base where I combined patchouli with incense resins for an exotic touch.
This allowed all of the sharp and wild notes in patchouli to actually be a feature that fitted in perfectly with the bite of the spice, and the dirty muskyiness of the jasmine!
The result is a dry, wildly spicy Oriental perfume that is almost the polar opposite to it's gentler sister "Happiness"....and has just as many devout followers from a completely different perfume loving group!
What they have on common is that neither of them are obvious patchouli perfumes to a non-perfumer, even though it is a main player in both perfumes recipe!
My next challenge is to create a perfume in which Patchouli is actually centre stage for the "Summer of Patchouli Love" project! So I have a workbench covered in little bottles again...should I go in the direction of an elegant chypre with a touch of apricot and caramel? Or do it soft and clean with vetiver for warmth and a fresh clean topnote? Or go classic hippie and do a straight rose and patchouli? Decisions, decisions......wish I could just submit 3 totally different ones, they all seem lucious and full of possibilities! But somewhere I have to decide and focus on just one direction.....

Whadyall think?

Patchouli Summer of Love

2011-04-08T10:42:00.000+10:00

I'm delighted to be part of another wonderful perfume project, this time run by the delightful Monica Miller of "Perfume Pharmer"!

It is based around one of my favourite ingredients: Patchouli!
I've been dying to bring out a perfume I actually made many many years ago that is based around this beautiful ingredient, that for so many of us is the scented symbol of a time when we all began to dream of new possibilities, a world without hate, of spiritual connections, conciousness and above all, Dreaming of Freedom!

The project is one of the first of it's kind, in that it is a "BLIND TEST"! The perfumes will be submitted in incognito identical bottles to the judges, so they have no idea who made which perfume!
Which makes it all far more exciting I think.....
Being judged on the scent alone, not ones reputation....

The panel of judges is also different being made up of a combination of perfume critics and celebrity judges, which allows the perfumes to be evaluated by a wonderfully diverse range of people, giving us a much wider impression of how the scent really comes accross....

I'm so excited!

I'll be blogging more about Patchouli both here and on Monica's wonderful blog in the coming weeks, so keep reading!

Lilac and Rose CO2

2011-03-19T13:33:00.001+11:00

Today I'm writing about some rather exciting new floral CO2's from a bulgarian company called "Ecomaat"
They are a newish producer on the essential oil market, and are specializing in producing a range of extracts useing CO2 as a solvent, which as I have written about before, gives you extracts which tend to be a more "total" and gentle version of the fresh plant.

The two extracts I have here in front of me are a lovely Bulgarian Rose and an even more interesting Lilac CO2.
This is to my knowledge, the very first natural Lilac extract to be available to natural perfumers, so I am particularly excited to be able to play with this!

It's been a bit of a dram actually getting these extracts, due to the vagueries of the Australian border security system and the general incompetency of couriers.
My precious little parcel sat with a courier company for over two months while I emailed back and forth with what I at first assumed was an overzealous customs officer. Who kept on trying to tell me that I might be importing dangerous goods and would need to sign a piece of paper promising to pay an inspection fee of $190 to allow them to open the package and find out what was inside it.
I finally worked out that I had been talking to a paranoid and uninformed courier employee for 2 months, got in touch with customs myself, found out what paperwork was actually needed, got this sent through by Ecomaat and told the courier person to send me my f%&&** parcel!
5 days, two attempted deliveries to the wrong address and me finally driving down to the head office of the courier company to pick up my parcel myself, I at last sit in front of two tiny little bottles of precious smelly stuff!

My first problem is that both CO2's are virtually solid. Which makes them very hard to get out of tiny narrow necked bottles!
I spent the next 2 hours sitting holding them into a cup of warm water, trying to dissolve enough of the stuff to transfer it and then further dissolve it in alcohol so I could begin to evaluate it! (which is why you can't see the label on the lilac bottle, it dissolved.)
To make matters worse, the neck on the Rose CO2 was broken, so I ended up covered in the stuff.
Mind you, this allowed me to start the evaluation, and I have to say it is truly delightful!

Rose CO2
This is a really lovely rose. I love rose. And I have quite a collection of different Rose extracts nowadays, including a few others from Bulgaria. And this one is by far the nicest from this region. What usually bothers me with Bulgarian rose is the really sharp topntes, and this CO2 extract is much softer...it has a lovely freshness to it, and gives you a real "White Rose" impression. It is deeper than your classic "Rose De Mai" and also has some lovely apricot warmth to it as well. The bottle doesn't state which rose this is from, but the website mentions both "rose damascaena and rosa alba"...and I suspect this is from Rosa Alba. It would be a great rose to use in a spring floral or flower garden blend...truly delightful! It has great staying power too...the scent has clung to my fingers through 4 washes and is still wafting from the shirt I wiped my hands on some hours ago after the messy decant operation. All up a great addition to the rose pallette!

Lilac CO2
Ah how I yearned for Lilac...in it's natural form, the scent of fresh lilac is so beautiful and ephemeral...it has a completely unique floral softness and lightness to it, with lovely watery overtones that you just can't copy with anything else...
I was so excited when I read about this CO2, and finally having it here to evaluate..
On first sniff it's a bit dissapointing. It's a very gentle scent, esp compared to the spilt rose CO2 that is filling my workshop at the moment.
I had to actually go outside to evaluate this delicate scent as it just got lost under the rose.
Once I buried my nose into the tissue I had dabbed the alcohol diluted CO2, I did recognize real lilac there...The CO2 is a very gentle, green scent. Delicate and soft, but beautifully fresh and floral. It's a lovely thing, but oh so mild! I wish I could have a more intense version of this, for it is surely one of the nicest things I have smelt recently! I have a bottle of Gardenia abolute and another of Hyacinth abs. that I am tempted to combine with this pretty stuff, but I'm afraid it will dissapear into the background too easily. I'll have a play though...you never know how an ingredient will play with others until you've given it a try.
I would love to create an eau de toillete version of this with just a few ingredients to accentuate and support it...I'm hoping that Ecomaat will find a way to create a more intense version of the lilac CO2 as the scent is beautiful and would make a wonderful addition to the natural perfumers pallette!

All up I'm rather excited with these tw new CO2s...and I'm looking foward to seeing what else Ecomaat comes up with in the future!

Cedarwood & other Conifery things

2011-03-14T18:11:00.001+11:00

I have recently recieved a number of new and rather interesting samples of various kinds of cedarwood plus some other conifers and scent related oils, so I thought I'd do an article on the oil and review all of them together! They all have the same dry, earthy wood base scent to them that is characteristic of cedar...and then each of these oils has added layers that make them different and interesting.
Cedarwood itself is one of the oldest oils to be used in perfumery and healing. It's distinct woody scent has been the base of many a perfume, and is to be found in the scent library of virtually every perfumer, natural or otherwise.
Cedar or "cedrus" is a member of the genus of coniferous trees in the plant family Pinacea.
Scent wise, it is the deepest basenote of the conifers. It has a very characteristic dry woody scent that is common to all cedar oils, which is quite different to the high eukalypt and fresh notes in in it's relatives pine, fir and spruce.

It has strong antiseptic properties, and has been used in "smudging" ceremonies for centuries for this reason. Indigenous American people still use it in rooms where people have been sick to cleanse the air.

In perfumery, Cedar is a base note. It is used to hold and support other, more colourful mid notes, and tends to take a background role in the overall scent. Which doesn't make it any less important! It has a drier, more masculine and elegant feel to it than many other base notes such as patchouli or sandalwood, which makes it an excellent choice for mens colognes. It is a true woody scent, with pencil shaving graphite like notes that give it a cool, earthy touch. I used it "Pan" to capture exactly that sense of forest, of earthiness and nature...Depending on the kind of cedar, you will also get some balsamic, fruity notes to it that are most prominent in red cedar.If you are looking for a real "woody" scent, cedar is your man.

First of all, I've got a collection of oils from
the Essential Oil Company

Incense Cedar
This stuff is pretty awesome! If you like cedar, , you will LOVE this! It's like cedar crossed with frankincense! Seriously! It has a deliciously warm incense note to it coupled with a fresh green note that makes it really lovely!

Western Juniper
This essential oil has the same woody, pencil graphite quality to it that atlas cedar does to me, coupled with a light touch of the fruity herbal eukalypt quality you get from the actual juniper berry essential oil. It has a mid to top note quality to it.

Douglas Fir
This is an interesting one. I have a variety of fir essential oils, and love and use them a lot. Douglas fir is rather different. It is a warmer scent, with woodier qualities, that to my nose, make it closer to red cedar in scent than actual fir essential oil. I'm wondering if this is made from the wood rather than the needles? It's a strange scent, that catches just a tad at the back of my throat and also goes straight to my head. It says it's distilled by the Guerilla Distiller, Robert Seidel himself....which brings up fascinating images of a wild scent fanatic, carting his precious destilling aparatus through the Canadian Wilderniss in search of raw materials, camping out under the stars watching the drops drip into the copper flask....probably not quite as romatic, but it certainly adds to the scent for me, grin!

Palo Santo
Now this little oil is something that I'm sure many of the people out there with shamanic leanings will be delighted to hear of! Palo Santo is known as an incense wood. The name itself means "Sacred Wood" and it is used by shamans in South America for blessings and healing ceremonies of all kinds...it's smoke is deep and mesmerizing and truly magical, so I was very excited to hear that someone was making an essential oil version!
The oil is a bit of a different animal to the incense wood. It is as you would expect, far lighter and more volatile, and also a lot more intense!
My first whiff made my head spin...and I had to go out of the room for a while to let my senses clear!
Going back to it and sniffing more gingerly from the lid, held at a respectful distance, oh buy, that's potent stuff! It has so many layers to it that it's hard to describe as a scent...it is definitely an incense scent, but not easily qualified...it has juniper berry qualities to it, but with deeper franincense touches to it....I have no idea what I would do with it in a perfume...I think I'll have to dilute it WAAAAY down and then play with it for a bit...I get the feeling it would proably dance well with rose in the mid notes...and it definitely has some heavy aromatherapy potential.....

The next ones are from a company called Northwest Aromatics that have just recently entered the essential oil arean. They are making use of the waste wood and shavings produced from harvesting the trees of the Pacific North West and their advertising is very cool to look at and read. (They've also pinched the seriously cool bottle layout page that was originally thought up by "I hate Perfume", but hey, who hasn't wanted to? I certainly did!)
The samples came in a very decorative box, accompnied by a colourful heavyweight ringbound brochure outlining their company and their futre projects. Someone has put a lot of money into their advertising and it's quite impressive! (And boy, do I wish I had the cash to employ their PR team for my perfumery!)
Inside are three 10ml bottles of oil.

Nootka tree oil
Nootka trees it seems, are used for many of the sacred indigenous carvings. The brochure speaks of a "sandalwood effect, with smokey, patchouli vetiver and earthy tones"
Me, I get pencil shavings in the "medium pressure" distilled version. Quiet, elegant wood with graphite overtones. In fact elegant wood is a good way of summing it up!
The low pressure version is very different. Here it becomes almost herbal. I get a destinct sense of thyme in the wood here! The scent os far deeper and more alive somehow...herbal wood?

Giant Arborvitae oil
I've always loved redwood trees...to me they are one of the most fatherly of trees, warm and comforting...you just want to snuggle up to them and stay there forever, safe and at home...
The company again has a lovely sounding desription for it:
"Almond. Add spicy, cumin, pepper and nutmeg notes. Now add a limey scent. And now, woody and wormwood notes."
My own take on it is a bit different. I suppose it's a bit like wine tasting. If you start out with the premis that all of the oils smell like cedar in that they have the same basic dry, earthy woodiness to them, then yes, you can indeed detect vannilla like and cummin like tones to this oil. It's certainly one of the prettiest cedar oils I've come accross so far, and in that, reflects the gentle strength of the trees themselves.

It's really fascinating seeing more and more new essential oils come into the market, as the interest in natural scents and aromatherapy grows!
It's been a delight sniffing so many new variations on an oil I've been playing with for over 20 years...and I hope you've enjoyed reading about them too!
I'd be very interested to hear of others takes on these oils too if you've sampled them yourself!

Aphrodisiacs and Perfume

2011-01-29T22:29:00.000+11:00

http://www.perfumebynature.com.au/love_potion.htm

I've been making perfumes and incense for over 20 years. And I have found that one of the most mysterieous, sought after and debated topics in perfumery is aphrodisiacs.
You still see adds all over the place for perfumes and colognes containing "pheromones guaranteed to attract the opposite sex", and let's face it, one of the main reasons we even started splashing ourselves with scented ingredients was in the hope that we'd smell pretty to potential mates!
Most of the surviving ancient perfume recipes are about Love or at least Sex. Cleopatra's famed unguents were part of her weapon arsenal in bedroom politics...Napoleon and Josephine each had favoured potions that they used to perfume their bodies before they met up after each of his bouts conquering other countries...
And then of course we have the famed "Love Potion No 9" from the 60's song that has inspired so many perfumers (including me) to atempt their own olfactory version...
The historical perfume recipes of the 1800's all have bases of various musk components, musk deer glands, civet, hyraceum, ambergris....all of these an attempt to copy the musky component of our own sweat, in the hope of amplifying our own attractiveness....
Scent actually drives the mating rituals of most species, from mammals to flowers and insects even!
Male deer in rut actually drip thick gooey stuff from various glads and leave trails of intensly musky smelly goop on the trees they rub up against...the smell carries for miles through the forest...dogs leave similar scent trails, both maile and female, and it never ceases to amaze me from how far away a male dog can sniff my locked insie the house bitch when she is on heat!
And think about this for a moment: Why do flowers smell pretty? To attract insects and birds to come and dip in their nectar, and carry the pollen containing genes to other flowers!
Flowers are in fact a plants sex organs.
In fact a vast number of the ingredients of perfumery are based on the various aphrodisiacs of the natural world.

So let's have a closer look at a few of them:

The most obvious ones of course are the musks.
The whole birth of modern chemical perfumery was actually triggered by the attempt to create a cheaper and more readily available form of Ambergris, Deer musk and Civet.
And the number of different musks available to the modern chemist perfumer is quite astounding.
The Natural world offers a number of wonderfully musky ingredients too, even without useing the animal based deer musks that bring with them questions about animal cruelty and sustainability: Hyraceum and Ambergris are both animal musks that are actually left behind by the animals.
Hyraceum is a fossilized form of excreta left by generations of small African mammals who pee over and over again on the same place.
It's not easy to get, but it's an amazing substance, animaly and musky and woody, and throughly wild!
Ambergris is a substance spat out by whales that then spends years to decades floating around on the sea purifying, until one day it washes up on the beach to be found by some lucky person who then sells it on for thousands of dollars to avid perumers. Personally, I don't get much off it...it's just dry and faintly resonant of orrisroot and some sort of musky scent...but it does have a fixative effect in perfumes.

Then there's the spices:
All spices have the effective of getting the juices flowing. They are biological stimulants, designed to heighten our bodies functioning and awaken our appetites...
Of these the ones with the most aphrodisiac effect are Cardamon, Coriander and Cinnamon, Ginger and Pepper. All of them are warming and yummy in food, but in perfumes they add life and warmth and literally "spice things up".
Cardamom is probably one of my favourites. It has a sweetness and depth to it that makes it very sensual...it features strongly in my own offering to the Gods of Erotica: "Love Potion" which was my first spicy Oriental designed to live up exactly to it's name...the idea being that if you felt sexy and passionate, that was the energy you'd give out to the world and attract to you....Kind of my own Aromatherapy version of the infamous "pheromone attractant" perfumes I mentioned above, grin!
Pepper is a really interesting one. It adds bite and Life to florals and fruity blends if you manage to dilute it far enough down....

Cinnamon and Ginger are both used in Chinese medicine to warm the body and spirit, and make great additions to any kind of aphrodisiac massage oil (though be careful again to use them sparingly...cinnamon in particular can be too much of a good thing very quickly! but it does definitly stimulate the tissues! Recently cosmetic manufacturers have started adding it to lipsticks to make the lips swell up and look more sexy! so if you take that a bit further down.....

