real perfume for real women

Just got back from Adelaide where I've been working on a custom design project with three young Australian sportswomen!

Elisabetta Del Re, boxer and gridiron football player

SA boxing champion, Australian silver medal holder, Adelaide Phoenix captain

Annette Edmosdson cyclist

two times World Champion , Team Pursuit World Record Holder , Olympic Medallist and a Commonwealth Champion

 Mariafe Artacho del Solar, beach volleyball player

Australian and world champion and olympic hopeful

its been really exciting, flying over with a photographer, staying in a hotel and doing the perfume consultations in interesting venues like the Botanical gardens!

Talk about an amazing project! When i was first approached by their manager Shane Jones about doing a custom perfume design project with 3 young Australian sportswomen, I was a bit doubtful.

I'm not a sports follower, and it wasnt a big money gig. But the more i got to know them, the more the idea began to fascinate me...

Perfume, luxury and a silver medal in bike track racing dont normally go together.

we associate perfume with girly girls. Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, and a whole slew of female actresses have perfumes marketed by big corporations. 

These perfumes are the ones we all know from the shops. Cheap, mass produced things that are designed by focus groups and marketing analysts rather then perfume artisans. And they sell us a really narrow image of femininity that is tied to well, looking pretty, and being famous. 

The women these perfumes are promoted by, are not real people. They are the artificial star images, created and photoshopped by their management and PR teams. And so are their perfumes.

These Australian sportswomen by contrast, work their asses off for their passion. And unlike their male counterparts, they don't get huge corporate sponsership deals to support their efforts, in fact they all have real world jobs they work at on top of all day training sessions, weekend competitions, overseas trips....

And part of the idea for the project is to showcase them and their achievements as women.

What also fascinated me about this project, was that they had chosen "me" in particular, because not only am I one of the few existing indie perfumes who actually does custom design,  I am also one of the few proffesional perfumers out here who works exclusively with botanical ingredients.

It makes sense when you think about it, as athletes they need to pay attention to what they put on and in their bodies. Fresh, organic, no junk....their bodies are their business, so they need to be treated as temples and kept at their utmost best...

So they want perfumes made from natural, eco friendly, healthy ingredients too!

Its a such a great perfume project, because there is no commercial focus dictating what i have to create.

Yes, the perfumes will be available to buy, but we're talking small batches here from a small indie perfume house. Not David Jones, we gotta please our investors style mass production.

Real personal hand made luxury.

The concept is to simply sit down with the 3 women, and design their own perfect fragrance. No constraints on making it a commercially viable product, no target market consultations, no pricepoint restrictions on the ingredients we choose.

Just what each of these women dreams of as her own special personal bespoke perfume. 

Real, amazing women who are the kind of roll models I'd want my daughters to look up to

And Real perfume. Natural oils, plant extracts, tree resins, the best of the best.

And I get to give them one of the most feminine of luxuries: A perfume designed to fit who they are...with all their strengths, beauty and longings!

What makes the project even more exciting is that I get to tell their stories in the process!

Designing their perfumes means I have to get to know them, what they dream about, what makes them tick....a custom perfume is like a hand sewn dress, cut to fit perfectly...

So we're making a scent doco of these womens journeys as we go along.

stay tuned for more blogs about each of the individual perfumes!

#realperfumeforrealwomen

Workshop: The Mystery and Magic of Perfumery

After an inspiring phone call the other morning, I'm finally going to be running the first of the promised workshops on perfumery on the 4th of July here in my Byron Bay studio!

People have been asking me for ages when I'm going to be running classes...but it's taken me a while to work out what I can actually offer.
Teaching perfumery is a BIG project.  Realistically, trying to condense my 30 years of experience into a few one day workshops just isnt possible.
But what I can do is offer lessons in where to start, and give people the opportunity to talk, ask questions, and above all to play with some of the essential ingredients and bases used in perfumery in a real perfume studio.

So that's what I'm going to do.

