Welcome to a perfumer's blog on perfumery

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 8:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. Your comment is highly welcome, please join the discussion!