The roots and woods:

Vetiver is probably the most aphrodesiac one amongst them for me...there is something so deep, pheromoney and wild in a good Vetiver, it makes my skin tingle just smelling it...

Sandalwood is the sweet gentle one amongst the Aphrodisiac ingredients. It has soothing anti depressant properties as well as being sensual and loving. It is elegantly unisex too and blends harmoniously with almost everything
Patchouli is a bit more of a wild child. It's deep, sweet and woody depth is something you either love or hate. For many people it's strong association with the Hippie Era of the 60's makes it either wildly attractive or tacky and "too earthy!". Like Sandalwood, it has been used in Indian Auruveda medicine for centuries to cure depression and other mental imbalances, (as well as repelling moths!) It's one of my personal favourites but it does take some skill to incorporate it harmoniously into a blend without allowing it to dominate.

Another group of sensual scent elements are the Gourmand notes such as Cocoa, Vanilla, Honey, Caramel and Coffee...all of these make our mouths water...and create feelings of increased appetite, Craving and of course eventually, Satisfaction.
The Adult novelty industry sells a number of body butters with both Chocolate and Honey flavouring, and Vanilla is one of THE most popular fragrance notes amongst women.

I spent a lot of time experiementing with these when I was designing "Craving" for the "Mystery of Musk Project" run by the Natural Perfumers Guild last year.
For me, Gourmand smells are some of the most erotic of all (OK, I'm a serious food head too), but a lot of people seem to feel this way. I had made a perfume called "Death by Chocolate" some years earlier and it never ceased to amaze me how many men found the scent seriously erotic on their girlfriends.
So it was an obvious step for me to take it that one step further and combine these wonderful Gourmand notes with some seriously hard kicking Animalic musk notes in "Craving"....
I'm working on a body oil version of it at present after one of the critics from the MoM project actually specifically requested this for her boyfriend!

And last but not least, there's the Flowers of Myth and Legend:
Fragrant Jasmine of the Arabian Nights, what could be more magical and sensual? Of all the scents associated with Lov3e and Passion, Jasmine has to be the most well known of them all!
Not many people get to smell actual jasmine though, unless they happen to be into aromatherapy or natural perfumes! As with most of the ancient perfume ingredients, the jasmine in modern day perfumes is made up of chemical compounds made to immitate the original, and many of the perfumes that list jasmine as one of the prominent notes within it, bear only a passing resemblance to the real thing.
There are 3 types of jasmine commonly available, and of the three, jasmine sambac is by the far the most erotic. Real jasmine Sambac has a deep musky quality underneath the sultry intoxicating flower topnotes that grabs you by the gonads. It is one of the sexiest scents that Mama nature ever gave a flower, and the scent of the tiny white flowerswafting around you on a starry summers night is truly intoxicating. Here in Australia the lovely dark green vine grows abundantly up and over verandahs everywhere, so for me it is one of the smells of summer...

Rose is the true Queen of perfumes of course. One of my first true olfactory loves, some of my earliest memories involve crushing the rose petals of my mothers delicate "Peace" roses in our English garden...the combination of sweet, lemony softness with it's fresh green magic had me sniffing and sniffing as I tried to follow each tantilising magical layer as it appeard adn then faded....
I have a number of different roses in my own garden now, and the difference amongst them ranges from delicately peachy fresh to musky deep and warm....no two roses smell alike, yet each has that undeniably recognizabe "Rose" note to it.
The deepest of all is one I am yet to find in extract form: "Papa Mailand", a deep crimson rose with huge velvet petals and the most intoxicatingly sexy rose smell I have ever encountered.....
I've come close to recreating it with Rose Marroc and a few of the deeper root oils...but I dream of one day distilling this one myself...

So you can see there are many incredibly sensual ingredients a natural perfumer can play with...I hope this has inspired you!

Have a Wonderful Valentine's Day!

Chocolate for Xmas

2010-12-27T13:41:00.001+11:00

Well, my apologies to those of you eagerly awaiting the second chapter on natural isolates...it just ain't happening yet.
I'm still tiptoeing around them, and my further experiements have so far not yeided anything that I find useful or even that impressive.
Instead I thought I'd write a bit about one of my favourite ingredients:
Cocoa.
I'm a chocoholic. My freezer is full of Lindt Milk Chocolate, (and the latest Aldi knock off which is actually better!), Mozart balls. chocolate covered raisins and more...
(For those of you wondering about the freezer: I live in Australia. If you don't keep your choccies in the freezer, they melt.). Chocolate is my comforter, my pick me up, my sweet and ever sustaining companion through the ups and downs of life. And I love the smell too.....

We know that Chocolate contains all sorts of wonderful ingredients such as antioxidants, and chemicals that act as gentle anti depressants too...
But for these to have an effect, you need to actually ingest the stuff.
So for me as a perfumer, the interesting question is: How does it's aromatic components affect us?
Obviously, for most of us it triggers happy memories from our childhood. But beyond that, there seems to be something so deeply comforting and physically sensual about the stuff that even deodorant manufactureres have started to incorporate it into their latest range! (Though personally, I think they've done a pretty crap job of it. There's only a faint touch of choc to the Linx spray stuff...most dissapointing!)

So let's have a bit of a closer sniff as perfumers eh?!
It comes in the form of "Cocoa absolute", a thick, dark brown murky looking liquid that doesn't really dissolve well in anything. It took me a fair while to work out how to use the stuff...This is one of those substances you need to really work at to incorporate in a perfume. And you will always end up with a thick, murky residue that you need to filter out before you can actually add it to blend. I make up two standard solutions of it to work with: One in oil form and one in alcohol. The oil one I actually leave for up to 6 months before I filter and use it, as it seems to take far longer to give it's scent to the oil. And even the alcohol solution needs to stand for some weeks to allow the solid parts to seperate from the solutes.
It's an obvious base note with a goodly amount of midde note to it as well, but very little in the way of obvious top notes.
The scent itself is sweet, bitter, woody and aromatic, with a dark oily depth note to it that you don't notice as much in actual chocolate, and outer touches of a dry powdery note that is a bit orris root like.
Just sniffing it makes me swoon...to me it's a bit like chocolate on steroids. There's something so deep and mysterious to it that seems to go straight to my heart...(and my groin) and makes me want to just dive into it...
It seems to be both deeply soothing as well as incredibly erocitally stimulating, both at the same time.
Which makes it a pretty exciting ingredient to play with really....
Strangely though, most perfumers seem to approach it very tentatively as an ingredient. It always seems to feature as a side or supporting note, mainly in oriental style florals, and almost always with a strong orange or berry note accomanying it.
This always struck me as a bit of a pity, as to me it is such an amazing scent that it should really be given a more starring role, rather than being relegated to the back in such a mistrustful way.....
But then I'm also not a great fan of complicated chocolate recipes in food either. Give me a straight upfront and honest milk chocolate bar or a simple in your face honest to god mud cake over any of the complicated cointreau truffles and turkish delight messes out there any day.

Anyway, once I'd worked out how to get the absolute into a more workable form, I set about finding a way to build a perfume around this beautiful ingredient.
The first Chocolate perfume I created was following my above stated love for the simpler things in Chocolate. I wanted to find a way of making it centre stage with no clever flourishes. But I also wanted it to be a wearable perfume, not a sweet, cheap and tacky thing reminiscent of the many "Chocolate body creams" that are out there. So it had to be chocolately enough to be recognizable, without being sweet and tacky.
As always, the experiments ended up filling a complete shelf of different notes and combinations. All the florals took away from it's elegant simplicity...fruits gave it sharp bynotes I didn't like. And a lot of the woods I paired it with amplified the dry orris root note in a way that was interesting, but not quite what I wanted. In the end, I gave it an Australian Sandalwood base that is less sweet and incensey than it's Indian counterpart. It has an honest warmth to it that gave the cocoa dignity and strength. To this I added just enough spice notes to liven it up a bit, and a lively honey note that aded another layer in the middle and a touch of sweet topnote....
The idea was to find a balance of ingredients that complimented and supported the Cocoa, without changing or covering it up in any way.
And it seems to have worked. "Death by Chocolate" already developed it's own faithful following and been reviewed by a number of different perfumistas. Here's two of them: (There's some more on Perfume By Nature's Facebook page!)

House of Waft
Monica Miller of Skye Botanicals

The thing which fascinates me when I first took it to a show to give it a good public testing, is that after the first few minutes, people smelling it would often not identify it as chocolate. It used to amuse me geatly watching women spray it on, and then approach their husbands/boyfriends and ask "What do you think of this?" The reaction was always the saem: "Yum (followed by a neck nuzzle or even nibble), that really nice! What is it?" It seems to have a subliminal effect that isn't directly linked to it's connection to chocolate!
Mind you, there's always a number of people who run way, squealing about how it will destroy their diet and everyone will want to eat them! (This is a bad thing??)

The next Perfume I used Cocoa in was for the great "Mystery of Musk" project run by the Natural Perfumers Guild.
Here I was more interested in Cocoa's Aphrodisiac effect than anything else, so it is not as domonant a note in the perfume itself. In "Craving" I paired the Cocoa with a number of similarly fingerlickingly yummy notes, and some pretty hard hitting musky animalic base notes which brought out a whole diffent aspect of the cocoa scent.
The deep base of Vetiver, Arabian Oud and Excotic Hyraceum had such a punch to them that I could afford to overdose the mid and topnotes accompaniying the Cocoa. Caramel, Vanilla and a delicious Hazelnut all swirl around the Cocoa here, adding a sweet friendliness to the wild animal base.
But even with all the added sweetness, "Craving" is a much deeper and wilder take on Cocoa, and certainly not for the faint hearted, grin!

(Being part of the Mystery of Musk project, this one got so many reviews that I had to spread them over a number of blog pages:)
Craving Reviews
Craving Reviews 2
Craving Reviews 3

All up it's one of my favourite ingredients. And my project list for next year includes turning both "Death By Chocolate" and "Craving" into a bath and massage oil version.....chocolate simply cries out to be slathered all over a willing body don't you think?

Natural Isolates chapter one

2010-10-04T16:45:00.001+11:00

"Playing with the Dark Side"

Well, I finally got hold of a collection of natural isolates to play with...
(For those of you not in the "know" , natural isolates are the current buzz word amongst botanical /natural perfumes. They are chemicals that have been "isolated" from natural sources, usually useing fractional distilation. Because of their natural origins, these fragrance chemicals are being added to the pallette of many natural perfumes, but some feel that since they are actually isolated chemicals, rather than complex scented simple extractions such as essential oils and tinctures made directly from the plants, that they are no longer "natural" as such. For me they fall into a grey area that I haven't made up my mind about yet, hence my following musings.)
For days, I circled around them, unscrewing the lids and sniffing them suspiciously...
They make me nervous...
Essential oils I understand deeply. I know the herbs and the fruits they come from, their effect on the human body, how much I can use safely, what they do...they are my freinds and my playmates, beloved for so many years that they have become as familiar to me as the food I eat.
But these babies in their sterile little bottles, with strange chemical names i forget as soon as I have read them, are completely unknown. Wierd strangers in my happy friendly workshop full of dried herbs and tree resins.
How do I use them? What will they do to me if I spill them all over the workbench and the workshop fills with their fumes?
I go searching on the Internet, and all I can find is guidelines for the safe dilution percentages in an actual skin contact blend. Nothing more. And it reminds why I've shied away from artificial perfume ingredients for so many years...(beyond my disdain and repulsion by the actual smell of so many of them of course).

This little group of isolates form a pallette of singular scents.
Nothing as unpleasant as some of the artificial blends I have encountered, but they are very different to the essential oils and absolutes I am used to. they seem almost one dimensional, and totally missing the complexity of my usual ingredients.

Some of them are very familiar....the lollies of my childhood were obviously flavoured by "citral" and "ethyl decadionate"...and the bright purple grape flavoured bubble gum we used to beg off American Gi's from the army base next to our school was obviously given it's flourescant ultra grape flavour with the help of "methyl anthranilate".
Others are completely alien and slightly repulsive to my nose, such as "phenyl ethyl alcohol" which to me just smells like plastic, and "bucco leaf" which isn't a leaf, and is one of the notes I have smelt in many noxious plants that to me just sends warning bells of "don't touch!" and "hazardous for consumption" all over the place....

Some again are obvious in their origin. "Eugenol" is the baby cousin of All spice and Cloves and probably an unobtrusive replacemnt for them if you want a weaker, less obvious spice note...and "methyl cinnamate" is actually a weak cinnamon smelling thing.
But I still don't see the reason not to use the real spices in the first place.
If I want to create a perfume that calls up the poison rings of the Italian Gibraldi family, I might find a use for the bitter almond touch of "benzaldehyde".But so far, only 3 of these new toys really tempt me to any kind of olfactory experimentation:
And of course, they are fruit notes. The only family of accords I have found missing in my extensive natural pallette have been fruity notes. I crave juicey strawberries, succulent grapes and sexy figs so much....
and here I see possibilities!

"Raspberry ketone" offers the warm deep note in the base of a fresh raspberry...it lacks the freshness and the juicy citrus aspect of the real fruit, but it is a warm fruity note that you can't find amongst the freely available citruses which form the only freely available fruit essential oils you can get.
"Butyl butyrate"smells of over ripe bananas to me, which gives me all kind of wild ideas of wierd and wonderful blends I may be able to create...
But so far, my cherished favourite amongst the bunch is "Strawberry fuarnone".
This baby to me speaks of caramelized strawberries.You know, the sticky stuff you end up with when you cook strawberry jam on the stove too long and the sugar caramelizes and the whole thing ends up as a rock hard lump at the bottom of the pan, enticing you to chew on it with it's sweet warm toffee smell.....
OK, so there's none of the depth and layers here that you get with strawberry jam of course, but there's enough of the warm caramel edge with a touch of fruitiness to tempt me....
So following my noses inspiriation, i set out to create jam notes, sweet, sugary and deep....
I sloshed around with some flowers and cirtus touches, and lo and behold, a very respectable apricot/peach jam accord appeared in a little bottle of sherry coloured liquid!

What made me uneasy working with it though, was that I had to literally dilute the fuck out of it to get it to a point where it didn't dominate the scent completely. And it's tenacity on the skin was a bit daunting too.
I can see why this is a good thing for conventional perfumers, but for me, it's very indestructability and intensity make me wary of it's actual biological effect on the body, both for those wearing perfumes and for the perfumer working with them.

After a few weeks playing with these things, I feel....well, a bit dirty.
And it feels heady, as if I had been dabbling in forbidden fruits, drinking strong liqour laced with a coctail of heroin and speed instead of my usual organic wine, or even an honest scotch whiskey!

My workshop smells of strange, intense things, no longer just my known and trusted friends, but wierdly intense and fluorescant things.
Will I use them in my perfumes? I don't know.....
I'm tempted for sure.....but will my soul ever be the same?
Will I lose myself down the road of so many perfumers, seeking the cheap thrill of new and intense olfactory effects and end up drowning in the cheap, the artifical world of conventional perfume chemistry...
Or will I find a way to dabble just occasionaly...and give in to the drugged visions of an Ultraviolet Cheshire Cat perfume, a Grape flavoured Grin hovering over a shimmering transparent body?

I'll keep you all posted.......

The difference between Aromatherapy and Natural Perfume

2010-09-23T10:41:00.001+10:00

There's been a debate withon the natural perfume community lately, as to what the difference is between Natural or Botanical Perfumery and Aromatherapy.

Conventional Perfumery has been poo pooing Aromatherapy ever since it started to become popular in the 1980's. But then Conventional Perfumery poo poos Natural Perfumery too, so I don't really see how their opinion matters either which way here.

Aromatherapy is the art of useing essential oils to create a certain therapeutic effect, both emotionally and physically. As I wrote in my previous blogpost, essential oils have been used for centuries, both in perfumery and for medicinal purposes.
All scents have an effect on our emotions and hence our bodies, be they natural or artificial.
Our sense of smell is directly linked to the emotional part of our brain, which in turn has a direct biochemical effect on our body, raising or dropping levels of hormones and other biochemicals depending on the scent.