We're going to look at the basic way a botanical perfume is created:

 -the difference between aromatherapy and botanical perfumery
 - the different types of scented ingredients (essential oils, absolutes, CO2 extracts, alcoholic tinctures)
 -the different bases used and how to choose whether to work in oil or alcohol
 -how a perfume is actually made
 -the basics of scent design
 -what top middle and base notes are
 -how to classify different oils

  and most importantly:
 -how to evaluate individual oils to see how they will work in a perfume

As part of this,we'll be looking at a number of commonly used ingredients and I'll be talking about the botanical and aromatherapy effects of each oil, their historical and spiritual uses, as well as their qualities from a perfumers point of view.
And we will then  experiment with combining them in different ways to achieve different effects.
 The idea is to give you a real understanding of how to approach the process of creating a perfume useing botanical ingredients.

Each participant will go home with a hopefully much better understanding of the process of perfumery, notes and hints on the ingredients we've used and some little bottles of the perfume blends we've worked with to further work with at home.

The cost for the workshop is $500 which includes all of the materials used in the class and the finished blends to take home.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, send me an email at
ambrosia@perfumebynature.com.au

A perfume for Chikii

Annette, the lovely owner of the Australian online eco cosmetic store "Chikii" popped into my studio the other day for another "custom fitting" session for her new perfume!
We've been working on a signature scent for her business for a while now...and it looks as though we may finally have it!
It's such a beautiful scent...and concept...
What Annette wanted was something elegant and calming, a beautiful womanly scent that would give the wearer a sense of peace....a feeling of space, which women so desperately need in their daily busy loves in our culture!
It's based around the energy of the eastern Goddess Kwan Yin, deity of compassion and mercy. 

We've chosen some beautiful ingredients to build it with:

Neroli, the delicate queen of bitter orange flower, fresh and elegant and calming
Orange Floweritself, giving the scent a warm honey floral depth
Labdanum:  a soft woody vanilla like basenote made from the Rockrose that grows in Crete. One of my favourite ingredients as it has a sweet woody gentleness to it that is understadely supportive in a perfume....a true skin scent
And Indian Genda attar, a traditional indian oil distilled from marigold flowers. This is the rarest ingredient in the perfume, as it is incredibly difficult to come by real traditionaly made natural indian attars nowadays. You can buy cheap fake copies in any indian knick knack shop, but the real thing is rare and costly...and I've been lucky enough to be able to source some of the real thing. It adds a lovely green,

exotic and magical element to the scent...... It's going to be one of the most elegant perfumes I've ever created. Such a beautiful soft, understated floral....I'm totally in love with it! It reminds me of jade...cool, soothing, strong and yet gentle at the same time....

Boxes boxes and more boxes

 My studio has been covered in cardboard boxes this week.
Ive been trying to find better packing solutions for the perfumes for a while...and getting more and more frustrated. The old velvet bags Ive been useing are nice...but a) they are made from synthetic material which i wasn't happy about and b) they simply don't look that profesional when they are sitting on a shelf. And since we are doing more and more wholesaleing, it was time for an upgrade.
The problem, as usual, was that I could have anything I wanted, as long as I was willing to buy thousands and thousands at a time. Which being a small indie perfume house, simply isn't in the realm of feasible or sensible.
Ive spent the last year or so writing back and forth to manufacturers, getting ripped off after paying out money for samples that never arrived, being quoted insane manufacturing and shipping costs and generally getting totally fed up with the whole thing.
And then I finally had a brain wave.
Simple. Clean, Kraft paper boxes and beautiful colorful pictures as stickers instead of printed on the boxes themselves!
And simple square shapes instead of cool round cylinders (which is what I really wanted....this is part of the ripped off for non existent samples saga).
I found a supplier willing to sell me small quantities to play with, and two weeks ago a large box full of tiny boxes of different sizes arrived in my studio, and I've been in creative heaven ever since!
The next difficulty of course has been working out what kind of labels to put on them....How to keep them simple and beautiful while still providing enough information?

I've compromised by using the color grahics signature photo for each perfume on the front...and putting the logo and a bit of actual information on the back of the box.
I probably need to include more information. As people really don't know what the difference is between my perfumes, botanical perfumes....and all the other perfumes available in the stores...
So I need to spell it out clearly. But how do i do that?

Tell me, what information would you want to find on the boxes?

