Peace, Love and Patchouli

The Summer of Patchouli Love is finally here...
Some months ago I was invited to take part in a fascinating perfume event.The wonderful Monica Miller from Perfume Pharmer, had come up with a really great idea: To host a double blind perfume challenge based around Patchouli.
The idea was to see what a bunch of Indie Perfumers could come up with, when faced with the following brief: The perfume had to be:

a) completely natural
b) made with at least 25% of patchouli oil

To make it even more interesting, all submissions were re-bottled by Monica herself and given a number, rendering them completely igcognito,  and then sent out to a huge cast of reviewers to be sniffed and judged purely on their scent alone.

This was a first in perfume challenge history. It was a double blind event, neither the judges, not he perfumers themselves had any idea who's perfume was who's, and the reviewers had to go by their own personal tastes, as they were not given a list of notes, or in fact anything at all about the individual perfumes to work from!
Monica also managed to orchestrate an amazingly diverse cast of judges, with two totally different groups: Firstly a more traditional group of perfume reviewers who regularly write reviews for various blogs.
And a second group of celebreties, ranging from International political activist and Witch, Starhawk, over eco clothes designer Deborah Lindquist , Cirque de Soleil members and musicians and actors the likes of Jodie Foster and Mary J. Blige!

With such a wide and stellar cast, us perfumers have been sitting there chewing our nails, wondering how our babies were going to be recieved.....I was a bit sceptical at first, as I know how a perfumes story is a huge part of it's appeal...and I wasn't sure how people would relate to a perfume without this, esp. as many of the judges were unfamiliar with natural perfumes.....
I am now a great believer! The "double blind" nature of this contest has made it far more fascinating...the judges perceptions and the descriptions they have found for the individual perfumes are absolutely wonderful! It has made the event absolutely fascinating to watch for me as a perfumer too!
And it is giving us all true feedback on the scents themselves, unbiased by stories, packaging or the perfumers reputation!

If any of you would like to be able to follow the story on an olfactory level, Monica still has a limited number of sample boxes of all of the PLAP perfumes for sale....email her for details!


(I'm now eagerly awaiting my own!)

Later today I'll introduce you all to the perfume I submitted for the event myself too!

The Creation of Pan

I have submitted one of my oldest perfumes to the "Midsummer Nights Dream" competition...and as I was trying to write short desriptions of the perfume for the judges, I realized how much a perfumes story is also part of it...
And the story of the birth of this perfume is a particularly interesting one.
The perfume I am submitting is called "Pan " I chose to submit it to the competition, as one of the main character's in Shakespeare's play is "Puck", who is actually an anglicised and slightly tamer version of the great Greek God Pan...so it seemed only fitting.
"Pan" the perfume was actually one of my first creative collaberation projects.
I wanted to create a perfume as a male counterbalance to the overtly female "Goddess" I had made, a sweet, enticingly sensual rose and jasmine concoction..."Pan", for those of you who haven't come accross him before, is the Wild Greek God of Nature. Untamed, Free, he is said to wander through the Greek countryside palying his pan pipes followed by a dancing group of delighful and sensuous nymphs...he loves good wine and sex and the word "panic" comes from his habit of creating mayhem wherever he goes.....At the same time Pan is the protector of all wild animals, and a great Lover and also protector of Women....

I had been reading the book "Jitterbug Perfume" by Tom Robbins and was completely taken by the olfactory image of "Pan" in it...wild, animalic and representing everything that is untamed and male....
But I was having problems with it. So I recruited the help of my sisters then boyfriend, who's nickname, fittingly, was "Puck". We sat down in my workshop and started sorting through the various potions and extracts to see what we both thought could make a scent that could call up a perfumed image of this wild make nature spirit...
We started with patchouli, which Tom Robbins married to the lad in his book. Deep, sensual, dark and with an interesting combination of sweet, woody, rooty and earthy...but it just wasn't wild or male enough by itself.
I had just bought my first tin of oakmoss resinoid some time ago. I had bought it blind, having no idea what it was, when looking for incense ingredients, and had been overwhelmed by the intensity of the scent of this dark brown sticky goo...and on sudden inspiration, brought down this tin of sticky stuff to show to Puck...it was perfect! So wild and earthy and downright rutting with natural muskiness! A tiny dab went into the patchouli, and then we started adding herbs and spices, from the fresh rosemary and thyme that grow wild in the Greek hillsides when Pan comes from to oriental cinnamon and nutmeg, which gave the wild thing a touch of exotic warmth and pizazz.....