Musky scents arouse us, sweet and foody scents make us salivate and increase stomach aci, citrus scents and mints make us feel awake and refreshed, regardless of their origin!

So from that point of view, ALL perfumes are a form of Aromatic- Therapy.

To get back to the nitty gritty though, modern Aromatherapy defines itself by the use of individual or combinations of pure and natural essential oils, either by diffusion or application to the body in form of massage oils & suchlike. And the focus is initially mainly on the effect of said oils, rather than the actual smell itself.

Natural or Botanical Perfumery in contrast, focuses primarily on the smell created by combining different natural materials.
The pallette of Natural Perfumery is also much larger than the that used in most schools of Aromatherapy, drawing not only on essential oils, but also a wide variety of absolutes, extracts, resins, herbal, fruit and other infusions and basically, anything natural that has a pleasant scent!

I should probably mention here that, much as I love Aromatherapy, use it on a daily basis and am incredibly grateful that it's has introduced millions of people to the benefits of useing essential oils, I am a bit critical of a lot of the stuff touted in aromatherapy courses.
I started working with essential oils before Aromatherapy had hit the big popularity stakes, and have viewed it's evolution at first with great joy, then with growing annoyance.
Essential oils are wonderful things, and their effects can be amazing...
But a lot of the the textbooks have stolen their information wholesale from each other, and most of it is simply cribbed directly from much older books on herbal medicine. And this simply doesn't work.
An essential oil is the volatile part of a plant made available by distillation. The plant itself in many cases contains many other chemicals that may or may not be important in it's physical effect on the body.
On top of that, there is a huge difference in the way your body aborbs things, and drinking a tea made from a herb (which is the way most herbal medicines are taken) is a very different thing to having the dilted oil from the same plant rubbed onto your skin during massage.

This becomes very obvious when you read the warnings about when which oils are safe for use during pregnancy. They are, for the main part, pure fiction, and merely the result of essential oil traders trying to cover their sue-able butts.
Arnica, for instance, is toxic if drunk as a tea...but makes a fantastic bruise and varicose vein salve when applied to the legs externally!

Unluckily, as I mentioned above, the text books all quote each other, and somehow this new school of thought with the many faulty text books has managed to wrangle it's way into higher education, so you can now become a "certified" aromatherapist....

Enough of the side rave though, getting back to perfumery, and the question of whether a natural perfume can be an "Aromatherapy Perfume".

Like all of these natural terms, there is no official definition.

For myself, I define it this way:

Most of the perfumes I make are essentially Aromatherapy Perfumes, because when I am designing a perfume, I usually have the effect I want it to have formeost in my mind. I have always used Scent primary to create a certain atmosphere, or as a direct kind of scent therapy.

"Love Potion" for instance was designed for a friend in need of that very thing!
And the ingredients in it are all ones that have an aphrodisiac, stimulating effect on the body and on the emotions. It contains things like Jasmine absolute and Coriander and Cardamon essential oil, all of which you can find listed in aromatherapy textbooks as aphrodisiac and stimulating to the senses....
What makes it a great perfume, is the way they are combined. The balance of each ingredient, and the way they all play together in the blend!

The Rebirth of Natural Perfumery

2010-09-23T08:37:00.000+10:00

Our sense of smell is more strongly tied to our emotions than any of our other senses. Smells can evoke crystal clear memories too, like vanilla bringing back the scent of a grandmother baking a favourite cake, or the smokey smell of frankincense the deeply moving feeling of a spiritual ceremony...
Scent has been used for thousands of years to evoke special feelings in us...and the earliest from of perfumery was probably incense, burnt in spiritual ceremonies everywhere from Egyptian temples to North American Indian Sweat lodges to invoke a feeling of religious and spiritual awe and connectedness with tree resins and herbs burned to honour the Gods....

Body perfumes made from plant extracts have also been made for thousands of years....scented oils, hair unguents, waxy cones worn atop of ones head in Egytian high society parties where they slowly melted and spread spread their perfumes through the elaborate wigs they wore...
European perfumery deeloped realtively late in the picture, and took it's inspiration from the far older arabian scent traditions in the wake of the silk and spice trade.

Perfumers in Italy and France began to develop new ways of scenting both the body and the clothing worn by the European Aristocracy, and personalized perfumes developed by the better known perfumers became a much wanted status symbol.
These perfumes, scented leather gloves and pomanders made from exotic and precious ingredients such as true musk pods from the infamous musk ox, exquisite jasmine absolute painstakingly extracted from acres of jasmine flowers etc, were rather expensive, and really only obtainable by the rich gentry...and as we came closer to our current day, the growth of modern chemistry began to give perfumers cheaper substances to play with.And with these cheap ingredients, and the invention of mechanized packaging and production methods, perfumery slowly became the realm of chemists and factory owners.
Perfume became a everyday item in every suburban household and the wholesale marketing of brand name perfume as a status symbol for everyone had begun.
With time though, people began to realize that a lot of the modern perfumes had sacrificed the magic that traditional perfumes had had, for the sake of a quick profit.

The buzz notes in perfumery became intensity, innovation and above all: price.
The main focus with a new perfume launch nowadays, is what celebrity it will be associated with.
I've seen numerous conventional perfume briefs, and the actual cost of the perfume itse;f is always the smallest part of the budget. Most of the money you pay for even the most expensive french perfumes, goes into packaging design, worldwide advertising campaigns! You'd be lucky to find $5 has been spent on the actual perfume itself!

And then Aromatherapy was born and began to breath a new lease of life into the fast paced plastic world of modern perfumery.

I had first bought essential oils in a conventional chemist in Germany around 1980...natural ingredients never went out of style in German, and conventional chemists still stocked a variety of herbal products and at the time, a limited number of essential oils, such as peppermint and rosemary. But it wasn't until some years later that the term "Aromatherapy" first appeared, along with a much wider range of essential oils.
The first literature on aromatherapy that I ever read was put out by a German company called "Primavera". It was a slim pamphlet listing their oils and the various effects on Mind and Body of each of them. I was fascinated! And spent all of my spare cash on them! I soon began to find other books on Aromatherapy, and Tisserand and others began to do some serious research nto the subject, which has led to such a wealth of literature on the subject....

From there, Aromatherapy has grown to the point that you can find essential oils in every small town the world over...and increasingly, commericaly available scented products use the popularity of Aromatherapy in their own marketing. (Sometimes they even really use some percentage of actual essential oils in their formulations too!)

This rebirth of the popularity of natural scent ingredients has also led to the rebirth of Natural Perfumery.
Like myself, a small but growing number of independent perfumers started to experiement with the these newly available essential oils, and discovered that they offered a clarity, depth, complexity and beauty that simply wasn't there for them in modern perfumes.

I started to research ancient perfume recipes from all over the world, and looking for the herbs, resins and extracts mentioned in them as I travelled around the world.
And 20 years later, I now have a workshop full of all those lovely ingredients mentioned in the old texts and stories...

And people love them.
Conventional perfumers though will still poo poo this modern rebirth of the idea of useing natural ingredients...I have had countless perfumers tell me that it is impossible to make a great natural perfume...

Personally, I don't really care. My customers seem to disagree, and to my great amusement, the general publics love of Aromatherapy has forced more and more conventional perfumers to scrabble to keep up and start producing their own version of natural scents...
Problem is of course, they simply don't have the know how. Creating perfumes out of traditional natural ingredients isn't really part of a conventional perfumers training, where the focus is far more on chemistry and building notes out of individual chemicals...
And their profit margins lead them to fudge and even lie blatantly about the ingredients they are actually useing.
Which has lead to even health food stores stocking such brands such as "Pacifica" which advertises their "natural" tropical fruit scented wares at prices which real natural perfumes of course cannot compete with....
Then you have the inspired marketing of DKNY's "Pure"...."One drop of Vanilla" supposedly from some poor African village....
What about the rest of the thousands of drops of perfume in the bottle? What's it made of??

Sigh...anyway, getting back to the reality of naturals, and my delightfully messy workshop full of whole jars of REAL vanilla pods, frankincense resin from Omani trees, Essential oils from every possible flower and herb...
THIS is real natural perfumery...complicated, amazing and fascinating!

How Natural is Natural?

2010-08-17T12:41:00.000+10:00

Well, the number of cosmetics out there touting the "natural" label is growing by the day....it's the new "thing"...which should make me happy, but.....
BUT (and that's a big but), most of them simply aren't.

There's an ever growing number of pretty sounding concoctions out there in bright shiny bottles with reasuring labels like "organic" and "vegan" plastered all over them, which have as much resemblance to the truly natural bottles of flower extracts and herbs in my workshop as, well, the bottle of commercial toilet cleaner my mother stuck in my cupboard many years ago in the hope I'd eventually use it.

I've spent over 20 years researching and developing natural perfumes. I've studied herbs and aromatherapy oils,and pored over ancient texts full of fascinating ingredients...and spoken to thousands of people at my stalls and on my website about natural perfumery and what it means.
And for years, the conventional perfume industry has belittled what we natural perfumers do, claiming it is archaic, and only modern aromachemicals give you a truely beautiful perfume.
Then all of a sudden, they've discovered that we're on to something! And all over the place, you suddenly see so called "natural" perfumes with bright pretty flower pictures!
A collegue pointed me towards a company I'm not going to name the other day....delightful packaging, pretty sounding scents...and "Beauty Habit", where they are sold, writes the following:

"L### & T## believes that natural formulas should function and not fail. These formulas have been vigorously tested for performance and stability.Each product is loaded with the very best natural and organic ingredients, while delivering a luxurious, skin-nurturing experience." And in the listing for their handcreams, list the scent as "botanical perfume blend".

But hang on a minute, the bottles contain completely clear fluid for starters (And natural perfumes just don't come in clear...)....let's have a look at the ingredients of one of them, ": "Vanilla Orchid, White Musk, Jasmine, Ebony Woods, Natural Alcohol"

OK, for starters, that's not an ingredient list, it's a fanciful list of the notes in the fragrance.
There is no such thing as vanilla orchid, white musk or ebony wood. And wtf is natural alcohol supposed to be? As opposed to un-natural alcohol?
These perfumes aren't natural. Not even nearly natural. Yet the advertising sells them as such, loud and clear.

And it frustrates the hell out of me. Because people believe what they see written. And it seems, you can write whatever you want and get away with it. Loud and clear.

Mmfph.

Did you know that you can call anything vegan if it doesn't have animal ingredients in it? plastic gumboots are vegan by that definition!
And "Natural" can mean just about anything. I did a bit of research into natural flavours some time back, and discovered that a natural flavour can be made entirely of individual chemicals, as long as said chemicals were originally extracted from a natural source!
And mind you, that source doesn't have to have anything to do with the the fruit of vegetable it's imitating!

The Truth Seeker writes: Natural and artificial flavors are now manufactured at the same chemical plants, places that few people would associate with Mother Nature.

To me that seems like cheating. All chemicals are originally extracted from natural sources. It is the degree of processing that takes them from natural to artificial.
Raspberries are natural. raspberry juice is natural. Raspberry ketone is a scent chemical that can be extracted from raspberry juice, or also made by chemical process from other chemicals. It is a white crystaline substance, that can be dissolved in alcohol and used in very diluted form in fruity scents to give the impression of raspberry....
Is it natural? I'm not sure. I have two kinds of raspberry scented ingredients in my workshop:
One, an alcoholic extract of raspberry, which is dark brownie red and slightly sticky, and needs to be filtered before I add it to scents. And the above said raspberry ketone, a strange little bottle of white powdery crystals....the crystals themselves have no scent until disolved further in alcohol.

There are a growing number of companies that are useing natural isolates like raspberry ketone in their perfumes too. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Like many botanical perfumers, I crave some notes that simply aren't available on the market....there are no natural violet extracts, and some fruit notes like "dewberry" simply don't exist in natural form.
And it is a very tempting idea to follow along the "Natural Flavour" lines and start recreating these scent notes useing individual chemicals extracted from natural sources. But I feel uneasy about it.
The biggest question for me is where do we stop? When does a perfume go from being a real natural product crafted from exquisite absolutes and essential oils, to being, in reality, merely an artificially created scent concoction made purely from ingredients cooked up in a science lab like all of the others out there....

I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm experimenting with isolates, and keeping an open mind...but it does leave me feeling uneasy.
I feel somewhat guilty, as if I were experiementing with illegal drugs.....

I do know one thing for sure: If I do end up useing natural isolates in any of my perfumes, I will be honest and open about this.

Teaching Natural Perfumery

2010-08-05T17:45:00.001+10:00

I've been asked many times if I teach classes on natural perfumery here in Australia....and I've finally decided to give in and do just that...
It seems there is a growing number of people out there yearning to learn how to play with all of these delightful natural ingredients...and realistically, there is a vast amount of stuff to learn about useing them safely and truly creatively if you want to make perfumes. And books can only take you so far.
There are a number of people running natural perfumery classes overseas, esp. in the States, but here in Oz, it's still a very new art.
So I'm now making lists and collecting ideas on what and how to do this....

Obviously Safety in working with natural perfumery materials would be one of the first and most important things I would want to impart, but beyond that there are so many different topics and different approaches I can think of...
I've read course descriptions from other perfumers, and they sound really in depth. Covering everything from perfume history, to details about every essential oil in exsistence, creating vertical accords and so much more....

I don't think it would be useful to teach another course along the same lines...some of these are already run by correspondence and easily accesible via the internet...(Anya McKoy has a very detailed one, and so do Mandy Aftel and Lyn Ayre)
And it would like re-designing the wheel sorta....

I would however like to share a bit more my own personal style and creative approach to making perfumes....
What I do think would be useful to teach is the actual hands on how to's of perfume making. Introducing the individual components in small groups, and showing how combining them in different ways can create so many different effects...
In fact I think it may be the best to run a series....based around creating to certain themes maybe....each a day where you can smell and play with the ingredients that are used to create specific notes and genres in a perfume.....where you can also take home your own creation at the end of the day.

Themes could be:

-Flower perfumes, Scents for Blokes, Gourmand Scents....

And then of course there's the whole chapter of combining Aromatherapy and Perfume.....
Now that's really big chapter.

My question to all of you now is :

What would you like to learn in a perfume workshop?

(And If you've taken part in other classes overseas, maybe you'd like to share what you thought worked well? What else would you have liked to learn?)

Perfumery Materials: Co2's

2010-08-02T22:24:00.000+10:00

Like most perfumers, I'm constantly searching for new and unusual ingredients to work with...
And one of my latest area of exploration is so called CO2's.
It is an extraction method that was first developed for the flavour industry, whereby carbon dioxide is used to extract concentrated materials from spices, fruits and nuts. In recent years it is also being used to create scent materials from flowers like jasmine.
Some perfumers are beginning to use them exclusively, instead of the more common absolutes, which use solvents such as hexane, believing that the method of extraction delivers a gentler and safer alternative.
Personally, I don't think this is necessarily true. Absolutes generally don't contain much, if any of the initial solvent, and these are not that toxic to start with.
What makes CO2's interesting to me, is that useing them gives me a far greater pallette to play with. I recently obtained a number of really interesting CO2's from a European company called Evonik, delightful things such as honey bush, jasmine tea and hazelnut! Totally yummy!
The only downside to them is that for some reason, they don't seem to have the same staying power as many absolutes, which is always a big problem in natural perfumery. I'm not sure why this is, but I have generally found this to often be true for Co2's.
The scent is also often softer, and they also don't seem to disolve very well in either alcohol or in oil.
You can get a wide variety of different forms of CO2 extract too...I have found everything from clear liquids to the solid green stuff you see in the photo, which is a nice green tea CO2 from White Lotus Aromatics.

There are also a lot of CO2's which simply don't work for perfumery. I got very excited when I first stumbled upon natural flavourings, but quicly discovered that many of the food CO2's have great flavours, but not much in the way of scent. Which makes them great as, well, flavours, but not perfume ingredients.

It is however a fascinating new area in natural extracts, and hopefully, companies will start producing more that are aimed at the perfumery market in years to come...(how about a violet flower CO2 eh? hint hint!!!)