The My Gardenia project

Well, it's finally finished. And it worked!!! Yay yay yay!!!!!!
It's been a 2 year project of experimentation and fails....it all started a few years ago after my one and only supplier for natural Gardenia absolute stopped making the stuff...which meant that one of my best selling perfumes was suddenly missing it's main ingredient!
After searching for some time, and being told time after time that no one out there was making it any more because all of the big perfume companies were now using artificial gardenia fragrance notes as they were easier to use and cheaper,  I realized the only way I was going to get any natural Gardenia was to make it myself!
So I dug out some of my antique perfumery books and started to experiment with the traditional technique of "enfleurage". My boyfriend at the time lives out in the hills inland from Byron Bay, and had a number of large gardenia bushes on his property, so I had lots of blossoms to experiment with.
Enfleurage is a technique that used to be used to extract delicate floral fragrances from delicate flowers that could not be distilled. Such as rose and jasmine, and also gardenia. You are basically soaking the flowers in or on a base oil or fat to let the scent soak into it, and changing the spent flowers for new ones over and over again until the base you are using is saturated with the scent. Sounds simple huh? The first technique I tried was useing fluid oil. This was incredibly tricky as it turned out. You have to soak the fresh flowers in oil for a certain amount of time, and keep swapping them for new flowers when the old ones start to wilt. The first problem I ran into is that the perfume manuals I had were from France. And Australia is a LOT hotter. So the first batches I made, leaving the flowers in for the recommended time, let to a brown cloudy fermented MESS instead of the silky soft perfumed oil I was hoping for! We threw that lot out, and started again, keeping the bottles in a cool shady spot inside the house and changing the flowers more and more frequently....Now the Gardenia plants only flower for a short time, so it was a real run against time, with batch after batch fermenting just when it had been recharged for the 10th or so time! And it looked as if the project was going to fail...But we finally managed to work out the timing and we ended up with a small amount of softly sweet floral Gardenia scented oil just as the last flowers blossomed... it is lovely stuff, but not really strong enough to be a perfume in it's own right...but it makes a beautiful body oil!
This year I was determined to try again, this time using a different technique. This time I decided to use a more traditional approach using a solid oil so the flowers would have less chance of turning into a fermented mess. Traditionally, they used to use lard and other animal fats, but I thought I could improve on this and find a nice botanical alternative, so I made up batches of macadamia oil, mango butter and various botanical waxes to what I thought would be a good consistency. I started right at the beginning of the gardenia flowering season this time, and soon had every surface covered with containers coated with solid oil and wax blends, full of white fragrant gardenia flowers. And for the next weeks it was a constant job of collecting the flowers in the morning and evening (trying to avoid the jumping ants

that seem to love to live at the base of the plants and which seem to rejoice in finding interesting places to bite you while you are reaching for those last high up blossoms at the top of the bush!), changing the wilted flowers for fresh ones and keeping an eye on the process. The trouble with fresh flowers is that they contain lots of water. And water provides a wonderful environment for mold. So we realized pretty quickly (and after tossing out a number of batches) that we needed to provide enough air circulation around the containers to stop this from happening, but not so much that the scent from the gardenias would evaporate instead of soaking into the oil and wax layers... I changed layer after layer of old flowers for new, worrying that the scent wouldn't be strong enough before I ran out of flowers as the season came to an end. I can remember sitting in the workshop and holding up a container to a friend who'd wandered in and asking "Does this smell strong enough?". He answered "honey, you can smell it from out on the street! The whole workshop smells of Gardenia!"

In the end, all the hard work paid off. It really and truly actually worked! Deep heady sultry honest to goodness Gardenia in a solid base! So the next step was melting all the individual batches down together, adding more wax to make it solid enough to package and use, and adding the other essential oils from my original "My Gardenia" recipe to turn it into an actual perfume!
The Gardenia enfleurage makes a wonderful base...but I added some green light topnotes and a musky wood base to re-create the feeling of the fresh flowers on the plant... while keeping the Gardenia as dominant as possible to basically recreate the feeling of sitting  amongst the Gardenia bushes at dusk when the scent it strongest.....
And now on my shelf there is a pile of beautiful tiny little jars of exquisite one of a kind truly authentic "My Gardenia" perfume pots!

Want to know what it smells like?

Go to my store

Namaste Byron Bay

The Vanilla perfume has a name. 