"Pan is born" by Thorsten

The end result was pretty awesome. Somehow between us we managed to create something that was totally unlike anything either of us had ever smelt in a perfume bottle. And a far far cry from the beautiful elegant perfumes I had been making up until then.
The final test and Pan's first true debut was at a halloween party that happened a few months later. A friend of mine actually decided to dress up as Pan. Mike actually looked the part to start with, being dark hair and eyes, a furry chest and even a little goatee beard...but he was also a pretty gentle soul generally and usually fairly quiet and mild mannered.

"Pan is alive"by Thorsten Jones

So anyway, he dressed up in a homespun woolen jerkin, a goatskin  tail, and a crown of horns and leaves and we doused him heavily in the "Pan" potion...and the musky scent spread over him and began to do it's magic. It was an interesting party, as halloween usually is, esp. when you get together a bunch of mad pagans who dabble in interesting things...the food and wine flowed freely, accompanied by an ever wilder creature dressed in skins and furs who cavorted and galloped through the crowd, leaving a feeling of unrest and general mayhem, along with a scent of musk, rut and wild herbs that spread through the entire house......he was spanking people with his little whip, poking his goats tail in their faces and generally behaving exactly like you would expect of, well Pan himself! It was an interesting party...and I'm not telling any more tales even though it was some years ago now...but I can tell you that "Pan" and his wife told an interesting story about strange aparations with horns and a cheeky grin appearing at the end of the bed later that night (Mike reckons he saw two of them because he was so drunk he was seeing double at the time), shortly after which they had a run of exploding condoms......
I've been selling the stuff as a perfume ever since. And it has grown to have a bit of a reputation, esp. amongst the pagan community...What really amazed me as I began to offer it to my more mainstream customers, is how many women love and wear the scent! It seems "Pan" speaks to an inner wild women that needs to be set free in many of us too! It's heavy Oakmoss base makes it a dry herbal Chypre with an exciting edge in modern perfume terms and is in some ways remeniscent of the older perfumes of the 1930's and 40's...
Whether or not you like it is of course entirely personal....I'm usually to chicken to wear it my self, but my husband, my ex husband and many of my loyal customers love it....
It's definitely not for the faint hearted though....

As the bottle says: "Wear it if you Dare!"



The photos were taken by Thorsten Jones  whiteantstudios@gmail.com

Mike's wife Bev, who graciously convinced him to let me use the photos, is a great Astrologer who publishes regular "Astral Meanders"

Patchouli-a perfumers perspective

I'm writing a book about Natural Perfumery...

So as part of the "Summer of Patchouli Love" project run by Monica Miller of  "Perfume Pharmer" I thought I'd add a few of my thoughts as a perfumer on this strange and wonderful oil...In one of the chapters I've started a kind of reference series for budding perfumers to use when selecting ingredients for a perfume. And this is my entry for patchouli:

Patchouli

Forms it comes in: trad. EO, iron free distilled EO and absolute distilled from the fermented leaves of the pogostorum plant
Appearance: A thick, dark brown liquid, clearer in iron free eo
Origin: India and Asia
Therapeutic uses: Traditionally used in Asia to treat depression, as an antiseptic and to repell moths. Patchouli is grounding, soothing and also quite sensual.
Scent profile: Dark woody, sweet amber, earthy, musty with a touch of fruit and spice  (lighter in iron free version). Aged Patchouli is softer than fresh, which can have a sharp, biting by note to it.
Colour profile: (note:This is my own visual imagery of what a scent "looks like" to me! Kinda wierd I know, but that's how my brain works!) Dark soft rusty brown, with black and grey shadows and a few distinct purple and bright rust coloured streaks through it! Depending on the kind of patchouli, there may also be some greenish touches as well...and if it is the clear distilled patchouli you have, it will have a metallic touch and less of the dark brown and black, and also less of the rust.
Effect in blends: Used as a fixative basenote, it "sweetens" and deepens blends. Great for musky florals such as jasmine. Adds depth to citrus. Spice note can clash with some ingredients. Can also make blends overly sweet