Thoughts on Natural Perfume Design

2010-07-28T09:49:00.001+10:00

The Mystery of Musk project has given me much food for thought...especially about the challenges we face designing with naturals.
So I thought I'd share a few of them with you....

Botanical or Natural Perfumery is very different from conventional perfumery.
There is the more obvious point that we use natural ingredients as opposed to the artificial chemicals used in modern perfumer laboratories of course. And this tends to lend a depth and beauty to natural perfumes that simply can't ever be fully recreated by artificial ingredients....
But it also has a number of unique challenges that many newcomers to the art don't realize are there at first. Keep in mind that these are my own observations from over 20 years of fiddling with natural scent ingredients...and they are my own opinions, which may differ greatly from what you will read in some of the books out there. There are many different approaches, and different things work for different people. Hopefully this will inspire some more discussion on the various perfumeing lists!

Complexity:
One of the biggest ones is that each ingredient used in botanical perfumery, is actually already a complete scent all in itself.
Each essential oil or absolute, is an extract of an incredibly complex botanical scent creation, custom designed by Ma Nature to entice and delight the senses of an incredible array of insects and mammals.
Modern perfume chemistry started by attempting to copy Mother Natures ingenious complexity, primarily for money reasons. It is far cheaper to create an artificial copy made with individual chemical components, than to obtain say rose otto by the time honoured process of growing the flowers, harvesting them, useing the time and tons of flower petal consuming process of enfleurage to then obtain only a few kilos of the precious substance....
But the chemical version is never as good. Ma Natures masterpiece is simply to complex and clever to be fully re-created.
But the challenge in natural perfumery comes from this very complexity.
In the over 20 years I've been playing with natural perfumes, I've mixed so many blends that looked lovely on paper...but that turned out to be muddy, unpleasant or even downright nasty messes once I'd actually combined the ingredients! And there's very good reasons for this:

When you start to blend say rose otto and jasmine absolute, you are combining not one or two scent molecules, but what amounts to two incredibly complex and complete perfumes!
Think about this for a minute......
Each time you add another natural ingredient to the mix, you add not one note, but a complete complex array of hundreds of scent layers, each with the potential to harmonise or clash with any of the other hundreds of scent layers already at play in the mix!
It's a bit like playing ultra-multi dimensional chess.
You have to understand and somehow keep in your mind, each of the many many scent layers each indivisual oil or extract is made up of, and see how they will combine and work with each other.
Add to that that once the ingredients are combined, they go through a further chemical combining process, and often change quite substantially as they interact with each other.
I've lost count of how many times I'd created something that smelled lovely...only to come back to it after a week or so to find that it had somehow morphed into something 'orrible!
The reverse can sometimes also be true of course, and sometimes you accidentaly create a beautiful scent that was not at all what you originally had in mind...But usually it's the lovely turning into crap that happens.

Top Middle and Base Note classification
This is one of the primary ways that scents are classified and designed nowadays. You will find mention of the concept in most perfume reviews and technical perfumery handbooks. and even the books on I have found on Natural perfumery contain lists that attempt to place all of the imany essential oils and absolutes we use in one of these three categories.

The problem with this (in my experience), is that it simply doesn't work.
As I said before, each and every ingredient we use in botanical perfumery, is in itself a complete perfume creation, with top base and middle notes all of it's own.
Some of course contain predominantly top notes, others more base notes, but this in itself is not enough information to be able to work with it. Realistically you need to understand and know the various top middle and base notes that each ingredients contains so you can marry them to the appropriate combination of top, middle and base notes that make up the other essential oils or absolutes you are useing.

Designing with Accords
This is another concept that is basic to conventional perfume design. The idea is to first create perfume notes or "accords", such as "Green grass", "Oriental" or "White Flowers" and then combine them to create a Smokey, Oriental perfume with a White Flower heart.
Sounds good eh? Trouble is, it often doesn't work. Once you have combined the three accords, you suddenly end up with either a muddy mess, or completely new sharp nasty notes sticking out at various layers which don't seem to have been present in the original individual accords!

There's two reasons for this:
Firstly with creating an accord. If you go back to what I wrote further up about complexity, you can see the difficulty this presents. Of course it's not impossible, but it can be a very involved and trial and error process.
And there are many "notes" that are close to impossible to create, simply becuase the individual ingredients are so complex that you cannot create anything "pure". For instance, I crave "Green Grass", which was a perfume oil favourite of mine as a teenager. You cannot buy "Grass" essential oil, and tincturing it doesn't seem to give you a real "grass" scent". And I have not been able to find a combination of other naturals that gets anywhere near the fresh cut grass scent I'm searching for. (At this point of course any number of other natural perfumers may chime in and tell me I'm wrong...I'm hoping they do! And that they will be nice enough to tell me how!!)
But it's a good example of the problem.
Realistically, you have to work with interesting notes, that do not fit clearly in any simple category because they are simply too complex to resemble any one clear note or accord. Your "White Flowers" may have many other subnotes to it that are neither white, nor very flowery...but still really pretty overall.

The second stage of the problem comes when you start to combine the accords you have created.

Taking the White Flowers accord idea, once you combine it with another accord, you may well find that the woody acrid note that was originally just barely perceptabley in the the background, has suddenly become a totally in your face blast of burnt plastic. This will have happened because it ganged up with another sweet plastic note from the oriental blend that you didnt even know was there! Or maybe the slightly decomposing background note in the Green Grass accord that just added that touch of "natural" when you created it!
Often it would be just one oil or absolute that was destroying the plan...but the sheer number and complexity of the ingredients would make it almost impossible to track down which one it was.

I started out working with accords, but in the end I took a few steps back, and nowadays will usually add ingredients one by one, and take detailed notes on the effect they have on the overall mix. Which means I end up with a whole collection of trial blends of the various layers and stages of each perfume in tiny bottles!
My latest creation for the Mystery of Musk project is a perfect example! It's various stages fill up a whole shelf all on their own, not to mention the myriad of tables, notes and scribblings I wrote in the process.
(If you're interested in hearing more about this, Monica Miller of Skye Botanicals will be writing more about the trials and errors in the botanical perfumeing adventure soon!)

Anyway, hope you enjoyed reading a bit about how I approach botanical perfumery....(And yes, I am writing a book on the subject...I'll be posting more bits and thoughts as it grows!)

Happy Sniffing!

Mystery of Musk-Thoughts and other Perfumes

2010-07-24T23:12:00.000+10:00

Well, the Mystery of Musk project is coming to a close...though there's still the odd review trickling in. Seems it's been a tad overwhelming for some of the reviewers to work through all of the 12 entries in the originally planned time!
As for me, I'm exhausted! It's been such an adventure...
And it has taught me so much....
First of all of course, it was wonderful to get so many positive reviews, and it blew me away how many other artistic projects in form of poetry and visual art it stimulated!
You've all read about my own trials and tribulations in creating my own contribution to the project, "Craving" in previous posts....
So you can imagine how fascinating it was for me to then get to smell what all of my collegues had come up with! And a few of you have written asking me about my impressions of the other perfumes

So here's a few of my thoughts and observations:

First of all, I was fascinated with how diverse the 12 perfumes are!
We all seem to have taken different paths in our creations, and have ended up with completely different scents! What really surprised me, is that all, except for mine and Adams, are florals!
This really surprised me, as I don't really associate the idea of musk with florals at all....

My own experience of musk perfumes has been things like Kiehl's Musk oil, "Merely Musk" by Coty and others along similar lines, all of which are very linear, dry woody, well, "Musk" scents.

And originally, this was the kind of Scent I was trying to re-create useing natural ingredients.
I very quickly came to the conclusion that this was impossible, and the varied "Mystery of Musk" creations of my collegues seem to back me up in this.
Modern day "musk" scents are created useing isolated chemicals that immitate parts of the infamous musk scent originally obtained from musk deers private parts. They don't actually smell much like the far more complex and "dirty" natural musk...they are really more of a gentler, cleaned up and far more unobtrusive echo of the idea of musk......
And being made of isolated chemicals, there is no way you can recreate them useing the incredibly complex ingredients we use in natural perfumery.
The closest to modern day musk scents, is Ambrette seed absolute or Co2 extract. This lovely ingredient, when applied to the skin has just that soft, gently pheromonal warmth that we have come to associate with the idea of "musk".
But in itself it is not a perfume. It simply isn't intense enough to carry a scent all on it's own.
Which meant that I, like all of my collegues, ended up creating perfumes that have musky notes, but were in themselves not pure musks.
And this is where it got interesting.

Anya McCoy, head of the Natural Perfumers Guild had listed a variety of natural plants that have musk notes in them. And all of us MoM perfumers used ingredients from this list.
But which ones we chose, and what other ingredients we added led to the incredible degree of variety we ended up with.
As I wrote in the beginning, most of my collegues ended up creating floral perfumes, with varying degrees of musky base notes to them. In a number of cases, I get the impression that the perfumer became more inspired by the non-musk ingredients and ended up conentrating on the floral or fruit notes, so that the musk became more of an afterthought than the central theme.
(Some of the reviewers admittedly seemed to think I had done the same with the chocolate and gourmand notes in "Craving" too...)
On the other hand, it is also very obvious that this taste for florals is shared by a large number of perfume lovers out there! The comments by readers echoed the reviewers love and interest for each floral dominated MoM entry!

Adam's "Dionysius" is the only other MoM scent that to me wasn't either floral or fruit dominated.

The other thing I learnt from from reviewing the scents-and also from conversations with one of the reviewers, Denyse Beaulieu from "Grain de Musc", is the concept of linear versus multi faceted, changing design in the various layers of a perfume.

My own taste I now realize, runs to linear design. I prefer simple scents that follow a specific theme, and I tend to design perfumes with matching or at least closely echoing and complimentary layers.
Whereas others of my collegues seem to favour multi faceted scents that change considerably as they wear.
This doesn't mean that I didn't like them mind you...some of the multi faceted MoM scents had a multitude of pretty facets that, while different, were like a multi coloured caliedoscope of varying but harmonious changing chords...
but there were a few where the facets were too varied for me to find a common tune, and the overall effect for me was a tad clashing.

This concept finally explained why so many famous perfumes irritate the hell out of me instead of enchanting my senses.

Many of the classics, like Madame Rochas and Estee Lauders Aromatics Elixir, have what to my nose are intensely clashing notes that create a nasty clamour of scent that I really dislike.
Whereas mens colognes like "Grey Flannel" and Eau Savage and the simple musks I mentioned in the beginning have simpler, far more linear and less cluttered scent characters that I am far more comfortable with.

And I stress here that I am talking merely of my own taste in scent. As the so widely varying reviews of the various perfumes have clearly shown, perfume really is a matter of taste, not something you can easily give an objective judgement of.

The other thing I learnt is how difficult it actually is to write a review about a perfume!
Once you get beyond the like/dislike mark, it's really difficult to find the language to adequately describe what you are smelling. I've always disliked traditional perfumery language, and have often, if not usually found that conventional perfume reviews seem to talk about notes that I simply don't smell in the perfumes at all. To the point that I have often wondered if my nose works differently to other peoples. And to be honest, I found the same thing reading some of the reviews from the mystery of musk project!
But when I sat down to write my own impressions, I had to admit that writing a decent perfume review is bloody difficult! So I would like to extend my admiration to the dedication and effort that the reviewers for the Mystery of Musk project put in!
It's been a great experience, and has given me much delightful food for thought and inspiration for some future projects as well!

To finish off, I'd like to share a bit about some of the ones that caught my interest most from the Mystery of Musk project. (They are also not necessarily the ones the critics raved about the most, which I found interesting too).

The first one I will write about, is from one of the new comers to the Natural Perfumers Guild:

"Tallulah B2" by Jane Kate of "A Wing and a Prayer Perfumes"
is what I can best describe as a "baby powder rose musk". It surprised me with it's gentle softness, a truly delightful scent and by far the softest and lightest of all the MoM entries.
It very cleverly uses a combination of ingredients to create a sweet, powdery note that to me smells the way Orris root based perfumes are supposed to smell but rarely do. The citrus top notes are subtley enough applied to merely lend a touch of brightness to the composition without being obvious or subtracting from the gentle powdery lady-like musk itself.

"Musk Nouveau" by Charna Either of Providence Perfumes. This one reminded me of a sweet, boozy coctail! It's warm a deep and fruity, with tightly woven accords of yummy wicked things! It's sweetness deepens on my skin and a deep fig liqour with interesting bytones.....it's a lovely, slightly evil scent this one!

The third one is "Musk No5" by Roberto Dupetit
When I first smelt this one it struck me as more of a floral aldehyde than anything else. And it fascinated me because I had absolutely no idea how he had created it! Turns out I wasn't far off the mark. Alfredo uses natural isolates in his perfume, which has definitely piqued my curiosity. After a more floral opening, it actually reminds me of the original No5 by Chanel, which I wore and loved in my youth. I was fascinated to find this in a natural scent, as No5 was one of the first perfumes to use artificial aldehydes in high quantities. The floral notes follow the aldehydes into the dry down, where the scent becomes drier and warmer and a sweetish by note.

I'll be posting the last missing reviews for "Craving" as they turn up....

And thanks to you all for sharing my journey into the world Wild Creation and of Public Reviews!

Mystery of Musk-Craving Reviews part two

2010-07-09T08:19:00.001+10:00

Here' some more of the reviews gathered from the many blogs and sites involved in the project...
This is such fun! It's the ultimate kick for a perfumer to hear how her child she so carefully nurtured to maturity, and then nervously set sail into the wide wide world is faring....
Craving has visited all over the world....the US, France, Germany....and now I'm getting the postcards home....

"Hi Mama, I'm doing fine! This professionally trained reviewer from "Grain Du Musc" is complaining that I am tempting her to add too many calories to her diet and threatening to blame me for the destruction of her bikini figure, but I think she means it as a compliment! One of the others has decided I'm full of coffee, but she likes me too!
Alfred and I went to Paris together, where he told me stories about his youth where we drank congnac in one of those quaint little bars and he muttered something about "Desire for Desire" while looking deeply into my eyes....OK, so I'm not a virgin any more...figure you didn't expect me to be, what with all the pheromones and stuff you filled me up with right from the start...
I'm having a great time out here in the world, playing with noses and wreaking a little bit of havoc everywhere I go!
Hope your having a good time too, and give my love to my little Brother growing in the workshop!

Love Always, your baby Craving"

Denyse Beaulieu from "Grain du Musc" writes:

"Ambrosia from Perfume by Nature looks like a perfectly lovely, kind and charming lady… But I suspect she’s just a wee bit evil. Her perfume is called Craving. It should be renamed Gluttony, in the fullest, Nigella Lawson, chops-and-finger-licking meaning of the term. And gluttony, you know, is one of the seven deadly sins… Unlike many of the natural perfumes I’ve been sampling, Craving doesn’t fall apart on the blotter. In fact, it might inspire you to chew up that blotter – so imagine the effect on skin. It was all I could do not to sprinkle the contents of the vial on anything soft and creamy that could actually be devoured without running foul of the law, or not to rush out to the corner patisserie, which is unhelpfully open on Sundays. Ambrosia, think of my hips!

With its roasted nut accents and sandalwood adding a milky-smoky touch, Craving is too much of a gourmand to actually rate as a musk in my book, but Ambrosia has well understood the profoundly animalic nature of its core material, cocoa absolute. Some musks actually do have chocolate facets, and castoreum definitely carries more than a whiff of dark chocolate. She’s also sussed out the common facets between dark chocolate and vetiver (also expressed in Lalique Encre Noire), and has used the latter to tug the formula out of purely foody territory, adding another layer of darkness to the chocolate and caramelized nuts.

The actual animal note in Craving is hyraceum, the stuff I though was driving my Siamese girl wild. It isn’t, since she didn’t turn into a wanton minx when she took a sniff of Craving. I can’t say as much for her mama, though my libido was distinctly more attuned to getting a sugar high than mauling the friend who was with me (thank God: I doubt our friendship would’ve survived it). Whether you find that the Craving in question veers more towards sex or chocolate (good substitute, never have to worry whether it’ll still respect you in the morning, and call you back the next day) is a matter of personal settings.