"Namaste"....I greet the God/dess within you.
It's my personal gift to Byron Bay....a new perfume for my new home town. Embodying the spirit and the vibe of the place...
There's a wooden sign on the road leading into town painted with peace symbols and flowers that says :"Slow down, chill out and relax!" and it really sums up the place.
It's the New Age Hippie Mecca of Australia, a bit like San Fransico in the States in the 60's used to be.
It's full of colourful people, amazing beaches with clean sand and blue water, shops selling tie dyed clothes and really expensive designer hippie gear. (Because all of the hippies from the 60's are now grey haired and some of them very well to do.)
Anyway, it's also home to a plethora of workshops, meditation and yoga classes. And chanting OM and useing "Namaste" at the end of

each class is so normal that it's part of the local language.

My perfume Namaste is a scentual impression of Byron in all of it's neo hippie spiritual laid back glory. Vanilla and Sandalwood are the main notes, and here is why I chose them:
Vanilla is sweet and soothing and comforting and relaxing and sexy and well, just downright NICE! on every level you can think of. Everyone loves Vanilla. It's one of those true feel good, happy scents that envokes good childhood memories, innocence, playfulness and just makes you feel like the world is a better place.
The Vanilla in Namaste comes in the form of organically grown gourmand Vanilla beans in the actual

bottle. Amplified by a Vanilla accord made from a combination of incense resins, from tolu balsam over tonka, labdanum and a variety of vanilla absolutes and CO2 extracts to give a real sophistication and a sexier, elegant take on the innocence of Vanilla itself.
And it's held by a beautiful classic Sandalwood base. Sandalwood is one of the most spiritual scents in existance. Used for thousands of years in spiritual ceremonies for healing and blessing.
It is also used in Aruveda to treat depression and anxiety, and has similar applications in modern Aromatherapy. The twist is that it's an Australian

Sandalwood, not Indian. Indian Sandalwood has been harvested almost into extinction, which makes it a really bad environmental choice. And I also wanted to make sure that Namaste had a real Australian grounding to it, since, after all, it's from Byron, and Oz and all. Australia is a very down to earth place. And Byron Bay, for all of it's spiritual side, is still an Australian version. So I've used a really wonderful Australian Sandalwood that actually reflects this perfectly. It's an amazing deep, musky, dry and elegant smelling Sandalwood grown in Western Australia on an eco-conscious environmentally sustainable plantation.
And it's musky deep woody character enhances the elegant notes of the Vanilla and resin accord in the top and mid layers of the perfume.
I made up the first batch a few weeks ago. And sold the whole lot within 5 days. So I guess there must be something right there :) So I've made up a bath and body oil to go with it too....just for Xmas! If you'd like to try some for yourself, click here to go to the webshop!

Vanilla, Vanilla and more Vanilla

One of the first questions people seem to ask is "Do you have anything with Vanilla?"
And while some of my perfumes have Vanilla notes, ("Goddess" and "Craving" in particular)
I've never made a straight Vanilla perfume.
There's a number of reasons for this.
For starters it's not one of my favourite notes. Vanilla in itself is a tad too sweet for my taste. And the commercial artificial Vanilla perfumes out there actually make me a tad nauseous. They tend to be so overwhelmingly sickly sweet and cloying that it made me a bit of a Vanilla Nazi.
But after moving into my new bricks and mortar studio, and being asked, again and again whether I had a Vanilla Scent, I figured I should listen to my public and take another look at that ingredient.
This brought me to the second reason Ive never brought out a Vanilla perfume before: Natural Vanilla is a pain in the a*** to work with.
I have quite a collection of Vanilla extracts in my collection. Vanilla absolute from 4 different countries, CO2 extract forms, even food grade Vanilla essence!
What they all have in common is that they don't willingly dissolve in either alcohol or oil bases.
So I went back to the drawing board and ordered a large quantity of high quality natural Vanilla beans to experiment with too.
I began the Vanilla project in June this year, and one of my shelves is literally stacked with with tinctures in a variety of bases, powdered Vanilla beans, bags of Madagascar Special pods, absolutes in alcohol and CO2 extracts in oil....all sitting there flatly refusing to bloody well dissolve!
But in the end I remembered an old trick I had learned from an ancient apothecary text book many years ago and lo and behold, I got my Vanilla scent into an oil base! (And yes, I could tell you how I did it, but I think I might save that to include in the book I'm writing at the moment!)
This does mean that for the moment, it will only available as a perfume oil, as the process simply doesn't work properly in alcohol....but the oil base seems to lend itself to the softness of the Vanilla scent anyway....