Patchouli is one of my favourite ingredients.
Growing up on the tail end of the 60's revolution has left me with a nostalgic love of the sweet and heavy scents that accompanied the long flowing psychedelic flowered dresses of that era...Deep pungent oils from little Indian bottles, Patchouli is truly the scent of those years.
Which is why of course so many people have a Love/Hate relationship with it.
For me, it brings up the image of good times. My teenage years where I still believed that anything was possible...where we all dreamed of changing the world, and the ideas of “Peace” and “Love” were more than just slogans to write on a rainbow coloured t-shirt.
From an Aromatherapy point of view, it is a truly magical ingredient. Patchouli has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for centuries, as it has wonderful healing properties. It is soothing and antiseptic in skin care applications, and it makes a wonderful insect repellent (which is part of the reasons that the scent became so much part of the 60's...all those long flowing dresses came over scented with it from India to keep them from being eaten by bugs on their long journey in packing boxes!).
But for me the most interesting of it's properties is use in depression and anxiety!
The scent of patchouli is fundamentally soothing. In ajuveda it is used to”settle disharmonies of the Mind”, and has a long history of use in psychiatric illnesses ranging from depression to outright mania!(It's also used as an aphrodisiac in perfumery blends...but more of that later on...)
So the first time I used it, was in an aromatherapy blend I made to use myself in the middle of a particularly dark and depressing winter in Berlin, Germany. I combined patchouli with some lemon oil in my trusty oil burner, and was amazed and delighted to feel how much the scent lifted my mood!
When I first started out as a perfumer, I fell in love with patchouli all over again. It makes a wonderful base note in floral and oriental scents, with it's deep, sweet musty tenacity. I must have combined it with every other base note in existance over the years, an have used it in a number of my commercial perfumes too:

My original Aromatherapy experience with patchouli led me to create one of my very first commercial perfumes: "Happiness". It's based on Patchouli married to a delightful lime topnote, with sandalwood and other citruses rounding off the scent. It's a remarkably light, fresh scent and the patchouli isn't really noticeable as an ingredient (even though there's a lot of it in there!) In fact a dear friend of mine was chatting to me about the Summer of Patchouli project the other day, and remarked "I really hate Patchouli!" Which had me in fits of laughter...you see, she's been wearing my "Happiness" almost every day for years and constantly tells people how much she loves it!

Patchouli is like that. in perfumes, it is truly the skill with which you choose your ingredients and your deft hand with blending which makes the difference between a musty sweet mess, and a truly delightful elegant concoction. Patchouli can ruin a blend really quickly. It has some rather contradictory notes in it that you have to work with carefully, and this is where many perfumers go wrong when trying to use it.
For starters it has a strong musty note to it. Patchouli oil is made from the fermented leaves and flowers of the patchouli plant, and this fermentation process always leaves a very earthy, musty touch to it. The fermented leaves look like shrivelled, brown slightly moist, well, mess really! I was horrified the first time I imported a large quantity of the stuff and at first thought my oder must have gone "off" duiring the shipping process!
This mustiness is something you have to be careful with in blending, along with the sharp, acrid bynote you don't really notice on first sniff. If you pair patchouli oil with any ingredient that has similar notes somewhere hiden in its makeup, you will amplify them tenfold!