Meanwhile, Ambrosia, if that bikini makes me look like a muffin, I’ll take it up with you."

Sugandaraja from Basenotes writes :

"Craving opens with a singularly delicious accord - coffee, chocolate, and toasted hazelnuts. Sweet but not syrupy, it's the olfactory equivalent of drinking a capuccino and eating a box of hazelnut chocolates, with none of the calories that come with that.
Coffee and me have had a rough history when it comes to fragrances. For some reason, the lightest whiff of coffee turns my stomach, even through freshly brewed coffee is a smell I find quite pleasant. This may be the first coffee fragrance that I enjoy. Whether it's due to its natural origin or not, I have no clue, but it's delicious.
In the drydown, a good deal of the sweetness retreats, becoming drier and more nutty. A delicate amber emerges, and subtle woody nuances play in the background, with a hint of something rooty - vetiver, perhaps?
Perhaps worthy of note is what I don't smell. Namely, musk. Not even a little. That being said, I'm very happy this project allowed me to sample this delightful gourmand oriental."

And Alfred Eberle, one of the reviewers from the Natural Perfumery group on yahoo gave this lovely description:

This perfume flew me straight to Paris.
I have only been to Paris once, but I was struck by its essence when I
was there- the sights, the sounds, the tastes, and the smells.
By some marvellous witchcraft, Ambrosia Jones of Perfume by Nature has
brought me somehow to Paris, and playfully combined a perfectly-
balanced impression of chocolate, cognac, hazelnut, longing, desire,
and perhaps a bit of café-au-lait so that one is immediately gripped
by the simultaneous desire for all these things and yet something
beyond them all - perhaps for the desire for desire itself.

I found in the case of this delectable perfume that the musk idea was
here expressed not so much by the use of musk-smelling botanicals as
much as by the suggestion of musk, the allegory of musk, the kind of
ineffably sexy musk possessed by elegant decadences such as fine
chocolate and fine wine and fine leathers; by delicate vetiver fans
and by full cruets of honey standing in the sunshine, and - blushing
behind my vetiver fan here - well, by sex!

Mystery of Musk-Craving Giveaway

2010-07-07T08:31:00.000+10:00

The wonderful incense Blog
Olfactory Rescue Service
has published their review of "Craving" and is also running a Giveaway Competition!
So if you'd like to win a bottle for yourself, hop on over there and leave a comment telling them why!

I love the comparison to Mermade's Nefertum Kyphi incense...I love Kathlyne Breene's creations, (and also used to make and sell luxury incense myself which makes me appreciate the exquisite ingredients she sources from all over the world even more), and Kyphi is one of the most enchanting and luxurious of incenses imaginable....

Ross writes:

"The name pretty much says it all, most especially if you have need’s, chocolate, for one, not the normal stuff but the really hard core and high end kind, This is very potent with good sillage and is long lasting. It is also very sexy in unexpected ways. The cocoa is there from the get go and in one way or another continues through out, yet there are so many other notes the weave their way around, through and over it. Somewhere after an hour or so the Aloeswood/Oud notes really come through. In the incense world I would compare it to ShunKohdo’s Houshou(cocoa plus aloeswood) mixed in with Nefertum Kyphi from Mermade Magickal(deep, mysterious, musky and sacred). A very heady mix with the idea of musk pretty firmly attached throughout. Would you wear this to dinner, maybe not. But, if you were interested in being dessert…."

Mystery of Musk-Craving Reviews as Art

2010-07-05T20:36:00.001+10:00

Well, this competition is becoming more and more interesting. First there was the incredible challenge of trying to create a decent natural musk perfume in a tight time limit, then the fascinating experience of smelling what everyone else had come up with...
And now the feedback!
What amazes me is the artwork being created by the perfume reviewers! They are writing poems, creating slide views of visual artworks they find reminiscent of the scents, and now even creating completely new paintings of their impressions! I'm just in awe!

This lovely watercolour was painted by Pat Borow,

who publishes her thoughts on a lovely blog "Olfactorama"

She writes: "First impression? Chocolate. Deep, dark and rich. With incense underneath. An opium den of a scent. Well named, too: who doesn’t crave chocolate? And one or two other things?

The perfumer, Ambrosia, has created this elixir out of essences usually used in bases. She lists them as Hyraceum (a cruelty-free animal product), two kinds of vetiver, aoudh, ambrette seed and Australian sandalwood.

If made in an oil base, I think this would make the best massage oil for lovers on earth. Unisex, dark, sensual, a perfect Valentine’s Day gift.

I did this painting with cravings in mind. I thought it was just a vessel, with an incense burner heart, but when I was photographing it, my husband said, “It’s a face. A surreal face.” This is not an image for the timid. “Craving” is not a fragrance for them, either."

Lisa BTB of "The Blossoming Tree" writes:

There's a thin line between confidence and conceit. Even the most confident person may take a step back away from Craving, giggling before finally building up enough nerve to try it. This perfume makes a bold statement and anyone wearing it better be ready to walk the walk. Craving announces "I am here! Let the fun begin!" This potent potion opened with a boozy kick that caused me to draw my head back. It teased my nose with a hint of chocolate before giving in to a delicious cocoa delight and buttery caramel. Honestly, I'm not a fan of gourmand fragrances but Craving has captured my attention. It is rich and decadent bringing out the wild side. It is warm and honey sweet demanding closeness. Craving is beyond enchanting, beyond seductive. With notes of cocoa liquor, roasted nuts, Australian sandalwood, vetyver, ambrette seed, oud and hyraceum, it is lusciously hypnotic.

one word: Lust

Mimi Gardenia from Basenotes absolutely made my day with her stunning review:

"The name of this fragrance is very fitting …believe me. An immediate question came to my mind. "Can I stop sniffing this fragrance long enough to write something intelligent about it?"

Occasionally, you meet and sniff a scent that you connect with because it reaches subliminal levels. Craving is one of those. (I wonder if there are any pheromones in here…………) Although this fragrance is so open, embracing, gives up many of its olfactory secrets easily and comfortably – what is the X factor that makes it undeniably addictive, attractive and compelling?

Craving is the aroma that reminds you of all that was and is good in your world.

As the perfumer has said…there are no top notes, no flowers, no chypre notes. This is ‘honest to God’ goodness. It strips away all the frivolities and gets down to the serious business of just smelling ‘damned good’. So there is all this gourmand love goodness playing on my skin, around me and the musk just enhances all of it. Discreet and supportive of the entire fragrance . It increases the sexiness and takes Craving to deeper levels again. Subliminal, subliminal, subliminal and delicious.

An immediately intimate gourmand the scent is rounded, chewy, warm, butter cream, amber -deliciousness and that wonderful aromatic cocoa .It’s chocolate vanilla nutty goodness – rich and complete decadence. Dense, smokey –sweet with purring musk . Quite a linear fragrance, the aroma is long, powerful and deep. It’s never overpowering but satisfyingly lasting. As time goes by, hints of smoke, honey and sweet wood liquor arise. There is allure and passion in this. The sillage from this is surely heaven-like.
“You are not the food that I need,
you are the nourishment of my soul……” A Wedding Vow
Craving is deeply good especially if you have a sweet tooth. Inhaling this perfume is like savoring an excellent piece of artisan chocolate praline or the memory of sharing an intimate evening in front of a fire with only chocolate, toffee, roasted nuts and sweet wine for sustenance.
Craving is love, warmth, embraces, passion, desire, emotion, comfort, sex, lust , good memories and the making of memories to come. I love this perfume. It has Soul."

And Skye Miller from Cafleurbon has written a poem that is just....wow!

It’s happening again
the craving
craving the blessed boy
it’s a chemical reaction
no one can understand
a biological impulse
that sets fire to my insides
it’s the craving
craving the blessed boy
the sweet animal musk of his hair
curling around his ear
and the hazelnut scent of his sun warmed skin
butterfly kisses
barely touching
eyelashes against his cheek
my blessed boy
yes, its happening again
the craving
I’m craving my blessed boy
his tongue that drips with honey and caramel
I could never get enough
And his penetrating eyes the color of dark chocolate
Telling of a world that I will never understand
Of Kings and Princes
Magical mountains with snow capped peaks
And a struggle for life
He cannot express
To a woman from a different world
My blessed boy
I’m craving my blessed boy
It’s happening again
The familiar fire The craving
Remembering
The vetiver grass mats wafting their scent
without thought or guile
through the window breeze
remembering
the dark chocolate of his eyes
looking into mine
remembering
the honey drip of his tongue
with deep wet kisses
remembering
the sweet caramel of his lips
pressed against the softness of mine
remembering
the warm hazelnut scent of his skin
On that blessed blessed night with blessed boy…

Craving-the music

2010-07-05T14:38:00.000+10:00

Well, my education has been widened...Michelyn Camen of Cafleurbon has introduced me to an amazing piece of music written by the legendary pianist "Jelly Roll Morton".
And guess what it's called...."The Crave"

Mystery of Musk- waiting for the reviews

2010-07-01T12:11:00.000+10:00

Well, here I sit surrounded by my collegues offerings, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with us here on the 1st of July in Oz!
(For those of you who have landed here the first time, I'm talking about the Natural Perfumers Guild "Mystery of Musk" competition...you can read more about it on my previous blogpost)
I've emailed a better photo of my "Craving" for one of the bloggers to use, and started my own notes on the other musk submissions.....
Started only, because as soon as I'd done one initial sniffing of them all, I came down with a massive head cold AND NOW CANT SMELL THEM PROPERLY!!!!!!

Perfumers hell! At least I did get one good initial sniff.....
They are all so different!

It's been such an amazing experience....the challenge of trying to create something with a limited pallette to a very tight time schedule was....interesting. And frustrating...and amazing....and has given me ideas for a whole range of new perfumes!

And beyond that, it has now given me a glimpse into the perfumed world of my collegues...it's so incredibly interesting to see what they have come up with, working with the same restricitions and the same theme!
And the perfumes we have all created are (to me as a perfumer) almost like sneaking a look into the others private diaries!
Our personalities, likes and dislikes have flavoured our creations and have produced an incredibly diverse collection of scents....
Some are bright and happy, others deep sweet and sultry...others again have an ethereal lightness and softness of touch. Earthy and masculine or interesting and quirky, it's like a musk party full of different and diverse characters, all dressed in their individual version of what a "natural musk" should be wearing this season....

Scentual Cultural Diversity, grin!

What surprised me at first sniff, is how many of them are florals. In fact, going through the ingredient lists, I think I'm the only perfumer who hasn't got at least a floral bynote or accord in there somewhere.
"Craving" is definitely the dark one of the bunch....
And it's fascinating if you look at the packaging we've all chosen, how well the colours used with each creation, actually reflect the nature of the perfumes themselves!

Once my head and nose have cleared again, I'll be writing about my impressions on each of these delightful creations...(I've got Charna's "Musk Nouveau" on my wrist at the moment...and the deep sweet sultry notes can just penetrate through the fog in my head a bit...sigh.....)

More to come in the next week!

The Mystery of Musk-Craving

2010-06-21T09:42:00.001+10:00

The Mystery of Musk
"Craving"

Well, here it finally is. My personal Musk offering to the Perfume World.
To celebrate the 8th anniversary of the Natural Perfumers Guild, they are running a competition amongst us renegade Natural Perfumers to see what we can come up with in the way of Natural Musk Perfumes.
(see my post on the Mystery of Musk Competition) .
The whole undertaking has excited and terrified me all the way through in equal measure...the whole concept of creating a perfume under a very short time limit, to be submitted to a panel of people who spend their lives reviewing perfumes from the most famous perfume houses in the world...

Why am I doing this to myself?
How could I possibly think I could do this?

I have been through so many different versions, cried, torn my hair out, obsessed over little bottles with smelly sticky substances and finally ended up with one large bottle of deep chestnut coloured glass clear liquid sitting on my workbench.
It sits there glinting in the late afternoon sun like some kind of mysterious alchemical liqour....which I suppose it is really....

It's a Gourmand Perfume...a perfume that combines all the things I love and crave.....Cuddles, Sex....and Food.

It's got all the animalistic base notes you'd hope to find in a decent musk perfume, with middle notes of warm roasted hazelnuts, sweet caramel and dark sultry cocoa liquor.
OK, so I'm a food head. I can remember someone asking me years ago wether I prefer Sex or Food...and I honestly couldn't say!
My idea of a perfect afternoon involves lot's of sexy nakedness...pheromones and wild passion....with intervals of chocolate cake, roasted nuts and more......
Hey, why not make it perfect and combine them both?!

So that's EXACTLY what I've done with my perfume!

There is however even olfactory method to my madness:
Cocoa absolute to my nose is one of the sexiest base notes in perfumery..it has a deep bittersweet magic to it that hits you right in the groin....roasted nuts too give off one of those smells that give you that warm, safe at home in the kitchen kind of feeling...and caramel, while sweet, has a smokey honey depth to it that is very very sexy....

So what are the other ingredients you're probably wondering at this stage?

Well, right at the very base, you have the King of natural musk ingredients: Hyraceum. this wonderful stuff has an incredible lions den kinda musky funk that is SO King of the Wild! And on top of that, it's one of the very few enviromentally friendly cruelty free animal musks you can get! On it's own it just hits you in the face like...well, just like a well slept and mated in lions den I guess....but in "Craving", there's just enough to give you that sense of "Gee, I'm an animal at heart" at the very base of the scent to make it "Real".
With it, you find 2 kinds of Vetiver, Queen of the herbal root aphrodisiacs. Sexy, Smokey, sultry and deep.....
Costly Oud, worth more in weight than Gold, traded by the Arabian Empires for hundreds of years and still famous throughout the world for it's mysterious and sophisticated magic.
Ambrette Seed, gentle and subtle, and undeniably the clostest thing to the chemical counterparts you nowadays find in musk perfumes...It's one of my favourite ingredients, buttery soft with a deep sandalwood touch that develops only once applied to the skin....
Australian Sandalwood, grown in sustainable plantations in my favourite country, deep woody and buttery smooth with just enough bite to give it a bit of a kick...
There's more of course, but these are the dominant musk notes in the Potion.

It's turned out to be an interesting perfume. No top notes as such, no floral notes, or fruits, no fancy ozones or clever chypres or other fancy things.....instead a deep, sultry brew of warmth and yumminess....
You start off with the mouthwatering scent of the roasted nuts, warmed with honey and caramel, and then it goes deeper and the Vetiver and bitter Chocolate rise to embrace you.....and as the scent warms to your skin, the animal musk that is so close to your own begins to spread over you.....

It's one of the sexiest scents I've ever made. Yet at the same time it's almost subtle, clinging close to your skin, a private scent, shared only with those who snuggle close enough to become entranced by it.....
I put on a jacket yesterday, that I had been wearing 3 days ago while I was working on the perfume...and was immediately enveloped in the scent again....

It's been a long journey to here. 21 (yes, twenty one! I counted!) different musk versions, until I finally almost had it...but there was an acrid bynote to it I just couldn't get rid of no matter what I added to soften it down. And it was only a week ago that I finally worked out what the problem was! Which meant making up a whole new batch minus the offending substance! (It was actually one of the more expensive Oud extracts believe it or not!)

Will others like it too?
that remains to be seen...at the moment 30 little bottles are winging their way accross the ocean into the waiting arms of 18 perfume critics and 12 other proffesional perfumers.

And if I think about this too much I'll start biting my nails all over again....

Creating a perfume for a Faerie part 2

2010-06-06T13:21:00.002+10:00

The process of custom designing a Scent is a complex challenge....and one of my favourite things to do in the whole world! I think my approach is a bit different to that of many other perfumers, because I combine a number of different arts and disciplines...
First and foremost of course, you want to create a perfume that the perfume who has commissioned it will love. So you look for scent notes that the person likes. But beyond that, to create the "perfect" scent, I want to know more about the person I am creating for, so I can match the ingredients I use to their personalities.
Being a visual artist as well, I tend to associate different scents with different colours, so I often look at the persons favourite colours and the clothes they wear for inspiration too. My whole workshop is actually colour coded, and it never ceases to fascinate me how accurately you can translate one sense to the other....Music, food preferences, whether a person prefers the forest, quiet meadows or the bustle of busy cities, all of these things for me form a pattern that is the unique fingerprint of a person...and it is this unique pattern that I look for when I'm creating a perfume for them....And once I have a feeling for this pattern, you can then work with your client to find which aspects of the pattern they want to accentuate, which parts of themselves they would like to strengthen, maybe hidden sides they would like to bring out into the open....
Or maybe they want a complimentary note, something wild to inspire them...or something soothing and calming to help them to relax....
So the secret is to marry what the person wants to be surrounded by, to who they are.....

