Aphrodisiacs and Perfume

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!

The Mystery of Musk-Craving

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....

Scent for a Country Gentleman

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  $20

Love Affair with Vetiver-the Perfumes

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....