But you can also use them!
The second perfume I made with patchouli was "Love Potion". Here I used patchouli solely for it's renowned aphrodisiac qualities. Here it is patchouli's deep, sweet and musky qualitites that seem to play on our deepest senses... I wasn't seeking to make the perfume gentle and sweet here, so I played up the wilder side of the herb by adding liberal amounts of spices like coriander and cardamon to a heavy oriental blend with a deep, sultry jasmine heart, all on a deep sexy base where I combined patchouli with incense resins for an exotic touch.
This allowed all of the sharp and wild notes in patchouli to actually be a feature that fitted in perfectly with the bite of the spice, and the dirty muskyiness of the jasmine!
The result is a dry, wildly spicy Oriental perfume that is almost the polar opposite to it's gentler sister "Happiness"....and has just as many devout followers from a completely different perfume loving group!
What they have on common is that neither of them are obvious patchouli perfumes to a non-perfumer, even though it is a main player in both perfumes recipe!
My next challenge is to create a perfume in which Patchouli is actually centre stage for the "Summer of Patchouli Love" project! So I have a workbench covered in little bottles again...should I go in the direction of an elegant chypre with a touch of apricot and caramel? Or do it soft and clean with vetiver for warmth and a fresh clean topnote? Or go classic hippie and do a straight rose and patchouli? Decisions, decisions......wish I could just submit 3 totally different ones, they all seem lucious and full of possibilities! But somewhere I have to decide and focus on just one direction.....

Whadyall think?

Patchouli Summer of Love

I'm delighted to be part of another wonderful perfume project, this time run by the delightful Monica Miller of "Perfume Pharmer"!

It is based around one of my favourite ingredients: Patchouli!
I've been dying to bring out a perfume I actually made many many years ago that is based around this beautiful ingredient, that for so many of us is the scented symbol of a time when we all began to dream of new possibilities, a world without hate, of spiritual connections, conciousness and above all, Dreaming of Freedom!

The project is one of the first of it's kind, in that it is a "BLIND TEST"! The perfumes will be submitted in incognito identical bottles to the judges, so they have no idea who made which perfume!
Which makes it all far more exciting I think.....
Being judged on the scent alone, not ones reputation....

The panel of judges is also different being made up of a combination of perfume critics and celebrity judges, which allows the perfumes to be evaluated by a wonderfully diverse range of people, giving us a much wider impression of how the scent really comes accross....

I'm so excited!


I'll be blogging more about Patchouli both here and on Monica's wonderful blog in the coming weeks, so keep reading!

Lilac and Rose CO2

Today I'm writing about some rather exciting new floral CO2's from a bulgarian company called "Ecomaat"
They are a newish producer on the essential oil market, and are specializing in producing a range of extracts useing CO2 as a solvent, which as I have written about before, gives you extracts which tend to be a more "total" and gentle version of the fresh plant.

The two extracts I have here in front of me are a lovely Bulgarian Rose and an even more interesting Lilac CO2.
This is to my knowledge, the very first natural Lilac extract to be available to natural perfumers, so I am particularly excited to be able to play with this!

It's been a bit of a dram actually getting these extracts, due to the vagueries of the Australian border security system and the general incompetency of couriers.
My precious little parcel sat with a courier company for over two months while I emailed back and forth with what I at first assumed was an overzealous customs officer. Who kept on trying to tell me that I might be importing dangerous goods and would need to sign a piece of paper promising to pay an inspection fee of $190 to allow them to open the package and find out what was inside it.
I finally worked out that I had been talking to a paranoid and uninformed courier employee for 2 months, got in touch with customs myself, found out what paperwork was actually needed, got this sent through by Ecomaat and told the courier person to send me my f%&&** parcel!
5 days, two attempted deliveries to the wrong address and me finally driving down to the head office of the courier company to pick up my parcel myself, I at last sit in front of two tiny little bottles of precious smelly stuff!

My first problem is that both CO2's are virtually solid. Which makes them very hard to get out of tiny narrow necked bottles!
I spent the next 2 hours sitting holding them into a cup of warm water, trying to dissolve enough of the stuff to transfer it and then further dissolve it in alcohol so I could begin to evaluate it! (which is why you can't see the label on the lilac bottle, it dissolved.)
To make matters worse, the neck on the Rose CO2 was broken, so I ended up covered in the stuff.
Mind you, this allowed me to start the evaluation, and I have to say it is truly delightful!