When Helen Wells asked me to create a perfume for her, my first inspiration was the woman herself.
Helen is a delightful Fey creature, small in stature with delicate elfin features.....the clothing she wears are as artistic as her beautiful paintings: Long Victorian style skirts and bodices in earthy browns, burnt orange and red....soft comfortable natural materials. Her paintings are also an incredible insight into her being: detailed, exquisite and always highlighting something special, brave and strong in each of her subjects....
While I was speaking to Helen about her Perfume, the very first thing that came to mind was Mimosa.
It's a perfume ingredients that has fascinated me for some time. The flower itself has such a "Will'O the Whisp" quality about it...delicate, intricate and amazingly beautiful...mimosa blossoms always remind me of Dandelion fluff...but it's elegant Dandelion fluff, designed by a Fairy artisan, with intricate colouring and cleverly designed architectural features.....The scent of Mimosa is just as special: It is soft and floral, gently elegant with a distinct honey like depth to it...much like Helen herself.
Helen sent me a detailed answer to the perfume questionnaire I send out to all custom design clients...it was a joy to read, and part of why I love custom design so much...it's a bit like being invited into the persons private sitting room, where you get to know and appreciate the person....a bit like a private portraiture sitting.
And from this perfume brief, I then began to construct her Scent:

"I want the essence of my inner self to be expressed in a scent.
The essence that I want to bring forward is this:
My womanhood and passion for life. I want to feel safe, confident and uplifted, inspired and hopeful in facing my life. To celebrate the fact I am a woman, one who is sexy, wise, strong and gentle - flowing with life’s current. A hint of fun and cheekiness would suit me also."

The gorgeous Mimosa needed a more solid base to hold it, and Helen had requested "Something that would make her feel "like a woman, and also safe, confident". I found a lovely deep incense resin accord that echoed the honey like depth in the mimosa, and accentuated some of the elegant floral notes even further... the ingredients also had the added therapeutic effect from an aromatherapy point of view, of being both calming and grounding as well as aphrodisiac, which was exactly the effect Helen was looking for.
To give the perfume another level, I then added some exquisite Orange Flower absolute.
Now this to me is one of the Queens of floral notes. It fascinates me because it has a quirkiness to it that gives it a surprising and unique character, along with an incredibly feminine beauty and again, a sweet honey like depth...which married perfectly to the honey in both the mimosa and the incense resin base accord.

So what we now had was a gentle, exquisitely feminine perfume with sweet, honey and incense depths which was also unusual and interesting, without being loud or brash in any way.
I think it is one of the most beautiful scents I have ever created....and it is entirely due to the guidance of Helen herself.

It was such a joy to be invited to paint a scented picture of such a lovely person!
I couldn't resist creating a custom label for the perfume. For me, the packaging of the perfume is just as important as the content: The visual beauty is part of the experience of the perfume!
So I "borrowed" the latest of Helen's beautiful paintings off her website and printed a special label for her "Faerie" perfume!

If this has sparked your interest and you'd like to know more about custom designed perfumes, you can email me at info@perfumebynature.com.au

Designing a Perfume for a Faerie part 1

2010-06-04T11:01:00.002+10:00

A while back I was delighted to be asked to custom design a perfume for the amazing Australian artist Helen Wells. She has been one of my favourite artists for some time, so I was especially honoured and excited about the project!

And even more delighted that I succeeded in creating something she really loves!

By Hellen Wells:

Ever since I was a small girl I’ve wanted to have my own special perfume.

I couldn’t stand any of the commercial perfumes I came across as I grew up.

For many years I gave up and didn’t wear perfume at all.

Then I discovered essential oils. I was drawn to several. Frustratingly I found many of them to powerful to wear as a perfume. I’m very sensitive to scents and many incenses, perfumes and oils produced the undesired result of headaches ranging from mild to sever, hot flushes and also flu like symptoms.

The oils I found I didn’t react to like this didn’t feel like ‘me’. Some suited the mood I was in a certain times, but couldn’t cross with me to other moods when I went.

Meeting Ambrosia:

When Caiseal discovered ‘Pan’ by ‘Perfume by Nature’ at a Mind Body Spirit festival. I was delighted. This perfume is amazing on him. I find it very attractive and I don’t react negatively to it either. It wasn’t suited to me.. much more masculine scent.

Excitedly I tested the other range. And loved most of them. Although nothing still sat quite right for ‘me’

I liked ‘Death by Chocolate’ best and often wore it.. but t still only suited me in certain moods.

It was then I learnt Ambrosia offers the fantastic service of individually designed perfumes.

I knew she’d find the answer.

It was just such an enjoyable experience for me. Filling out the little questionnaire to begin with I felt I learnt a bit about myself during this process, and also felt she was going to leave no stone unturned in finding that special scent for me.

It was so exciting when the first package of samples arrived – four different ideas and directions it could go.

Only one of them created the headache reaction, but I loved the scent of all four.

One I thought.. I could wear this.. we could explore this direction more.. but then I sniffed ‘no. 3’

And I knew that was the one! My whole body relaxed and I got very excited about the possibilities of wearing this.

Ambrosia tried another 3 or four scents to make sure, but no. 3 was it.

And so ‘Faery’ was born!

I love it.

Faery is me!

I don’t know how she did this.. Alchemy and magic, it is!

I always wished for my own special perfume, but doubted I’d ever find some-one who would understand, and see me clearly enough to create it.

Thank-you!

I would highly, highly recommend commissioning a perfume for yourself from her.

What a great gift to give some-one! Not just a bottle of perfume, but a gift voucher to have their ‘Personal’ Perfume designed just for them!

We will be commissioning one for my husband Caiseal next.

Helen Wells, June 2010

I'll be posting the second half of the story about how I went about designing "Faerie" in the coming week!

In the meantime, you can go to Helen's Website and look at the beautiful painting that helped inspire it!

www.helenwells.com.au

The Mystery of Musk-A Competition

2010-06-02T11:19:00.004+10:00

Well, my little blogpost "The Search for the Ultimate Musk" actually sparked a competition! It seems another well known perfumer actually read it, and then suggested to Anya of the Natural Perfumers Guild that it would be a nice idea to actually run a competition to find the best natural musk perfume to celebrate the 4th birthday of the guild!

The project launches today, with samples from the participants going out to 10 different perfume review blogs, a number of reviewers from basenotes and others....all to be reviewed in the first week of july!
There'll also be giveaways of full bottles of the various musk perfumes, samples and more.....
And ultimately....one of the perfumes will be chosen as the winner....

And I've been invited to take part!
Oh the excitement....
Oh the joy!
Oh the total blind panic!!!!!!!!

As those of you who read my blog know, I've been working on musk perfumes for quite some time....but that doesn't mean I've actually found exactly what I'm looking for!
And now i have the challenge to actually choose from all those many "perfumes in progress" under the musk section of my shelves, and submit one of them to the wider world!
Now for some like me, this is beyond scary....I like to fiddle with my perfumes till I'm completely happy with them. Some of the perfumes I sell in my perfumery took years to develop.
And even worse, I have to offer up my creation to a wide selection of perfume critics, perfume bloggers and my fellow natural perfumers from the guild!
(Ohmygawdohmygawdohmygawd.....)

(Taking Deep Calming breath.....OMMMMMMMMM..........)

OK, so which perfume did I eventually choose? I was so torn.....should I go with animalistic? Follow the popular choices you find in shops and offer my own Vanilla Musk? Or maybe a sultry Oriental one with a touch of incense? So many choices.......(looks again at all the little musk version on that shelf).
I sat down at my workbench and started to list what Musk actually mean to me:

Musk is about:
-sex.
-pheromones
-attraction
-makes me feel safe
-makes me feel like I'm wrapped in a soft warm blanket
-makes me crave things
-Cravings
Cravings eh?......cravings........now theres a good name.....and a concept.....
What do I crave?
Going back to my "musk in progress" bottles, there it was...I'd been mixing all the things I loved, smells I craved, things that made me want to reach out and snuggle into them.....
So I sat down at my workbench, and started to assemble all the ingredients that I "craved".
Now I'm a multi dimensional hedonist. I love all things physical, sex, cuddles, soft sumptuous clothes, food.....

So to make my ultimate musk perfume, I needed ingredients that covered all of these...something so yummy, so luscious that it made you want more....

I've made a few perfumes that have that sort of touch in them...."Love Potion" has a deep musky base with an oriental touch....."Goddess" has a completely different sensuousness to it..."Pan" is the ultimate Wild invocation to passion and then there's "Death by Chocolate", my own private offering to the Gods of food addiction in perfume form.....

What I needed to do was find a way to combine the sensuous spirit in each of them, the sexy musky character of each of them into one perfume that combined the ultimate "muskness" of them all!

And "Craving" began to be born.

I'll be posting more about this over the next weeks.....

And in the meantime, let us all know:

What do you Crave?

The rewards of Perfuming

2010-05-20T18:30:00.001+10:00

Sometimes the rewards of perfuming can be other interesting and inspiring things....I've swapped samples for books, for samples of other perfumes and any number of things over the years...and a little while ago, I sent some samples of "Sense of Honour" to Johanna in New Zealand, a lady who had been reading my blog....and in the return mail, look what arrived back! She actually spun it herself, I'm so impressed! This colurs in this skein of wool were actually chosen to coordinate with my blog colours! The photo doesn't actually do it justice, it's a beautiful every changing blend of colours with lovely sparkly threads twinkling in and out...Johanna, if you are planning on selling your lovely spinning wares, do put your contact details in a message here!

It's such a lovely gesture though....makes me really feel appreciated!

My motto for the day: "Nothing says "I love your perfumes" Like beautiful wool!"

Scent for a Country Gentleman

2010-05-14T20:06:00.001+10:00

I've been asked many times what inspires me to create a specific perfume...and there's no one thing....it could be a new ingredient I've discovered and fallen in love with, a bespoke perfume concept given to me by a client, a specific need of a friend, (such as the infamous "Love Potion"), a painting, a song, a particularly nice autumn day...

But the one dearest to myheart is a concept perfume called "Sense of Honour"..
It's based around my memories of my grandfather. He was one of those true gentlemen you don't find very often. The kind of person who made you feel as though there was actually something worthwhile in the world. He had real integrity, solid, kind, reliable and with an air of authority and strength with it that made him someone people admired and trusted. He used to make up the most amazing stories to tell me as a kiddy, as I sat on his big lap and snuggled into his chest and breathed in the solid, warm scent of him.
I went through a phase where he was on my mind a lot...I was missing him, and decided to create a Scent that would call up the feeling of happiness and security he gave me as a child, and a perfume that would suit him. Something solid and real, that makes you feel , well, that things are right in the world.

My Grandfathers name was Noel Weaver. He was a true Australian country gentleman who came from one of the original families that farmed the land near theWisemans Ferry in New South Wales. He came from the generation that really worked hard, starting as a labourer on the roads in his mid teens, and eventually establishing his own citrus orchard, built his own house by hand, and eventually became the head of a small dynasty of kids and grandkids who loved and admired him. He kept his family on the farm during the depression, and I remember my mother telling me how he would always find at least a part days work for any of the many who came walking through the district, desperate for work of any kind....
He was also a pretty high up mason, and one of those deeply spiritual people who never spoke about religion.
He had an incredible love for the land itself, and I grew up listening to stories about the trees and the billabongs out in the bush and the many animals and birds that lived there....he used to also send me books to Enlgand where we were living at the time, with Aboriginal dreamtime stories about spirits living in rocks the living spirit of the land itself...
His stories, and those my mother told of him have shaped my life deeply...

So how in the world do you build a Scent to do this man justice?
I started off with Vetiver. Vetiver is a deep love opf mine (as those of you who read my blog regularly know by now) Vetiver is to me, the ultimate Bear hug of perfume ingredients, esp. the Javanese Vetiver I used here. It's a deep, musky base note that makes you feel safe and grounded. It smells of earth, and pheromones, and is just about as manly as you can get, scent wise.
Perfect as the base for my grandfathers scent.
To this I married some smokey dark Coffee absolute. My grandfather used to drink a lot of coffee, and this is another scent I associate strongly with him. It also happens to fit wonderfully with Vetiver, adding a nice warm, dry masculine element to it.
I used white grapefruit as a topnote, because it's fresh without being sweet, and one of the fruit he used to grow in his orchard....and it adds a great refreshing pick me up note to the smokey base. Then some douglas fir oil because there is something incredibly clear and clean about all of the conifers. And fir is the gentle, mellowest of them. My grandfathers farm also had a row of tall connifers growing along the path lading to the house, which he had planted along a water line he had dowsed...
So you now have a scent impression of a country gentleman, sitting on his verandah drinking his coffee, the fresh sharp scent of the freshly peeled grapefruit from his orchard on a plate next to him, the fresh scent of the tall connifers he planted many years ago as seedlings coming with a gentle breeze from the road down from the house....
I had the beginnings of the scent I had been dreaming of.
I ended up with umpteen variations sitting on the "work in progress" shelf in their own carefully labeled bottles. All of them smelled great. But .....In some of them the grapefruit just took over, in others the base was so heavy that you lost the fresh notes...and some were just a tad too sweet.....
But eventually I got it just right! (Took me over two years though!)
What I eventually worked out was missing was sweetness, ...I kept missing it because I had a masculine fragrance in mind, and was avoiding anything sweet or in the least girly...
But there is another kind of sweetness: the deep, ripe, mature sweetness of late summer fruits, apples at that point where they have reached warm, tart yet soft sweetness that is perfect for making cider..a note of grace and maturity that comes at the end of a long life well lived, the harvest at the end of a long summer....
The perfume now starts with a refreshing headnote of white grapefruit and fir, clear as a cool late summer morning, then warms to a lovely cider sweet middle with notes of foresty spruce freshly rubbed between your fingers, darkening to a deep woody base which wraps around you like you grandfathers hug.....
Then of course I needed a name that encompasses everything my grandfather stood for:Honor, Respect, Kindess and caring for all living things...a real maturity and wisdom that comes from a deep understanding of life.....and above all Integrity.
I was originally going to call it "Noel" after my grandfather...but that just didn't sound right for a scent, much as I loved the man.....
In the end I ran a small competition offering a bottle to the person who came up with the best name.
And it's just perfect:

"Sense of Honour"

This perfume isn't available through the website as yet, so if you'd like to buy some, send me an email and I'll send you a paypal invoice for it.

