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

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?

Perfume for "Chikii"

The lovely Annete, owner of "Chikii", an awesome Australian webshop that
specializes in  natural cosmetics has asked me to create a perfume for her business!

www.chikii.com.au

When I asked her what she wanted the perfume to smell like, she said "I want something beautiful, calm....that gives you the feeling of space and makes you feel safe. Women work so hard and are under so much pressure, I want to give them something to heal them and make them feel that kind of lovely meditative space they need in their lives. Something protective...."

We sat down with a whole bunch of ingredient bottles in my workshop...and the ones she picked to base it around were:

Neroli, Red Raspberry and Labdanum

Perfect for a calm zen and very sophisticated perfume!
Floral in a very cool calm way, with a nice herby earthy touch from the Red Raspberry plant...and Labdanum adds a smooth vanilla sophistication to the base...yummy indeed!
Such an exciting project, I'm really enjoying this! Ive made

up a few different version which can either take it in a more floral or more chypre direction...and the little bottles are now waiting for the next round of test sniffing!
Custom designed perfume for todays woman....what an awesome thing to work on!

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

perfume questions on ABC radio

 ABC radio rang me the other day to ask if I'd be willing to answer a few questions about perfumery on their afternoon random questions show...."can you bruise perfume by rubbing your wrists together?", "what are perfume notes", "which are the best places to wear perfume?",
And nerve wracking it was too....there I was pacing up and down the courtyard in front of my shop trying to hold the mobile phone steady in my shaking hands...
Hope you enjoy it!

Green Mandarin Friday

Working on new bath and body oil bends...and today it's green mandarin that I'm playing with.
This stuff has been begging me to play ever since I got it...
And now I finally have time and space to do so....

It's such yummy stuff...the freshness of mandarin, without the fruity bite! It's so soft, and well, green!
What you can see in the bottles are blue corn flowers... the colour backs up the fresh restfulness of the scent, but corn flowers are also some of the few safe flowers to use in infusions for skin too....
I'm combining it with mint in a few different forms....
just lush and soft and fresh.....Suggestions anyone?

Website Rebuilt

My new Webshop

Well, after a few weeks of sleepless nights and tearing my hair out in frustration, my new website is finally up and running!
I loved the look of my old website, but it was handmade by another programmer, and I simply didnt speak enough techie to be able to update it at all....
So this one was built on a shopping platform by a friend of mine, Rowan from www.lifesytes.com and I can actually upload new products onto it myself, edit the shipping etc etc....
There's still some bots which need fiddling with, but at least its working, and my customers can place orders through it!
And best of all, it's finally got all the perfumes on it that weren't available through my old one! Things like "Avalon" and "Craving" and my beloved "Sense of Honour".
I'll also be able to offer short runs of wierd and wonderful things I come up with now that I've got time and space in my new workshop!

And the very first is a range of "Love Potion" Bath and Body oil!
I used to sell this one years ago, and people have been asking for it...so here it is again! It makes a lovely after shower moisturizer too if you pour a small amount into your hands and rub it over your still damp skin! All over body scent.....

Bush Perfuming

my workbench with bush views

Well, I've finally escaped suburbia and moved up to the North Coast of New South Wales where am currently living out in the bush with a friend...It's such a relief to be back in the bush where I used to live 20 years ago...It's part of my plan to grow the perfumery to a proper professional public place, where people can come in and sample perfumes, sit down and have relaxed custom design consultations and maybe even hold classes! So many of you have asked to come and visit and see the perfumery in person over the years, and while it was always lovely sharing my workplace and home with visitors, I have long dreamt of having a large workshop where I can really play, with space for everything, so that you don't have to pack the tools of one project away just to attend to packaging the orders for the week....

It's beautiful and relaxing here, and I have my workshop set up where I can sit and see out over the valley, soft breezes wafting through the window and light filtering through the trees to play on my collections of perfume bases and bottled goodies...But it's small.

Oh, the idea of finally having enough space! And Shelves, whole walls full of shelves! And 3 large workbenches, and a small shop out the front with my perfumes displayed on some of the beautiful cast iron displays I've used at shows over the years...

Fresh flowers, and beautiful large mason jars full of herbs and resins...

my new granite dropper holders

Basically being able to have all of my wonderful fascinating weird and fragrant collection out where I can look at them and share them with my customers!

And I'll be able to do short runs of interesting stuff too!

Perfumes that are too complex and special to mass produce, things like solid potpourri perfume for putting in small lockets, maybe soaps and candles too!

I've got my eye on a perfect little place in Byron Bay, and put an application in for it today!

It's a small workshop space in the arts and crafts part of the industrial estate, where I'd be surrounded by other small artisan businesses, and it comes with some business assistance and advice available from the council too, which is what I could certainly do with too!. The premises themselves are light and airy, with high ceilings, a sky light and even a mezanine where I can sit with clients on comfy chairs and talk about what they really want from their perfumes...and share a cup of coffee in between smelling bouts!I'm so excited I'm terrified they may turn down my application, it's just too too perfect! I ran into an old friend who is making films nowadays, and we've already chatted about her and her partner making a small youtube video...or even a series of them to go with and advertise the new shop...me chatting about perfumery and showing how the scents are made...sounds like awesome fun and great advertising too....

The Dream is slowly coming together......I'll keep you posted as it grows!