Rose CO2 
This is a really lovely rose. I love rose. And I have quite a collection of different Rose extracts nowadays, including a few others from Bulgaria. And this one is by far the nicest from this region. What usually bothers me with Bulgarian rose is the really sharp topntes, and this CO2 extract is much softer...it has a lovely freshness to it, and gives you a real "White Rose" impression. It is deeper than your classic "Rose De Mai" and also has some lovely apricot warmth to it as well. The bottle doesn't state which rose this is from, but the website mentions both "rose damascaena and rosa alba"...and I suspect this is from Rosa Alba. It would be a great rose to use in a spring floral or flower garden blend...truly delightful! It has great staying power too...the scent has clung to my fingers through 4 washes and is still wafting from the shirt I wiped my hands on some hours ago after the messy decant operation. All up a great addition to the rose pallette!

Lilac CO2
Ah how I yearned for Lilac...in it's natural form, the scent of fresh lilac is so beautiful and ephemeral...it has a completely unique floral softness and lightness to it, with lovely watery overtones that you just can't copy with anything else...
I was so excited when I read about this CO2, and finally having it here to evaluate..
On first sniff it's a bit dissapointing. It's a very gentle scent, esp compared to the spilt rose CO2 that is filling my workshop at the moment.
I had to actually go outside to evaluate this delicate scent as it just got lost under the rose.
Once I buried my nose into the tissue I had dabbed the alcohol diluted CO2, I did recognize real lilac there...The CO2 is a very gentle, green scent. Delicate and soft, but beautifully fresh and floral. It's a lovely thing, but oh so mild! I wish I could have a more intense version of this, for it is surely one of the nicest things I have smelt recently! I have a bottle of Gardenia abolute and another of Hyacinth abs. that I am tempted to combine with this pretty stuff, but I'm afraid it will dissapear into the background too easily. I'll have a play though...you never know how an ingredient will play with others until you've given it a try.
I would love to create an eau de toillete version of this with just a few ingredients to accentuate and support it...I'm hoping that Ecomaat will find a way to create a more intense version of the lilac CO2 as the scent is beautiful and would make a wonderful addition to the natural perfumers pallette!

All up I'm rather excited with these tw new CO2s...and I'm looking foward to seeing what else Ecomaat comes up with in the future!

Cedarwood & other Conifery things

I have recently recieved a number of new and rather interesting samples of various kinds of cedarwood plus some other conifers and scent related oils, so I thought I'd do an article on the oil and review all of them together! They all have the same dry, earthy wood base scent to them that is characteristic of cedar...and then each of these oils has added layers that make them different and interesting.
Cedarwood itself  is one of the oldest oils to be used in perfumery and healing. It's distinct woody scent has been the base of many a perfume, and is to be found in the scent library of virtually every perfumer, natural or otherwise.
Cedar or "cedrus" is a member of the genus of coniferous trees in the plant family Pinacea.
Scent wise, it is the deepest basenote of the conifers. It has a very  characteristic dry woody scent that is common to all cedar oils, which is quite different to the high eukalypt and fresh notes in in it's relatives pine, fir and spruce.

It has strong antiseptic properties, and has been used in "smudging" ceremonies for centuries for this reason. Indigenous American people still use it in rooms where people have been sick to cleanse the air.

In perfumery, Cedar is a base note. It is used to hold and support other, more colourful mid notes, and tends to take a background role in the overall scent. Which doesn't make it any less important! It has a drier, more masculine and elegant feel to it than many other base notes such as patchouli or sandalwood, which makes it an excellent choice for mens colognes. It is a true woody scent, with pencil shaving graphite like notes that give it a cool, earthy touch. I used it "Pan" to capture exactly that sense of forest, of earthiness and nature...Depending on the kind of cedar, you will also get some balsamic, fruity notes to it that are most prominent in red cedar.If you are looking for a real "woody" scent, cedar is your man.




First of all, I've got a collection of oils from  
the Essential Oil Company

Incense Cedar
This stuff is pretty awesome! If you like cedar, , you will LOVE this! It's like cedar crossed with frankincense! Seriously! It has a deliciously warm incense note to it coupled with a fresh green note that makes it really lovely!

