Welcome to a perfumer's blog on perfumery

You guess right, based on yesterday’s post: I am not amused. This last autumn was the worst we had since at least fifty years, officially!, and therefore I can not remember an august like that. It was the coolest and rainiest august since ….Well, not much can be done there, it is too much a chance thing, this weather. It is as arbitrary as my suits and jacket pockets (What is a woman’s hand-bag are my pockets): In every pocket you will find sample sprayers, labelled with something like Orris 4.12 or Hyacinth1.
The last one was today’s chance discovery, as I went for the leather jacket, in light of cooler temperatures in the morning. I do not remember when I did this trial exactly, must have been in spring, though, and the excel with the formula is not at hand either, thus I am just guessing… but this is not the point of today anyhow.

Basically, today I declare as Happy Sunny Flower Erotic Scent day!  It will see me playing with Jasmine and Orange flower absolute, with my beloved Bulgarian rose, the Hyacinth synthetic mix and ambrein and lots of vanilla and oakmoss and ahhh…
One day off from the cool lavender stuff, one day enjoying sunny scents with lots of sexy lines in it. In this sense: Enjoy your HSFES Day!

Sitting in the tramway, late at night, almost alone in the coach, looking out into the night, into streets with grey lines passing by. It is cold and wet, still raining as it has been all day long, and although the tramway is an illuminated dry island moving through silent streets, it is of little comfort. Dark, wet hands knock on the windows, embrace the moving glass and steel shelter and wait until their time has come to get hold of the passenger again.
The sky is dark, with clouds hanging over the roofs like thick, cheap motel carpets. The streets below are reflecting the light coming from shop windows, with plastic people wearing the clothes of tomorrow. Guarded and fenced they stand in strange poses, headless, faceless, polyester women wearing the most expensive fabrics with wool from sheep grasing at the slopes of the Himalayan mountains. Their emotionless pale faces gleam as they stand under artifical suns, herolds of this season’s colours, without noticing that they are wearing already the dresses of the past, while the next season’s dreams are produced in far away places.
Perfumeries fight the pouring rain with beautiful faces, staring at innocent night travellers.  Unreal beauties, holding bottles filled with the elixirs of passion. They sell a dream of yesterday to citizens of today, citizens who live a life as safe as never before. Because they became consumers. Consumers are cared for and guarded. The fragrant beauties in the shop know their consumers. Their eyes shine into the night, they promise with every detail of their immaculate bodies paradise coming true. Flakons with golden fluids wait patiently for tomorrow, waiting for a soul in search of pleasure. Tomorrow they will be caressed again, sending ephemeral pictures of tropical flowers into a grey day, fulfilling teanager dreams and liberating shy wishes.
Tonight, the rain washes away the last petals of these delights, leaving the 2-dimensional beauties by themselves, behind crystal windows, dreaming their silent dream of paradise.

I have a table that proofs the concept of ever increasing entropy (=mess) on a daily basis and every attempt to control the state of disorder there either fails or leads to an increasing disorder somewhere else.

Yesterday, five glass bottles joined the alu bottles and pipettes and stuff: I figured out it was time to bring in a somewhat different approach to my lavender trials. A different approach in the sense that the major story lines of the scent are prepared individually and then brought together, mixed to see where how things develop. So we are talking:
Woody amber, woody cedar, green lavender, rose, neroli and citrus-pine; or in a more complex way:
a1+a2+a3+…=A, b1+b2+b3…=B, …until f1+f2+f3….=F
And then:
xA+yB+zC+nD+mE+ oF + some more stuff= Fragrance mix.
A is a woody amber, B is a green lavender, C is a woody cedar line, D is a spicy, thyme enriched rose line, E is a flowery neroli mix, and F finally is a green citrus pine line.