So from there I sat down to come up with a Vanilla perfume that actually appealed to ME!
As I said in the beginning, my biggest beef with Vanilla has always been it's sweetness.
So I built my Vanilla perfume on a deep dry woody base with a lot of Australian Sandalwood in it. The Sandalwood I use has a particularly high Santalol content, similar to the Indian Mysore Sandalwood, but it is a lot drier and sharper than the Indian one, which in this perfume works perfectly.
I then experimented with a number of other resin extracts with complimentary notes to them to enhance the shy softness of the Vanilla itself.
There's quite a number of them: Styrax, Benzoin, Labdanum, Tonka bean, Tolu and Peru Balsam being just a few I tried...
each of them lent a different note to the perfume and it took quite a bit of fiddling to find just the right combination for the effect I was looking for.
But I got it.
And made up a test batch.
And sold the first bottle half an hour later, with no label, no name....
And then posted on facebook and sold the rest of the batch in a week.
Still with no name, no label, not even a proper website page.


So I've just made up a second batch, and added a bath and body oil version...(of which Ive already sold the first 2 bottles here in the shop).
And have added it to the new website.
Still without a name, or proper label.

Vanilla Wood perfume oil

Vanilla Wood Bath & Body oil

Adventures in Gardenia Enfleurage

Gardenia Macadamia oil Enfleurage

One of my experimental projects this year was in the making of Gardenia Enfluerage. As some of you know, a few years back I managed to track down a small amount of real Gardenia absolute, and made a small batch of a perfume I called "My Gardenia". Which sold out. And to my horror, the supply I had for the absolute dried up and there has been no more to be found ever since!
And I was living out in the bush in Nimbin, norther NSW Australia near a rather large crop of organic gardenias...
So I thought I'd have a go at seeing if I could actually extract the scent myself.
And not wanting to muck around with toxic solvents out in the bush, I decided to try "Enfleurage".
This technique was developed in France a century or so ago, and it involves covering glass plates with a solid oil or fat and laying the petals on them over and over again...each time waiting for up to 24 hours till the scent from the flowers has infused into the fat, and then replacing them with new flowers until the fat has become thoroughly saturated with scent.

gardenia coconut enfleurage

Now the problems I faced were many fold. For starters the Gardenia flowers needed to be picked at exactly the right time of day when the scent was strongest. I started off picking them in the morning, but quickly realized the scent was far stronger in the evening. Which meant making sure I was home at the right time to be able to pick them before it got too dark to see both the flowers and any stray snakes that might be slithering around (remember this was right out in the Australian bush). Then it rained and there was no point picking wet flowers as you need them to be as dry as possible while still young and fresh. Then I found out that the bushes were growing right over the nest of a particularly unfriendly form of jumping ant. But eventually, dressed in jeans tucked into sturdy hiking boots and a long sleeved shirt I managed to harvest enough flowers for the first run (with only a small number of ant bites).
Back in the mountain chalet, I hit the next hurdles. Australia is hot in summer. Very hot. And where I was living there was no air conditioning. So any of the fats I tried simply melted off the glass within about 15 minutes.
So I decided to simply immerse the flowers in the melted oil in jars...
Which worked...but I discovered after the first 4 batches failed that I had to immensely careful about timing. If the flowers were left in the oil for too long, first the water content would begin to seep into the oil, and then the whole melange would begin to ferment in the heat. the french instructions of 24 hours were definitely too long!
It was more like a couple of hours with the jars being left in a nice cool spot of the stone floor!
The first batch I did was in coconut. Which worked...but the smell of the coconut was very strong and tended to over power the gentle delicate gardenia, and I was trying to get a strong pure gardenia note all of it's own for my perfume....
So I ended up using a beautiful scentless locally produced macadamia oil which is light and beautiful, plus being environmentally friendly as it's produced in the same hills.
I ran into the same scent strength versus fermentation timing problem over and over....the oil would go from a lovely clear jar full of glowing white flowers dancing in suspension...to a cloudy yellow tinged mess with a distinct fruity smell overpowering the delicate floral gardenia. Which was particularly heart breaking if it was the 4th of 5th run of new petals in a jar.
In the end I ended up with a mere half 500mls of perfect clear delicately scented Gardenia oil! About half of which I have decided to share with my perfumer friends...the other half will be further transformed into "My Gardenia" perfume oil.
So if you'd like to have your own share in this olfactory adventure:

