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....

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....