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....