click to buy some Gardenia Enfleurage

Very Vanilla

My latest project: A Vanilla perfume.
I've been asked for one so many times over the years...but it's not an easy undertaking.
You see I want it to be a real "pure" vanilla. Maybe with some woody musk ingredients to it, but nothing to mask it or take away from it's basic..well.. "vanilla-ness".
So I'm working with gentle woods, and ambers, and musky smooth bases....
And it's challenging. Vanilla is such a subtle scent...and almost anything seems to overpower it.
Plus the bloody vanilla absolute I like best doesn't seem to dissolve in anything. Argh.

There's so many forms of Vanilla to play with...starting with the fermented vanilla pods themselves which I have incubating in oil and alcohol in bottles all over my shelves...then there's the aforementioned absolute (grr), CO2 extracts, and wonder of wonders, natural vanillin powder! Lovely and subtle to the EXTREME!!!!
Then there's all the "vanilla-ish" other ingredients...benzoin, styrax, tolu balsam, labdanum, peru balsam...but all of them are strong and sweet with sharp overtones I dont really want in the mix.....
So far I'm happiest with a really gentle wood/ musk base which doesn't take centre stage...but it still outshines the vanilla....
We'll see.
Any testers and bloggers out there who'd like a few of the advanced version to test sniff when I'm happy with them?

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!

ECLIP

Today I am writing about a fantastic innovation a couple of my collegues have come up with!
One of the hardest battles us natural perfumers face, is that of information.
You see the general public has little way of understanding the diference between what we do, and what the larger conventional perfume companies do.
I mean, my neighbour tried to tell me the other day that Chanel No5 was made out of natural Ylang Ylang Flowers!
Unluckily labeling legislation does little to help here..
Basically, you can put anything in a perfume, and the label itself will say helpful things like :"contains: alc. denat., water, perfume."
The big companies are also beginning to jump on the natural bandwagon and are selling a wide range of cosmetics and now even perfumes with lovely natural imaes and hints in their advertising that make people think they ARE actually natural.


So it's time to fight back.
And here's where ECLIP comes in:
ECLIP stands for Complete Ethical List of Ingerdients in Perfume.
Sounds pretty clear doesn't it?!
The idea behind it is to simply start openly and clearly showing exactly what is in out perfumes useing a standardized format. The format we are useing is the ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) standard for cosmetic ingredients, that can be found on the ISO website
That way, consumers can make a clear and informed decision about what they are buying!
Revolution through honesty, hows that for a cool idea?!

And it may well work.
The more of us who do this, the more pressure will mount for the bigger companies to do this too.

I have posted the ECLIP list for my company below, and here is also a webpage which is the start of our true revolution:

Natural Perfumers who use ECLIP

 

ECLIP of "Perfume by Nature"

ETHYCAL COMPLETE LIST OF INGREDIENTS IN PERFUMES  

WHAT I USE IN MY PERFUMES

Absolute as defined by ISO 9235
Alcohol natural
Animal Extracts and tinctures: (Hyraceum, Honey, Beeswax).
Concrete: as defined by by ISO 9235
Essential oils: as defined by ISO. 9235
Extracts: as defined by ISO 9235
Natural molecules isolates obtained from essential oils
Oil Vegetable
Resinoids: as defined by ISO 9235
Tinctures: as defined by ISO 9235



Wax  from bees (for solid perfumes)


WHAT I DO NOT USE IN MY PERFUMES

Alcohol synthetic
Aroma chemicals from chemical synthesis of petroleum derivatives.
Aroma chemicals from chemical synthesis of natural raw materials  
Denaturant for alcohol
Natural molecules (Isolates) from bio technology
Ogm ingredients
Oil MIneral (paraffins)
Preservatives (natural) ex. wheat germ oil
Preservatives (synthetic) ex. vitamin C
Wax from petroleum (for solid perfumes)  

Definition of the products listed on ECLIP      

Absolute: extracted with ethanol from concrete or resinoides. Ethanol is then removed.