Western Juniper
This essential oil has the same woody, pencil graphite quality to it that atlas cedar does to me, coupled with a light touch of the fruity herbal eukalypt quality you get from the actual juniper berry essential oil. It has a mid to top note quality to it.



Douglas Fir
This is an interesting one. I have a variety of fir essential oils, and love and use them a lot. Douglas fir is rather different. It is a warmer scent, with woodier qualities, that to my nose, make it closer to red cedar in scent than actual fir essential oil. I'm wondering if this is made from the wood rather than the needles? It's a strange scent, that catches just a tad at the back of my throat and also goes straight to my head. It says it's distilled by the Guerilla Distiller, Robert Seidel himself....which brings up fascinating images of a wild scent fanatic, carting his precious destilling aparatus through the Canadian Wilderniss in search of raw materials, camping out under the stars watching the drops drip into the copper flask....probably not quite as romatic, but it certainly adds to the scent for me, grin!

Palo Santo
Now this little oil is something that I'm sure many of the people out there with shamanic leanings will be delighted to hear of! Palo Santo is known as an incense wood. The name itself means "Sacred Wood" and it is used by shamans in South America for blessings and healing ceremonies of all kinds...it's smoke is deep and mesmerizing and truly magical, so I was very excited to hear that someone was making an essential oil version!
The oil is a bit of a different animal to the incense wood. It is as you would expect, far lighter and more volatile, and also a lot more intense!
My first whiff made my head spin...and I had to go out of the room for a while to let my senses clear!
Going back to it and sniffing more gingerly from the lid, held at a respectful distance, oh buy, that's potent stuff! It has so many layers to it that it's hard to describe as a scent...it is definitely an incense scent, but not easily qualified...it has juniper berry qualities to it, but with deeper franincense touches to it....I have no idea what I would do with it in a perfume...I think I'll have to dilute it WAAAAY down and then play with it for a bit...I get the feeling it would proably dance well with rose in the mid notes...and it definitely has some heavy aromatherapy potential.....

The next ones are from a company called  Northwest Aromatics that have just recently entered the essential oil arean. They are making use of the waste wood and shavings produced from harvesting the trees of the Pacific North West and their advertising is very cool to look at and read. (They've also pinched the seriously cool bottle layout page that was originally thought up by "I hate Perfume", but hey, who hasn't wanted to? I certainly did!)
The samples came in a very decorative box, accompnied by a colourful heavyweight ringbound brochure outlining their company and their futre projects. Someone has put a lot of money into their advertising and it's quite impressive! (And boy, do I wish I had the cash to employ their PR team for my perfumery!)
Inside are three 10ml bottles of oil.

 Nootka tree oil
Nootka trees it seems, are used for many of the sacred indigenous carvings.  The brochure speaks of a "sandalwood effect, with smokey, patchouli vetiver and earthy tones"
Me, I get pencil shavings in the "medium pressure" distilled version. Quiet, elegant wood with graphite overtones. In fact elegant wood is a good way of summing it up!
The low pressure version is very different. Here it becomes almost herbal. I get a destinct sense of thyme in the wood here! The scent os far deeper and more alive somehow...herbal wood?

  Giant Arborvitae oil
I've always loved redwood trees...to me they are one of the most fatherly of trees, warm and comforting...you just want to snuggle up to them and stay there forever, safe and at home...
The company again has a lovely sounding desription for it:
"Almond. Add spicy, cumin, pepper and nutmeg notes. Now add a limey scent. And now, woody and wormwood notes."
My own take on it is a bit different. I suppose it's a bit like wine tasting. If you start out with the premis that all of the oils smell like cedar in that they have the same basic dry, earthy woodiness to them, then yes, you can indeed detect vannilla like and cummin like tones to this oil. It's certainly one of the prettiest cedar oils I've come accross so far, and in that, reflects the gentle strength of the trees themselves.