Bottom line after a few hours: Very interesting. If everything fails….I can still go with my woody amber and the rose&thyme thing, that would be a dark rose…..hehehe. Trying to make one step aside, it looks as if the overall idea is ok. Outsiders might call it a “Tauer Thing”, because the ambergris mix turned out too dominant. The neroli helps together with the green stuff in the lavender itself to soothen the mix. And I can see how dangereous the methylpamplemousse turns out; I never realised this beforehand, but this guy needs to be controlled and a touch of Bergamot in the pine-citrus mix might solve this issue.

More bottles to follow.
Finally: For all my dear readers who are able to read Russian interviews….here is one for you: Andy Tauer interviewed by Sergej. You find my interview on the blog of Moon-fish, the interview was also published recently, I was told, in the Russian Magazin Cosmetic Market Today. Enjoy….

So, you may wonder where I was last week… I was in Guggisberg. A somewhat remote village with a 850 years plus story and the story of the “Vreneli”. The Vreneli story from the Guggisberg is going back to 1600 something with a folksong, that was interpretated many times, two interpretations you find below (links to follow).

Thus, the Vreneli story…no happy ending, be warned. She was from the sunny side of the hill, young and without parents. He, Hans-Joggeli, was from the shadow site of the hill, poor, but obviously handsome. So they fall in love but then… she was not supposed to marry him but rather the son of an influencal guy from the next village. Hans-Joggeli and the other guy met in the woods, there was a fight, of course, as men do not tend to discuss things. Thus, Miami Vice like they fought and the bad guy fell unconscious. Hans-Joggeli thought he had killed him and run away, joined a foreign army and left his Vreneli all by herself. Back then, being a soldier was one of the few options Swiss guys had when not inheriting their parent’s farm… So he fought and our Vreneli got so depressed that she died soon…
I visited the Vreneli museum in Guggisberg and learnt that Hans-Joggeli returned after a few years, maried twice and reached the phenomenal age of 93!

Guggisberg is doing its best in marketing with this Vreneli story, you find Vrenelis kind of everywhere and there was an entire Annabelle (Swiss fashion magazine) featuring Guggisberg and living on the country side of Switzerland. I think, Guggisberg has done the best it could and is an example of excellent marketing, in the sense of identifying a unique advertising proposition and then stick to it….

Bottomline:
Don’t die of desperation because your lover left you…he will come back.
Don’t fight…talk it over.
And…Guggisberg is worth a visit: I sniffed the most phantastic rose right next to the Vreneli museum…lily of the valley dressed as rose. Amazing!

So here are the Vreneli songs links, I hope they work:

Song1

Song2

And here is the link to the Annabelle, featuring (German) the village.

Picture: http://www.genealogy.com

Finally, the August Vogue (German edition), with a little, but fine beauty note featuring my L’air du dĂ©sert marocain. That’s a first for me…
Eau souvenir…. I love it!

It is still August, but the air got fresher and the light in the morning got this sharpness, this crystal clear touch, that tells us: It is approaching. Autumn. Well, be it; time on rainy evenings to drink tea again, bottle perfumes and fiddling around with computers. And think about Christmas already (what kind of presents to make? soap again ? or a room spray? or a scented ball for the dishwasher (just kidding)?

Greetings from late summer Switzerland, off in meetings, back again Saturday.

Sometimes, scent related things are difficult to describe, and even more difficult to understand exactly. One such issue was a discussion point at Vero’s and mine last meeting. We were sitting and sniffing over quite a few samples, one of them was a very nice spicy-woody note from a fellow perfume lover and composer: Konstantin. A complex composition, balancing between soft woods, elegant, velvetty somehow, and dark spices with an absolute yummie quality, round and somewhat smokey in my nose, cinnamon, and peppery aspects and edges that contrast the rounded woods in the back. The other one was the lavender primordial soup in a premature dilution, where the spruce freshness and the lavender is present, you can smell it, but it is sitting there like petrified, mumified, suffocated in a sense.

