Pan's Midsummer Night Dream

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!

Chocolate for Xmas

   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?

Mystery of Musk-Craving Reviews part two

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!

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....