It's really fascinating seeing more and more new essential oils come into the market, as the interest in natural scents and aromatherapy grows! 
It's been a delight sniffing so many new variations on an oil I've been playing with for over 20 years...and I hope you've enjoyed reading about them too!
I'd be very interested to hear of others takes on these oils too if you've sampled them yourself!

Aphrodisiacs and Perfume

http://www.perfumebynature.com.au/love_potion.htm

I've been making perfumes and incense for over 20 years. And I have found that one of the most mysterieous, sought after and debated topics in perfumery is aphrodisiacs.
You still see adds all over the place for perfumes and colognes containing "pheromones guaranteed to attract the opposite sex", and let's face it, one of the main reasons we even started splashing ourselves with scented ingredients was in the hope that we'd smell pretty to potential mates!
Most of the surviving ancient perfume recipes are about Love or at least Sex. Cleopatra's famed unguents were part of her weapon arsenal in bedroom politics...Napoleon and Josephine each had favoured potions that they used to perfume their bodies before they met up after each of his bouts conquering other countries...
And then of course we have the famed "Love Potion No 9" from the 60's song that has inspired so many perfumers (including me) to atempt their own olfactory version...
The historical perfume recipes of the 1800's all have bases of various musk components, musk deer glands, civet, hyraceum, ambergris....all of these an attempt to copy the musky component of our own sweat, in the hope of amplifying our own attractiveness....
Scent actually drives the mating rituals of most species, from mammals to flowers and insects even!
Male deer in rut actually drip thick gooey stuff from various glads and leave trails of intensly musky smelly goop on the trees they rub up against...the smell carries for miles through the forest...dogs leave similar scent trails, both maile and female, and it never ceases to amaze me from how far away a male dog can sniff my locked insie the house bitch when she is on heat!
And think about this for a moment: Why do flowers smell pretty? To attract insects and birds to come and dip in their nectar, and carry the pollen containing genes to other flowers!
Flowers are in fact a plants sex organs.
In fact a vast number of the ingredients of perfumery are based on the various aphrodisiacs of the natural world.

So let's have a closer look at a few of them:

The most obvious ones of course are the musks.
The whole birth of modern chemical perfumery was actually triggered by the attempt to create a cheaper and more readily available form of Ambergris, Deer musk and Civet.
And the number of different musks available to the modern chemist perfumer is quite astounding.
The Natural world offers a number of wonderfully musky ingredients too, even without useing the animal based deer musks that bring with them questions about animal cruelty and sustainability: Hyraceum and Ambergris are both animal musks that are actually left behind by the animals.
Hyraceum is a fossilized form of excreta left by generations of small African mammals who pee over and over again on the same place.
It's not easy to get, but it's an amazing substance, animaly and musky and woody, and throughly wild!
Ambergris is a substance spat out by whales that then spends years to decades floating around on the sea purifying, until one day it washes up on the beach to be found by some lucky person who then sells it on for thousands of dollars to avid perumers. Personally, I don't get much off it...it's just dry and faintly resonant of orrisroot and some sort of musky scent...but it does have a fixative effect in perfumes.

  

Then there's the spices:
 All spices have the effective of getting the juices flowing. They are biological stimulants, designed to heighten our bodies functioning and awaken our appetites...
Of these the ones with the most aphrodisiac effect are Cardamon, Coriander and Cinnamon, Ginger and Pepper. All of them are warming and yummy in food, but in perfumes they add life and warmth and literally "spice things up".
Cardamom is probably one of my favourites. It has a sweetness and depth to it that makes it very sensual...it features strongly in my own offering to the Gods of Erotica: "Love Potion" which was my first spicy Oriental designed to live up exactly to it's name...the idea being that if you felt sexy and passionate, that was the energy you'd give out to the world and attract to you....Kind of my own Aromatherapy version of the infamous "pheromone attractant" perfumes I mentioned above, grin!
Pepper is a really interesting one. It adds bite and Life to florals and fruity blends if you manage to dilute it far enough down....