Spices in top notes are difficult, and so are other notes like lavender (quite a few notes seem to be different to incorporate properly if you engage seriously and are not willing to compromise). Thus, you have a trial composition and the lavender does not show properly; what are you going to do? A simplistic approach: Just add more! Adding more will bring the lavender out, and if it is still not there, just add more…Well, sometimes you might be lucky, usually you are not. Eventually, you might better reduce it and have it accompanied by another line that does the trick. Contrary to what you would expect, adding more might well lead to composition that is dull, flat and reduced to a line where the spices/lavender or else just wouldn’t show anymore.

It is like making a newspaper front page somehow. The bigger the letters does not necessarily mean that people will read it better. There is a braking point beyond which even the greatest news like “Elvis is alive and became a vegan” can’t be deciphered anymore. Thus, use font size 150 or less, underline your header with a contrasting colour, and rethink your title…like “Elvis is dead” which might come as a shocker these days.

Thus, we are talking basically about non-proportional reception of scents and about cross-influences. Finding the right colour to bring about just the right contrast to your header, to raise awareness without distracting, that’s the key issue here. There exists some rules, some stuff you might have learnt already, but there will always be a trial and error approach, allowing to do the next step, learn another trick perhaps, and move one field forward.

Back to the lavender. The galbanum addition did not really solve my trouble yet. The next colours to try will be galbanum, fennel with a touch of a green powder (like lavender absolute and something anis like). And I will reduce the lavender itself as it -together with the methylpamplemousse thing from Givaudan- kills the head accord somehow.Finally, I would like to underline that I am entirely ignorant as far as Elvis’ physical condition is concerned. I just like a few of his songs.

What a week end! It was so intense that I could write for hours about it. There was the meeting on Saturday with Vero, my dear perfumery friend. We came accross quite a few interesting points when looking at some scents, including the lavender thing of mine. I will write about one of these issues, which is kind of a paradox, tomorrow. Then I was heavily engaged in threatening my neighbour’s cholesterol level by preparing my potatoe salad, like I do it every year once for our summer party. It is really heavy stuff, which might be one reason why I like it so much, based on a recipe I got from mom, with tons of mayonnaise and bakon.

It turned out that this year, we all could handle some calories more at our summer party, where we invite all neighbours living around us…. as soon as the fire was ready, after a delicious apero, sponsored by a new neighbour, it started to rain like hell. It was fun for the first minute. You had people singing for 30 seconds “I am dancing in the rain” but when our guests got really wet, it got kind of silent again. And I seriously worried about my salad, being diluted to something healthy and we moved everything to the restaurant nearby (the ” Alte Trotte”, regular readers of this blog know this place) where we were allowed to continue our party… Thus a line of 20 people grabed the salads, bread, meat, the gleaming grill, the wine and after half an hour we were ready again.

Sunday saw me cleaning up the soaking wet mess, and some jogging in the rain to get a clear head for my L’air du dĂ©sert endeavour. The rest of the day was more or less devoted to hand pour L’air du dĂ©sert bottles, and more bottles, and even more bottles. Pascal had a really great L’air du dĂ©sert week and sold the stuff like warm bread. He is happy and so am I. I can’t wait for this year’s x-mas season. Thus, while pouring and enjoying the waves of desert air surrounding me, I was thinking seriously about the packaging concept for the L’air and . More about this issue, which is important for me and which I discussed for hours now with Pascal will follow later…….and finally, after falling in some sort of desert air delirium, I figured out the menu for tonight: A dear friend from the Lonestar State is visiting us and I am curious to see her reaction on the Lonestar memories of mine.
Besides all this looking back: I will be absent Wednesday until Friday for business reasons.  Let’s see whether I find the time to blog. And: Please make sure to visit Columbina’s blog tomorrow. She will discuss the Orris scent, I have no clue what her critic is going to be like and I am really curious on her thoughts…..