It's available as :

19ml perfume oil $110

70ml eau de cologne intense $98

19ml eau de cologne intense $45

mini sample atomizer $12

Musings on Gardenia

2010-05-07T18:23:00.001+10:00

I think I've had more requests for a natural Gardenia scent than for anything else over the years...and up until now I've had to say "It can't be done".
Gardenia is one of those flowers that seems to hold power over those that love it....for me, it is the smell that always evokes meomories of my grandmothers garden. My grandmother had an amzingly green thumb, and a deep love of scented flowers. And she had gardenias growing all the way along one of the paths in her garden....
I can remember as a kid, coming home from somewhere and walking along this path one evening, brushing cobwebs out of my face as I walked (it being summer and Australia and all), and being totally mesmerized by the scent of the gardenias. I had been out in the garden that morning, and hadn't really noticed that much of a scent coming from these white flowers with their elegant dark green leaves...but now suddenly, the falling darkseemed to have brought them to life, like some kind of magical spell that awakened only at dusk!
It's such an amazing scent, deep, fresh, tangy, musky and with something else that is totally mysterious there in the background as well. The Gardenia flower has a potent hypnotic magic about it that is impossible to copy.
There are many gardenia perfumes on the market, and each of them focuses on a different aspect of this magic. But none (to my nose anyway) come anywhere near the real thing. (Of course, few, if any of them actually contain real gardenia, so I suppose it's not really that surprising)...Then, a few months ago, I got hold of some real Gardenia absolute from a lovely supplier in Europe. It takes literally thousands of kilos of Gardenia petals to create just one kilo of Gardenia absolute. And since most perfume companies are happy to use artificial Gardenia scents made from chemicals that mimic it's mysterious and magical scent, the traditional production of this ingredient had just withered away....
But finally, it's being made again!
The absolute itself arrived and I excitedly opened the bottle:
The first impression was dissapointing. It's undeniably Gardenia, but somethow in the extraction process, the deep, sexy, sultry and musky flower scent comes through, but the magical fresh top notes that make sniffing a freshly picked gardenia flower so mesmerizing, went astray.
I put it on the backshelf for a while, and then (after yet another request for a Gardenia perfume...) I pulled it back out and set out to recreate the elusive top notes I remembered so well from my Grandmothers garden....
I experimented with a number of related flowers, and discovered that many of the white flowers have similar notes to them! Mother Nature seems to marry the creamy white colur in nature to specific scent notes, so by carefully adding just touches of a variety of these, plus some fresh leafy green notes to give the feeling of that newly picked fresheness you get from the crushed stem and leaves and oh my goodness, there it was, the scent I so remembered from early dew covered mornings in my grandmothers garden in Australia....
My mother was the first to try it...she's an avid Gardenia lover with a very accute sense of smell and one of my hardest critics...I sprayed some on her wrist when she popped by that afternoon without telling her what it was and "Oh my, Gardenia! How beautiful!"
The only problem was that the scent faded quickly, just like the natural scent of the flowers will once you bring them indoors....
So from there I spent some further months finding a gentle base note that would hold and extend the glorious fragrance without distracting from the gardenia accord itself....
Have I managed?
Smell for yourself and find out!

I'm giving away a free deluxe mini spray sample of "My Gardenia" with all perfume orders this month (excluding sample collections, but I will add a normal size sample if you ask me nicely and order at least 4 other samples!)

Orange tree...patron saint of perfumers!

2010-04-22T10:53:00.002+10:00

Today I'm going to share my experiences with the varied and delightful extracts the citrus trees gives us...in particular the orange tree. It's one of the most versatile of all Scent sources, and gives us a collection of amazingly different scents too!
It provides us with:

-Orange essential oil from the peel
-Orange juice extract
-Bergamot from Bitter Orange
-Orange flower absolute from the flowers
-Neroli steam destilled from the flowers
-Petigrain from the green twigs of Bitter Orange

Then of course there's also the huge variety of different citrus oils...but I think they are better handled in a seperate blog!

So let's start with Orange essential oil.
It's a remarkably simple oil to extract, being made by cold pressing the peel of the orange. It doesn't keep terribly well, like all citrus oils and will lose it's scent intensity as it oxidises. (This process doesn't actually render the oil "off" or dangerous to use contrary to some articles, but it does weaken it's odour). It, again like all other citrus oils, is best kept in the fridge. It is also photo-toxic, which means it intensifies the way skin reacts to sunlight, so it's not a good idea to smother yourself in orange oil if you are heading to the beach! Whether or not this applies to it's use in perfume is one of the many things independent perfumers argue about. The lumbering industry watchdog IFRA has managed to instill such fear in the perfume industry over the subject that you will not find ANY real orange oil in conventional scented products.
Me personally, having peeled and eaten oranges at the beach, think it's all a bit ridiculous. I wouldn't add it in large quantities to a bronzing lotion, but beyond that.....there are special "non-photo toxic" version offered by some of the refiners, but the scent just isn't the same....
This joyous sweet and tangy oil is one of the best ingredients to warm and liven up a perfume. It adds life and zest to any blend and brings out happy notes in bases like Patchouli and Vetiver. It's yummy sweet tangy quanlity gives such sunny magic to any blend...As I said before, it really brings life and lift to all the base notes...and if you pair it up (in hint amounts) to florals such as jasmine and rose, you bring out a warm, zingy, playful side to them that is just lovely......

I'm a bit of a citrus nut and have used them in numerous perfumes over the years...but probably the best example of how orange brings life and joy to a blend is my "Love Potion" perfume. Here you have a deep, succulent blood orange oil combined with musky jasmine and sexy vetiver....and the combo gives it a "wow" factor and an amazing sense of "alive" that makes the perfume live up to it's name!

Orange Juice Extract is a new addition to the perfumers pallette. It is a concentrated extract created from the actual juice itself, and brings a lovely fresh fruity flavour to blends. It's not as strong as the oil from the peel and quite astringent, but a nice new toy to play with!

Bergamot is also a cold pressed oil, this time from the bitter orange. It has a softer, sweeter scent totally different from the warm fruitiness of it's cousin. It is a major ingredient in traditional eau de cologne and is also used as a flavouring in earl grey tea! It has something a bit anal and very refined about it and it always makes me think of English Afternoon tea, with her Ladyship sitting on a perfect english lawn, sipping tea from delicate china cups.... it's a traditional ingredient in eau de cologne and often appears in mens scents. Though like sweet orange oil, IFRA has chased it out of modern perfumery with a vengeance.

OK, and from there we move on to the more mysterious side of Orange: the flowers!
Every year when my orange tree flowers I spend hours out in the garden with my nose buried in the blossoms. I collect the petals as they fall from the tree and fill bowls of them that waft their beautiful scent through the house. The bees go absolutly wild, buzzing in ecstatic frenzy as they wriggle around, collecting nectar and pollen, obviously totally intoxicated by the scent. And this is of course exactly what it is designed to do! Flower scents are Mother Natures herbal aphrodisiacs, desinged just entice and hypnotize the insects into taking part in their sexual dance of reproduction!
Orange flower in particular has a musky depth combined with an airy lightness that always reminds me of images of the Faery Queen. It is an entirely otherworldly scent, truly magical.
There are two different extracts of Orange flower available to perfumers, and they to me are quite different:

Orange Flower Absolute is extracted with solvents which are then evaporated off, so you end up with a conentrated version of the aroma. It is deep and musky, with a caramel like sweetness to it along with yummy green notes. It's quite a dominant scent, a definite middle note which will tend to take over a scent unless you use it in small quantities. I've used it in a number of custom design perfumes for clients, including one of my proudest achievements, "Faerie" which I designed for Australian artist Helen Wells. Here, it's Faerie like quality was just what was needed to capture the fey quality of Helen herself. (I'll be blogging more about the creative journey of this scent in future weeks. Helen has promised to write about the story from her perspective, which should make great reading!)
I have a variety of different Orange Flower absolutes here, all of which are different and have varying degrees of muskiness, warmth and lightness, and a delightful Orange Water absolute from Eden Botanicals which has a lightness to it as well as an almost lotus like watery quality...yummy!

Neroli is also made from orange flowers, but it's obtained by steam extraction. And this seems to bring out a far lighter side of the blossom. It leaves behind the middle musk notes and concentrates the heady, bright slightly tangy greeness of it.
Neroil has been used by perfumers for centuries. Along with Rose, it is probably the most famous of ingredients of traditional Italian and French perfumes of the past centuries. I have countless old recipes that use neroli, particularly traditional eau de colognes where it's uplifting freshness adds a delightful feminine touch to a blend. My absolute favourite is one from Butch from Anatolian Treasures. It is soft and clear and totally enchanting and lacks the slightly astringent note some other Nerolis have.
In any more concentrated perfumes however, it becomes and interesting and at times challenging. It has a very dominant, almost eukalypt like top note to it that I find tends to ride above anything else you add it to.

I have one perfume that has been sitting on my blends in progress shelf now for 2 years. It fascinates me because it is so multilayered. I was originally trying to create a lovely French Flower Garden in Spring scent, and Neroli seemed to obvious choice as a central note. But it insisted on dominating the scent and overriding the gentler rose and other floral notes I wanted to have in the forefront to such an extent that I eventually took it out of the mix. Only to discover that the previous amazing tenacity I had achieved suddenly dissapeared! For some reason, Neroli seems to attach itself to the midle and base notes of a scent and change them, both in scent and also in tenacity, which is something I have never found in a topnote before!
So now I have this blend sitting there waiting for me to find a name and place for it. It's really multi layered, which is part of the problem. A good perfume has a continuity to it from the first sniff to the remaining base you end up with on your skin after an hour or so...and this one just refuses to conform! It changes so much from head note to base that I just don't know what to do with it, delightful as it is......

And finally there's Petigrain.
I like Petigrain. I have a large bottle of a particularly fine one sitting on my shelf that I sniff regularly. It refreshes me and clears my head when I'm getting foggy....and again, it's a lovely ingredient for eau de colognes.
It has an interesting graphite pencil note to it that fascinates me and I'm pretty sure is one of the main ingredients in "Grey Flannel", that distinguished mens cologne I used to wear as a teenager.
But it's also not easy to work with. The graphite note combined with it's astringent green clarity make it the coolest of the Orange scents. Like Neroil, it doesn't combine and "play nice" with other ingredients, so unless you are happy for a dominant astringent top note, it ain't gonna work.

There's also other combination desitllations of flowers and twigs, such as "petigrain sur fleur", and destilations from the flowers of various other citrus tree, and I'm sure some of you perfumers out there are going to pop up to remind me about your particular favourite which I haven't covered!
So please feel free to add your experiences to the comment section!

Love Affair with Vetiver-the Perfumes

2010-04-17T02:24:00.006+10:00

My ongoing love affair with Vetiver has led to the creation of 3 perfumes (so far!).
They are all very different, which just goes to show how many different facets there are to this wonderful oil...

Vetiver and Sex
The first Vetiver perfume I ever created was the now infamous "Pan" more than 15 years ago....
Pan is the mythical god of Nature, Wild, passionate and as animalistic as they come. Pan embodies everything that is indiscriminately male and, well, pheromonal. It is Pan's scent that drives women wild in the old stories, and so I had set out to recreate this mythical Scent of the Wild...and what better element to start with than the Sexy Vetiver?
I chose the deepest, darkest, muskiest Vetiver I could find, and combined it with other musky basenotes like Patchouli and Woods...and from there added a range of other forest and heb notes, careful to stick to dry, tangy and green notes, with not a touch of floral or sweetness anywhere...Oregano, thyme, rosemary...The end result was a deep. dry musk with a touch of green, foresty earth and the fresh herbs of the greek hills where Pan originally comes from. Somehow the combination of ingredients seems to have added to Vetiver's notorious aphrodisiac effect, and given it a real, testosterone boost to rival the pheromones of any stag in season. Which has given the perfume almost cult status in some circles over here in Oz. Brut eat your heart out!

Vetiver & Love

Next in the story came "Love Potion". I wanted to play with the more emotional side of Vetiver, the side that feeds the heart, and lends the wearer strength....I wanted to create something that worked as an aphrodisiac, but also gladdened the heart and warmed the spirit...something to add energy and spice to the depth and strength of Vetiver...

So here I added jasmine, the Queen of Love oils....the combination of Jasmine and Vetiver is a marriage made in heavan. Vetiver deepens jasmines sultry muskiness, while jasmine in turn lifst Vetivers depth and gives it a lovely heart note to dance with....add to this a good doce of spice and a tangy blood orange topping, and you have an exceptionally lovely oriental blend that has real depth thanks to the beautiful Vetiver....Vetiver in Love!

Distinguished Vetiver
The third chapter of my Vetiver Obsession is "Sense of Honour". This was a work of Love dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, which I finished last year.
Here I was working with the sense of strength and security that Vetiver can convey...it has such a deep, comforting earthiness that you can feel like you are wrapped in a big bear hug where nothing can harm you...and this is exactly how my grandfather made me feel when I was a child.
my Grandfather was one of those honourable country gentleman, a citrus farmer with a deep love of the Australian Land he lived and worked on, so here I used a more elegant, gentle version of the fresh tree and citrus notes I had used in both "Pan" and "Love Potion". Instead of sultry jasmine, and zesty blood-orange, I used the sublte freshness of green mandarin and grapefruit to lift the depth of the Vetiver. And broadened it's lovely base notes with some elegant Red Cedar and other woods. The clarity of spruce, some green leafy nuances, and the Vetiver now becomes a beautifully elegant, natural cologne....

All 3 of the perfumes are so different....each showing a different side of Vetiver, from pure sexual and wild, to emotionally loving and enticing, to perveying a sense of protectiveness, honour and security....
It's such a fascinating ingredient, which I guess explains why so many other perfumers before me have created perfumes centred around it's beauty...

I'm currently working on yet another Vetiver...a kind of cross between "Pan" and "Sense of Honour"...a modern, smokey cologne with a more definite grapefruit topnote. I made a version of this as a custom cologne for a young male client who wanted something updated yet elegant that he could wear in the boardroom...and I had so much fun with it I got lost in a smokey, leather based version of it.....we'll see...is there a market for yet another Vetiver version i wonder? I may just have to keep this one for myself....

Love affair with Vetiver

2010-04-09T18:13:00.000+10:00

Today I'm going to write about Vetiver. I've written about Vetiver before, it my regular magazine column on herbs and on my perfume website, but I thought it would be nice to look at it a bit more from a perfumers perspective.

It's an amazingly useful plant, as well as a delightful oil, used for it's deep roots and incredible hardiness in all kinds of envirmments to preserve our precious topsoil, as well as clean water...
But for those of you who want to hear more about it's use in Perfumes, here goes!
In case anyone hasn't noticed: I LOVE Vetiver!
Of all the various oils on my shelves, this deep musky oil is the one that has been tantilizing me the most for the past year. I've used various forms of vetiver in 3 of my perfumes so far and I'm working on another one at present...And the reason for this is that it is one of the perfect base notes in my mind.

Worker harvesting Vetiver Grass in India

Vetiver Network International

It has a deep, woody muskiness, that acts like a kind of cradle for other scents. It gives them depth and character, and gives a perfume a robust structure that holds everything else together.

It doesn't work with everything of course. Vetiver has a very rustic character. It's a bit like a hug from a huge, hairy mountain man, surrounding you in it's rooty pheromone laden depth, amking you feel safe, horny and happy while at the same time reminding you that it's a wild and dangerous world out there in the wilderness....Of the many yummy basenotes there are to work with, each with their own dark depth to them, Vetiver to me it is the bikey outlaw. It has a rawness totally unlike it's smoother cousin Patchouli. And a many layerdness that can't be followed by the straightlaced cedarwood.
But enough of the gushing, let's have a look at a few of the different types of Vetiver available to us perfumers:
They differ mainly in the area they are grown in, where differing soil and enviroment combine with alterations in species to give us quite different aroma characters. Then there is also differences in extraction methods too.
The oil we know as Vetiver is made from the root of the grass vetiveria zizanioides, usually by steam distillation, theough I have also seen it as an absolute, extracted with solvents.

I've got four distincly different types of Vetiver sitting on my workbench this morning.
Indonesian, Haitian, Javanese and Indian Rhus Khus. All of them have their own very distinct characteristics, not unlike the cultures of the countries they grow in...is it the soil and the weather that influences the human culture too? And if so, can we use the infigenous perfumery plants as a guide to the nature of the people I wonder....hmmm....might look at that for a future blog.....

Indonesian Vetiver is the lightest of the four. It has a more woody quality to it, with a slight lead pencil and tobacco note that is very charming. To me this is the most contained of the Vetivers, and reminds me somewhat of cedarwood, particularly red cedar. It is light yellowy-brown in colour, and thick and slow to drip like all vetivers.....it's the more gentile of the vetivers, and would lend itself more readily to floral bases than the others....This is the distinguished English Gentlemans Vetiver, refined and somewhat contained. It's depth lends strength to a perfume in a sopihisticated and understated way that reminds you of many of the classic mens Vetiver Colognes.