Cinnamon and Ginger are both used in Chinese medicine to warm the body and spirit, and make great additions to any kind of aphrodisiac massage oil (though be careful again to use them sparingly...cinnamon in particular can be too much of a good thing very quickly! but it does definitly stimulate the tissues! Recently cosmetic manufacturers have started adding it to lipsticks to make the lips swell up and look more sexy! so if you take that a bit further down.....



The roots and woods:

Vetiver is probably the most aphrodesiac one amongst them for me...there is something so deep, pheromoney and wild in a good Vetiver, it makes my skin tingle just smelling it...

Sandalwood is the sweet gentle one amongst the Aphrodisiac ingredients. It has soothing anti depressant properties as well as being sensual and loving. It is elegantly unisex too and blends harmoniously with almost everything
Patchouli is a bit more of a wild child. It's deep, sweet and woody depth is something you either love or hate. For many people it's strong association with the Hippie Era of the 60's makes it either wildly attractive or tacky and "too earthy!". Like Sandalwood, it has been used in Indian Auruveda medicine for centuries to cure depression and other mental imbalances, (as well as repelling moths!) It's one of my personal favourites but it does take some skill to incorporate it harmoniously into a blend without allowing it to dominate.

Another group of sensual scent elements are the Gourmand notes such as Cocoa, Vanilla, Honey, Caramel and Coffee...all of these make our mouths water...and create feelings of increased appetite, Craving and of course eventually, Satisfaction.
The Adult novelty industry sells a number of body butters with both Chocolate and Honey flavouring, and Vanilla is one of THE most popular fragrance notes amongst women.

I spent a lot of time experiementing with these when I was designing "Craving" for the "Mystery of Musk Project" run by the Natural Perfumers Guild last year.
For me, Gourmand smells are some of the most erotic of all (OK, I'm a serious food head too), but a lot of people seem to feel this way. I had made a perfume called "Death by Chocolate" some years earlier and it never ceased to amaze me how many men found the scent seriously erotic on their girlfriends.
So it was an obvious step for me to take it that one step further and combine these wonderful Gourmand notes with some seriously hard kicking Animalic musk notes in "Craving"....
I'm working on a body oil version of it at present after one of the critics from the MoM project actually specifically requested this for her boyfriend!

And last but not least, there's the Flowers of Myth and Legend:
Fragrant Jasmine of the Arabian Nights, what could be more magical and sensual? Of all the scents associated with Lov3e and Passion, Jasmine has to be the most well known of them all!
Not many people get to smell actual jasmine though, unless they happen to be into aromatherapy or natural perfumes! As with most of the ancient perfume ingredients, the jasmine in modern day perfumes is made up of chemical compounds made to immitate the original, and many of the perfumes that list jasmine as one of the prominent notes within it, bear only a passing resemblance to the real thing.
There are 3 types of jasmine commonly available, and of the three, jasmine sambac is by the far the most erotic. Real jasmine Sambac has a deep musky quality underneath the sultry intoxicating flower topnotes that grabs you by the gonads. It is one of the sexiest scents that Mama nature ever gave a flower, and the scent of the tiny white flowerswafting around you on a starry summers night is truly intoxicating. Here in Australia the lovely dark green vine grows abundantly up and over verandahs everywhere, so for me it is one of the smells of summer...

Rose is the true Queen of perfumes of course. One of my first true olfactory loves, some of my earliest memories involve crushing the rose petals of my mothers delicate "Peace" roses in our English garden...the combination of sweet, lemony softness with it's fresh green magic had me sniffing and sniffing as I tried to follow each tantilising magical layer as it appeard adn then faded....
I have a number of different roses in my own garden now, and the difference amongst them ranges from delicately peachy fresh to musky deep and warm....no two roses smell alike, yet each has that undeniably recognizabe "Rose" note to it.
The deepest of all is one I am yet to find in extract form: "Papa Mailand", a deep crimson rose with huge velvet petals and the most intoxicatingly sexy rose smell I have ever encountered.....
I've come close to recreating it with Rose Marroc and a few of the deeper root oils...but I dream of one day distilling this one myself...



So you can see there are many incredibly sensual ingredients a natural perfumer can play with...I hope this has inspired you!

Have a Wonderful Valentine's Day!