Sometime I try to visit my website, with the eyes of a stranger, trying to take a step aside and look at it like someone who has never seen it before. A difficult taks because you tend to become blind in the sense that you know exactly what is where and do not realize anymore that things are hard to find or information is missing.

I did this yesterday and realized one thing: I do not have any pictures of my samples there. Which is a pitty because I put quite some effort into them and with the new flyer design I feel I should a least show what a client gets.

Thus….this will change in the coming days. If I find time,I will also try some javascripting that I found lately, allowing links that bring little windows up with other links, which might be a cool tool to guide clients through the information space… to be tested.

For all those happy folks living near by…. there’s a L’air du dĂ©sert marocain on the go for you…. Pascal and me had the idea of placing a bottle outside the shop, allowing people to pass by and spray. We just considered it a test. It is quite amazing how many clients use this bottle just on the go…., and enter the shop soon after. It is kind of an immediate client interaction, seamless, without having a sales person involved…In an abstract way, this is the way to go on the web, too. Allowing a client to discover things, seamless, using tools like Ajax applications or alike, with an on-the-go feeling. The key is: Interaction (without having to wait for the server loading things). Ajax sounds like a little bit too heavy for me, though…but still: There might be small things to improve…

Another nice thing about the internet: Having a website is like building an endless puzzle: It is never finished but hopefully looks better with every piece you put in there.

 I have a neighbour who is a darling. From time to time, when visiting a market in Austria, she brings me flowers, just like that. Usually it’s Lilies. A bunch of lilies, white as the laundry on TV after a thorough but easy wash with xyz. -Your kid can dive in motoroil, a little bit of this and that, a washing machine and bang! the Nike T-shirt comes out cleaner than it was when it left mainland China to be sold for 50 $ in a hip shop in NY after a journey from one side of this globe to the other. Arrived and sold, it makes a Chinese worker more or less happy because she earned 1 cent for it, and one house wife smiles two weeks later in her loundry room because her youngster has a white T-shirt again and she is loved by her family, admired by her friends and full of self-esteem for her washing skills. By the way: There are quite a few men, too doing the washing and worrying about grades of white…
If my goldfish memory (see earlier post) wouldn’t have failed me, you would see a picture of my lilies. I forgot to store them on the webserver and can not access my local computer right now….thus: Lilies picture follows later.

The lilies sit in my living room and transform it (scent-wise) into a church right before the funeral, with the coffin standing in the middle, the house wife before it, looking forward not to have to wash white shirts anymore. A first sniff when getting up in the morning is most agreable, a creamy, heavy, white flower like scent, without the sexual arrousing quality of Jasmine, though, more on the elegant and expensive side. There is powder quality that is wonderful, the scent is fresh and heavy somehow, which is difficult to reconstitute…A second sniff, sitting in the kitchen and watching the white flowers, thinking about life of house wifes and death, is already less exciting and after half an hour it is time to open the windows and let some fresh air in.

It is just too much. Like sitting early in the morning in public transport behind lots of artfully arranged hair, thanks to tons of hairspray proofing that gravity can be annihilated, and being drowned in clouds of fragrance waves that might be supportable in the evening when your nose is tired and the night calls for adventures, but not in early morning sun when you’re still trying to figure out where all your energy has gone over night. Because I have this white wonder flowers at home right now, I was comparing their natural scent with some synthetics I have, like Lyral which is described as Lily scent. I haven’t used any Lyral so far in any creations, it is not one of my preferred notes, and it is just one single line, far from coming close to what is happening in my living room right now. Lilial on the other hand (which is described in the specs to be more on the lily of the valley side, which is true) would bring in the powdery aspect, but misses the tonality completely.

The bottom line of all this: Even natural flower’s scent can become somewhat obnoxious, to reconstitute a lily scent without it becoming obnoxious too might be tricky, I know now why so far I have never worked on such a lily thing, and Chinese workers on the other side of this globe very often do not get a fair salary.