Alcohol natural: obtained from natural raw material source (grain, corn, cane) by fermentation then distillation.

Alcohol synthetic, synthetic ethanol is obtained by mixing ethylene (gas obtained from petroleum or fossil gases) with steam at a temperature of 300° Celsius.
Animal Extracts and tinctures: obtained by treating animal raw material with ethanol. To obtain the Extract the solvent is removed (es. civet, Castoreum, Hyraceum, Ambergris, Honey bee).
Aroma chemicals from chemical synthesis of petroleum derivatives.
Aroma chemicals from natural raw materials (acetate vetyveryle, acetate cedryle ecc…): Single molecules obtained from chemical reaction of natural raw materials with acids to obtain acetates, cinnamates, brassylates etc.
Antioxidants (natural) es. wheat germ oil
Antioxidants (synthetic) es. vitamin C or E
Concrete: obtained from botanical raw material usually extracted with solvent (hexane, supercritical CO2) then the solvent is removed.
Denaturant : in perfumery the combination of 2 chemical products is used to disable human consumption. The chemicals used for denaturation are MEK (methyl ethyl ketone), of controversial health impact and Bitrex.
Essential oils: obtained by steam distillation of natural raw material or cold press in the case of citruses.
Essential oils which significantly change in composition (folded essential oils, fractioned essential oils , x-less essential oil, molecular distillation). materials which has been eliminated reduced by re-distillation
Extracts: obtained by treating natural raw material with volative solvent which is then removed or non volatile solvent that is not removed at the end.
Natural molecules (So called) or Isolates, from bio technology (patent secrecy on process and origin material) obtained from microbiological synthesis. the problem is related to the secrecy that the producers keeps on the origin material of these products with the excuse of patent propriety and confidentiality.
Natural molecules (isolates) obtained from essential oils by distillation. Mostly obtained from fractional distillation of natural essential essential oils.
Ogm ingredients any ingredient from genetically modificated raw material
Oil mineral (paraffins) derived from petroleum. obtained from crude distillation of the same.
Oils vegetable (jojoba, mandorle ecc) from natural source obtained from cold pression without solvents
Preservatives (natural) ex. wheat germ oil, used to prevent the deterioration by oxidation
Preservatives (synthetic) ex. vitamin C, used to prevent the deterioration by oxidation
PG and DPG (Propylen Glicole, Dipropylen Glicole) synthetic solvent from petroleum used to obtain extracts from natural raw materials: PG is used mainly to obtain cocoa extract: the PG is NOT removed.
Resinoids: obtained from dry botanical raw material extracted usually with ethanol, that is then removed.
Tinctures: obtained from ethanol maceration of raw material (also called infusion in perfumery); the exhausted raw material is filtered off.
Water
Wax  from bees (for solid perfumes)
Wax from petroleum (for solid perfumes)
In all our fragrances are present the 16 so called “natural allergens” contained in most essential oils, they are:

• cynnamic alcohol
• hexil cinnamal
• citral
• eugenol
• geraniol
• hydroxycitronellal
• isoeugenol
• anisic alcohol
• benzilbenzoate
• benzyl cinnamate
• citronellol
• d- limonene
• cynnamaldehyde
• farnesol
• linalool
• evernia prunastri extract

Naturalperfumers that use ECLIP


The list of "natural allergens" is a biot more controversial.
It's one that was basically set up by IFRA, the international perfume association. And defines ingredients that they have decided can cause allergies in some people, and sets standards for the amount in which these can be used in perfumes, as well as demanding that these be declared on labels.
Perfonally I think it's a load of rubbish, as it doesnt incude the many many artificial perfume ingredients that can cause nasty reactions in so many people...and also doesn't take into account that essential oils are complex synergies that contain these chemicals in small amounts...which is a totally different thing to the way the perfume industry uses them.


However, IFRA is such a powerful mover and shaker in the business world that many individual countries have started to legislate useing their standards.
And to be able to sell perfumes legally in most European Countries, we now have to include that list, to warn people that our perfumes contain these dangerous natural chemicals as part of the essential oils we use!

But thats another story alltogether..
Anyway, here's to a new revolution in honesty in business!

I'll be including this list on a whole page of it's own on my website, as soon as I can find a new webtechie to fix up my official website!

 

A Scented Visitor

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