The Travelling Perfume

Today it finally arrived in my humble abode!
The Travelling Perfume Bottle is the Mind Child of the wonderful Monica Miller of Perfume Pharmer.

"I wanted to make a Perfume for PEACE

I wanted to travel all around the world collecting ingredients...prayers for PEACE...things like....

from the Zapatista people in Mexico...the FREEDOM that they crave ..if we put in the bottle the prayer for FREEDOM from people who so fervently pray for FREEDOM then that prayer is carried throughout the world in the bottle and becomes part of the homeopathic medicine....there is s song..."everything is everything" and there is a saying... that in everything is the seed of its apparent opposite

I came to understand that I didnt have to travel all over the world collecting ingredients and I began to see it as not so much a personal project but a co created project".

taken on patrol in a small village with the Taliban shooting from the right.

It started off with one of the Grandmother's of Natural Perfumery, the great Jeanne Rose. Her son is fighting in Aphganistan. And she tinctured one of his combat gloves. What a start for a perfume project for Peace?!!!

It has since travelled through many countries, and many perfumers, each adding a few drops of oil, special herbs or sacred waters...and it's quite an amazing thing...

As I open the bottle, it's like the impact of hundreds of different voices...so many scents, so many layers have been added as it travelled. It's dark brown, sticky and full of wierd bit's and bobs, like some kind of primordial ooze....There are flower scents, and herbs, and deep musky layers..like an over the top kaleidoscope of perfumes from many cultures...

I have to put the bottle down and take a deep breath as my head is spinning just from one sniff!

I take a few more carefull sniffs and then start thinking about what I can add to this....

I've just come back from working out in the Australian desert as a remote area nurse for a month...and what I have brought back with me is a deep sense of Peace...the wide open spaces, the ancient mountain ranges, impossibly blue skies and the glowing warm red sand....

Australia is an ancient country....and travelling out to the Outback, you begin to understand just how small and new us humans really are....ancient landscapes that have been here since long before humans started to create their "civilisation" and beging to squabble over territory and money....

So I am am adding that sense of ancient Peace:

Australian Sandalwood for it's deep healing properties. Oz sandalwood is drier than mysore...it carries with it that tang of the desert and the hot sun that forces you to relax, not matter how stressed you are. Sandalwood is one of those magic perfume ingredients that connects all other elements gently and warmly, giving them a base to work together.....which feel very fitting for this potion.

Cinnamon oriental magical ingredient to give warmth and life to everything. It's heat and sharp bring a touch of clarity to the many voices in the Travelling Perfume.

Cardamon and Coriander to add a touch of Love and Passion, because after all, these are what truly bring us together...

One of the Creation Stories of the Anangu People of Central Australia, is that of the Great Mother Snake called  "Kunia". She was very pregnant, and travelled far and wide through the Land, looking for a safe place to lay her babies...she travelled all over the country, from the top end, to the bottom South, From East where the Sun rises, to the Western Coast where she go's to sleep, and she couldn't find a place that was safe and peaceful enough....and eventually she came to Uluru, the huge Sandstone Rock in the centre of the desert that calls so many tourists from all over the world nowadays....and here she came to rest. She laid her eggs, and her children were born. It is truly one of the strongest, most peaceful places in the world.

So this I give to the Travelling Perfume of Peace...a little touch of the Great Mother, protecter of her children from out in the Red Centre of Australia.

And a new word I learnt in Pitjanjara: "Palya!" All is Good!

Tackling the 5 Elements

My Quest for perfection is bogging me down.....
I was supposed to be taking part in Monica Miller's wonderful perfume project around the 5th Sacred Thing..."Primordial Scents 2012"
A Challenge to design perfumes around one or more of the 5 Elements, Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit...
A Project really close to my heart as a) I love and adore Starhawks book "The 5th Sacred Thing" and b) designing scents around the elements is what got me started in perfumery in the first place....
but Life this year has been pretty....emotional. Upheavals, depression, relationship changes and other stuff have been either dragging me away from my workshop or making me too tired and confused to focus properly....
Plus I was stupid enough to want to make a full set of scents, covering all the Elements.
"Should be easy", I thought, after all I used to actually make and sell Magickal Oils along these lines...
But when I actually sat down with my old recipes and starting looking at them properly, it dawned on me that my skills have come a long way since then...and that what may be a perfectly apt blend as say, a FIRE oil, does not translate as easily into a wonderful perfume! I mean, you gotta look for longevity, wearability, generlal wonderfulness and all there...
So I began to rework the formulas...and the collections of little sample bottles for each element got larger and larger....

Whether it was the sheer magnitude of what I was trying to achieve, or the muddled self doubting mess in my head over the last few months, nothing seemed to be good enough. Time rolled on, the deadline grew closer and closer, and I became almost paralized with indecision. And finally gave up, took a job contract for 2 months to get away from the house and the dramas, and left behind my project bottles unfinished...
Now I'm back, brain heart and soul refreshed from 2 months out in the desert, the project is rolling out, and I'm sitting in my workshop staring and sniffing my little bottles. And here is the big question:
Do I just stop dithering, pick the best out of each lot and send 'em off to Monica? Or do I give in to my need to have them "just right" and thereby miss out on the project alltogether?
I have a pretty damm good "Air" that is like a fresh seaside breeze, with tads of seaweed and driftwood in the background...I have a very watery "Water" that I'd love to fiddle with to make it a wonderful perfume as well as a great representation of the element...my "Fire" again is very firey rather than perfumey...and I'm tempted to send in my "Love Potion" which is applied Fire incarnate and maybe PAN as the ultimate Earth elemental...but is it acceptable to add to older perfumes to the set?

Both of these are great perfumes...whereas the Fire and Earth in my experiments are primordial rather than rounded perfumes....arrrggghhh!!!!!!!!!