Haitian Vetiver is a far more lively thing. The sexy woody musk comes with a distinctly fruity overtone here, and you can almost sense a dance in it's step. It has a fresh touch, along with the slight graphiote pencil note, and a much deeper muskiness to it as well. This one plays happily with other fruit notes and gives you a warmer tone to the perfume in general. It is a deeper amber than the Indonesian version, and you get a real sense of Earthy Forest here, along with just a touch of fresh leaves in the background.

Vetiver Java is my greatest love. I have a precious stock of aged Javanese Vetiver which gives me goosebumps every time I open it. Now this one is the darkest brown of them all, thick, almost gluggy and SEXY to the max! Here to me is where Vetivers legendary appeal as an aphrodisiac truly comes into play!
When I smell Javanese Etiver, I see Orang Utans swinging through the forests (and if my georgraphy is mixed up here, please don't correct me!)
This Vetiver has the strongest of all animal funk to it. It's sexy, deep and musky, and has a true pheromone hit to it like a sweaty football player fresh off the field after a big win!
It also has lovely caramel and coffee overtones in it, making it a true gourmand base note. Now Geographically, Java is part of Indonesia....so I do wonder if the vetiver I have is from a particular plantation, or whether it is merely extracted differently. It reminds me of the difference in Patchouli types. The traditional way to extract patchouli includes the use of copper vessels, and the resultant patchouli is dark brown and earthy....some years ago some clever person thought up a new extraction method under pressure useing nice clean steel aparatus, and the resultant patchouli oil, while delightfully clear and clean, lacked the deep earthy characteristics of it's more primitive relative.

And then there's Rhus Khus. This Vetiver is the interesting foreign cousin in the clan. Made in India useing the aforementioned copper vessels, it has an interesting greeny colour instead of the more common browns, and a scent as different as it's colour. It has indeed green notes and the destinct animal funk of the java vetiver is replaced by an almost water like softness. The deep earthiness is still their, but it has an almost spiritual touch to it. Here, the leafy side that appeared in the Haitian Vetiver, is stronger and newer. It's almost as if the earthiness itself has been refined.

What they all have in common, is their capability to impart a sense of strength and security to the wearer. In traditional Indian Ayurdeda, Vetiver is used to treat depression and anxiety, and modern Aromatherapy uses it for the same things.
At the same time, it is a legendary aphrodesiac! But then, Strength and security are very attractive things....it's the big strong males that tend to ooze sex appeal after all.....
they give strength to a perfume blend, depth and character, and a lovely anchor for citrus an fruity topnotes. As I mentioned in my blog on natural musks, vetiver features in more mens perfumes than any other natural note.

In my own perfumes, I've used many different aspects of Vetiver.

But I'll write more about that in the next installment: "Love Affair with Vetiver -The Perfumes"

Have a look at http://www.vetiver.org for more about vetivers incredible contribution to soil conservation

And at Anya McCoy's blog about the role of soil micobes in the creation of the distinctive Vetiver oil which is a really interesting read for those of you who want to know more!

The Eco Revolution?

2010-04-08T23:03:00.000+10:00

Eco seems to be the new trend in perfumery. Everywhere you look there is Eco" this, "aromatherapy" that on everything from body sprays to bath gels. And most of it is fake.
Apart from a few honourable players like Weleda and the Australian skin care company Jurlique, I don't think I can name a single worldwide brand that actually has more than a token touch of some kind of essential oil in it's ingredient list. Yet many if not most of them are tossing the "natural, ecological aromatherapy" catch phrase around as a hook to the worlds new enviromantal concious buyer.

The resons for this are many fold:

The first and most blatant one is price. I was recently contacted by a wheeler and dealer in the cosmetic industy who wanted to pick my brain about the viability of his newest project. A range of "household scent products" from perfumes to candles and air fresheners, that would be "excellent quality, top of the range natural" (whenever possible of course) "organic fragrance products that would sell at the middle to lower cost range as a cheaper alternative to ranges like Jo Malone for the urban proffesional" etc etc...
Now apart from having the nice gentleman try and pick my brains for free, what fascinated me was the proposed maximum cost for the scent base for the perfumes: $70 a kilo!

This means that ingredient cost of each bottle of perfume (assuming around 10% of each perfume would be made up of the actual scent base) would be 70 cents!

Now those of you who have bought essential oils know that this is just laughable.
Beyond useing straight eukalyptus oil, there is no way of doing this.
A beautiful natural perfume contains things like Rose absolute and good quality aged patchouli oil...and you are looking at closer to thousands per kilo than the mere $70 this guy was planning on.
When I pointed this out to him (OK, so I was naiv enough to think that he might actually intend to hire me to create the natural scent base), he said that this price was one that had been agreed on after consultation with some of the best and most experienced perfume consultants in the business (why was he talking to me again???) and that he himself had been part of the planning committe of a number of high end projects etc etc..
So there we have it. Out there in the world of the big conglomerates, the actual price of a perfume is based purely on the other costs. Planning, advertising, distributing etc. The actual ingredients themselves are an afterthought, dictated by the tiny bit of budget left over for them. And natural ingredients are expensive.

The scond reason is lack of actual knowledge and understanding of natural perfumery.
If you look closely at the ingredients lists of all these hundreds of "Aromatherapy" body products you find in the average drugstore, those that actuallly contain real essential oils, seem to have been put together totally haphaverdly by someone blindly picking from a catalogue of oils! They rarely have any kind of logic to their actual use in the products. And at times, the oils would actually be contraindicated for their proposed use -if of course they were included in any quantities above the mere molecular level., which they aren't.
The average "Aromatherapy" body lotion will have as ingredients (in decending order of percentages) a lovely lotion base of petroleum based "mositurizers", a team of different chemical surfacants, straight water itself, a variety of artifical preservatives, ARTIFICIAL FRAGRANCES and as a kind of afterthough a few random essential oils or herbal extracts.
What you smell when you open the bottle is the artificial fragrance. which may or may not mimic the scent of the essential oils at the bottom of the ingredient list.

Here's an example for you, from a well known American company from their so called "Aromatherapy " range:

Aromatherapy

Body Lotion

Sleep - Warm Milk & Honey

"Good night. Cinnamon essential oil is comforting. Clove essential oil is calming. This ultra-creamy body lotion keeps skin soft and moisturized, while an aromatherapy blend of essential oils evokes the comfort of warm milk and honey so you can get a good night's sleep. In addition, natural soybean oil nourishes and moisturizes, and glycerin attracts moisture, so skin is beautifully hydrated. "

Breathe deeply for best results
Never tested on animals
Natural ingredients may cause color variations

For starters these people don't have an actual ingredient list online for any of their products. But what they do tell us is interesting. Firstly, there is no mention of actual milk or honey being used in any form in the lotion. And yet it smells strongly of both of these! So for starters, we KNOW that the fragrance has to be artificial! The "aromatherapy" ingredients they do have in the lotion are Clove and Cinnamon.
Now neither of these oils is renowned for helping anyone sleep better.
Cinnamon is warming, antiseptic and invigorating. It's a great oil for people feeling the cold and strongly stimulating to the digestive organs. It is also used in herbal form to help balance blood sugar levels....but I don't think this is what they had in mind for a "Sleep" themed body lotion!
Clove is an even more interesting choice: It's distinctive odour sends alarm bells ringing in police dogs at airports when Indonesian travellers bring in their renowned clove scented ciggarettes, and you can also find it in a number of prorpeity pain relief ointments. It's a powerful nerve numbing agent, and has been used for centuries to relieve aching teeth.....but a soothing sleepy time scent? I think not.
And this company is by no means one of the worst. They do at least include a few natural ingredients, such as the soy bean oil they have added to the overall chemical base of their lotions. There are companies out there making far broader claims while useing completely artificial ingredients!

Now apart from all of this being decietful, amoral and downright un-ethical, it also leaves those of us who are actually making REAL natural perfumes and cosmetics with a huge problem.

The average consumer out there believes what advertising tells them. And they are also used to paying a specific price for their beauty care products. The market is dominated by a small handful of large cosmetic conglomerates, who can pretty dominate it by power of their advertising dollars. So what they sell is what people buy.

Depressing innit?!

The Search for the ultimate Musk

2010-04-01T17:02:00.000+11:00

Like many of you, I love musk.
Of all the Scents in the world, musks are the sexiest. A good musk creates a feeling of desire, warmth and general yumminess both in the wearer and the person smelling you!
After all, they were designed as mother nature's ultimate attractants and sex stimulants for us mammals!
My teenage years were dominated by yardleys "musk oil", musk deodorant sprays and little bottles of various musk perfume oils from Indian clothing stores.
Trouble was they were all artificial.
Natural musk comes from animal sources such as civet cats and the musk deer's anal glands, and harvesting this poor animals glands is an ecological and moral no no.
Which is why (along with price of course!) modern chemistry came up with synthetic musks to take their place. Now the problem with this is that they are not very healthy chemicals. Like most synthetic scent molecules, they tend not to break down. Which makes them lovely and stable in body lotions and deodorants, but creates a real problem once they are absorbed by our bodies. Musk chemicals in particular tend to latch on to hormone receptors in our bodies...and since they don't break down, they tend to stay there and go on stimulating, and stimulating....they also tend to collect in our livers as, not being designed to be part of the bodies biochemistry system, we simply have no way of getting rid of them or breaking them down!
And this is probably the reason why synthetic musks are suspected of contributing to or even causing cancer, in particular breast and ovarian cancer.
The research on this has been alarming enough that a number of governments have begun banning particularly the older musk chemicals, and chemistry labs worldwide are rushing to try and develop alternative and possibly safer musks to replace the ones we now know are so dangerous.

But there is another alternative: Naturals.
Now since I love musk so much, creating the ultimate natural musk perfumes from botanical sources has become a bit of an obsession. I have a large collection of deep base note musky oils and absolutes, and I have been experiementing for quite some time with them...
Mother Nature seems to love creating musky notes...you can find them in roots and woods and particularly in tree resins.
They all tend to be especially musky once applied to your skin...there's something about our own body chemistry that seems to bring out the animalistic note in all of them.
One of my current favourites is Ambrette Seed. This strange essence is made from the crushed seeds of an Indian tree. I originally came accross it many years ago, but had dismissed it after obtaining a small quantity, as it's slightly nutty, buttery scent in the bottle didn't seem at all musk like to me. But when I started seriosuly researching musk notes, I pulled it out again and applied some to the inside of my wrist...and 15 minutes later was astounded to find that it had developed into a sweet, deep musky scent that was sooo animally and, well musky that I was totally overwhelmed! I spent the rest of the afternoon sniffing my wrist and making up test combination with this new found wonder musk ingredient! And it really drove home that you ALWAYS have to try a scent on your actual skin to get it's full effect!
Vetiver is another great musk note to play with. It is renowned for it's grounding, aphrodesiac effects and has a deep, incredibly sexy and masculine velvet to it that I keep coming back to. It's been one of the great favourites in mens Colognes for centuries, and there are more men's scents with "Vetiver" in their name than any other perfumery ingredient! And for good reason!
Then there's Sandalwood, a lighter and more playful but incredibly beautiful oil, that has a smooth musky undertone to it that gets deeper with age. (which is why sandalwood is one of the essential oils that actually get better as they mature...so does vetiver for that matter. Must be some particular part of their biochemistry that evolves into the muskier notes as it ages...
Vanilla too has a musky component to it, as does Tonka Bean and the other great base note: Patchouli!
These are all very sweet notes too, which makes them good if you want a sweet musk scent, but not good if you are aiming at a more masculine musk.
All of the tree resins are musky. Frankincense, Myrrh, Labdanum all share a mesmerizing musk along with their magical incense like properties.....
What all of these have in common is that they are used in Aromatherapy to counteract Fear and panic.
Their soothing base note scents all make you feel safe and comforted, which is a bloody good starting point for any kind of sexual interaction in my minds!
And then of course there's the mystical Oud! Distilled mouldy tree wood (a very special mould and a very special tree species of course) to be exact.....and about as famousan aphrodesiac in the arab world as rhino horn and snake wine and all those other wierd concoctions men will imbibe in the hope of growing their potency....Good quanlity Oud will fetch a higher price in weight than Gold.

Interstingly, most of the flower absolutes have a strong musk component to them too. Damask Rose has an incredibly strong musk note in it's base, surrounded by the sweet and freshly tangy notes that rise to the top when you first smell it. Try it on your skin, and see if you can find the musk in the base after 15 minutes or so! We all pay so much attention to the beautiful heart and top notes that the underlying base goes undetected...though our bidies still react to it. Rose too, is known as an aphrodisiac!
Then of course there's the ultimate musk flower: Jasmine Sambac! The Queen of the SExual Flowers, she gives as a musk to rival deer, civet and all the musk creation of modern day chemistry. A depth and many layered magic that no white coat perfumer could ever hope to rival!

It's been a musky day....I still haven't found my "perfect" musk recipe...I do have an ever growing number of musk accords sitting on my shelves quietly working their magic in ageing together...so I'll keep you posted!

I think I'd better put away all my bottles and go and find a nice fresh pepermint tea to clear my fuzzy warm senses again

custom perfume design

2010-03-31T20:09:00.000+11:00

Custom designing perfumes is my greatest love...
the whole process of finding the perfect Scent to match a persons personality is a real delight...and probably the ultimate gift you can give yourself or a Loved One!
It is a pretty involved process, starting with a detailed questionnaire that gives me insight into your basic likes and dislikes, covering everything from colours, moods, conventional fragrances you have previously worn and a chapter on aromatherapy so your perfume can be tailored to your physical and emotional needs, as well as on a purely scentual basis.
It's a very interesting artisitic process...a combination of personality profileing, Healing and Perfumery all rolled into one!
As a perfumer, this is my greatest challenge and greatest delight! Seeing the look of happiness on a persons face when I've got it "just right" is such a pleasure....
I've found I can now often pick the scents that will suit a person simply on meeting them the first time. Natural essential oils and absolutes have personalities of their own, and it's a bit like being an olfactory marriage broker really....you just know which oils and which people will really hit it off together!
I'll often pick 2 or 3 central oils on which to base the scent which in themselves are perfectly suited to the person the scent is being crafted for....
From there the process is a matter of finding accessory notes which will bring out the best in both the chosen base aromatics and the person who will be wearing them.
Sometimes I will start with a particular accord...in this case the young man who the cologne is being designed for wanted something with a leather note similar to his italian leather jacket.
This is a wonderful old fashioned note in perfumery...very masculine and both sexy and comforting at the same time...and a fantastic base that can be varied in so many different ways...in this case we decided to go with a bright citrus note to give it a fresh twist and make it a good cologne to wear every day. He wanted something he could wear to the office that would make him feel good, as well as being an attrative scent to others around him, both men and women! This is a really important aspect to a custom perfume: You need to have an idea of who you want to wear it around....will it be at the office? or at a private intimate dinner? Or do you maybe want something seriously in your face sexy to wear to bed with a lover?
Perfume can be subtle and freindly...or it can be intenslely intimate! And you need to have an idea of the effect you want it to have on others as well as yourself...
The bottles on the left are a varity of versions of a custom designed cologne I've put together for the young man, who is coming to the workshop to try them out on his actual skin, and from there I can fine tweak them with various nuances and notes till we've got it exactly right!
What you can see here is a workbook with notes I've taken on the Scent as it's been developing, some of the ingre
dients I may use to give the working blends a final "tweak" and 6 sample bottles with variations of the actual scent I have made up for the client to try. In the background you can see the round glass bottle with one of our signature velvet leaves that will be used for the finished cologne.
And here he is smelling the effect on his skin. No matter what a scent is like in the bottle, there's no substitute for trying in on the actual skin of the person it is designed for. Your skin will change a scent and bring out different nuances...
In this case, the base needed to be fine tweaked and ramped up a little as the young mans skin brought out the citrus top notes very strongly.
He was delighted with the scent by the way! masculine, elegant, fresh and understated with a beautiful italian leather base that is really timeless.
You can almost see him back in Venice in the 1800's. A young Italian count going out for a nights revelry....
In the next installment, we'll give you some feedback on how those around him reacted to his new cologne!
If you want more information about our custom perfume design service, contact us on
info@perfumebynature.com.au