Welcome to a perfumer's blog on perfumery

when visiting a friend’s painting exhibition (where I bought myself a blueish Christmas present, a picture of water, similar to what you see on Ernesto’s website) I met Ann, being originally from New Zealand, and I learnt some English on the side. We were talking about body odour, sweat and perfumes, and I tried to explain that there is a thin line between the likeable and the appalling and that sometimes one needs a tiny winy little bit of something dirty in an otherwise immaculate scent picture. Like a little yellow spot on a black canvas.Sometimes this dirty spot may smell sweaty, I said, and she returned a saying that her father told her many years ago. After running around for a while, Ann said something like “I sweat like a pig”, and her father said:
“My dear: Horses sweat, men perspirate, women glow!”

 

Just coming back from the one and only post office in town that closes at ten: Urgent shipment of some moroccan air! With a smile on my face, going from one ear to the other.
I knew that X-mas means big time perfume business. I had no idea that big means really BIG.
Unfortunately, the urgent parcel meant no pony wagon shopping for my beloved little girl tonight….more about this unfolding Christmas present shoping story later!

I realised this morning that it is -in a first approximation- just some 10 days until the big thing happens. Maybe a couple of phone calls yesterday with mums of various children helped raising awareness and letting the adrenalin levels rise. A dream tonight did help too and after a night’s fight with avalanches somewhere in the dream mountains, a dizzy head when waking up and a growing list of things to get done before 24th, I know: There is no way out. I have to go there, where no man should have to go.

Evolution made us intelligent enough to walk on two legs, to make beer, drink it on the moon after a little hop with our two legs, we managed to put us on top of the food chain and the worst that can happen us, being the most privileged 10% of this world’s population, is a traffic jam, a missed air plane, a business meeting with our boss who suffers from a time-space discontinuum and finally buying X-mas presents too late with too many co-sufferers. Next year, I´ll promise: I will do better… but now: Let´s hunt for this pony wagon… argh
Talking about X-mas and privileges: are you aware of the fact, that the gap between us (us being the top 10% of this world`s population) and the lowest 10% is probably bigger than the gap between Louis XVI, an his entourage and his low class French fellows who ended up killing him? They killed him for good reason probably. This man was too much a symbol, and the French killed so many other French back then these days that a king more or less on the Guillotine did not really matter anymore.
Louis was hunting when in Paris the people started the revolution by taking over the Bastille. Which would be like taking over the Pentagon or the secret US prisons on Cuba. Louis wrote “nothing” in his diary (he was not successfully hunting) this day. He´d better done a horse ride downtown….

Maybe we should too, from time to time, ride downtown on this globe.

quite a common combinations of keys these days, now that we have entered IE7 age. I am lucky that -as far as I have seen- most of the layout is conserved from IE6 to IE7 on this page. Others are affected much harder. Amazingly enough, we take this like a viral disease as something one has to go through. Where are the days gone, where one guy (or girl…) would ride on his horse, there where he said he wanted to go? He wouldn’t ask what the percentage of IE users is, he would proudly ride towards the sunset, and who wants to be with him has to use Firefox…..Where are the hippies gone, the brave dreamers and movers, singing of love, peace and happiness, breaking down the walls of establishment?

Ah well. If there was a Ctrl Alt Delete combination in perfumery I would use it right now, just to access the overview of all processes running. I imagine a perfume being a complex set of algorithms running, from the speedy head notes to the grumbling base notes. Looking at all processes might be insightful, observing how one compound becomes dominant, how others disappear, a constant up and down of individual scent processes in a sense, all interacting.
An overview about all molecules in a fragrant mixture and how they develop over time, in dependence of their interaction and what scent impression this mixture would lead to at any moment…that would come in handy these days. There is software that you can download from Perfumersworld for free, use the compound information that has been fed into it, or feed it with information yourself, and what comes out are graphical representations of a perfume’s behaviour over time. I do not use it, but I wonder…Is this the beginning or the end of creative perfumery?
Thus, what’ s this post about? …. I have to admit…I have touched the lavender again!

Greetings from a little phalaenopsis garden in Zurich! In full morning sun, protected and guarded behind glass, like a human visitor on moon, my orchids bloom and enjoy live.
So do I. I had the pleasure to meet a scent lover and scientist, thinking hard about fragrances and scents. I heard stories about collecting roses in Bulgaria and how tough this work is…I will think in him, now grown up,  and his fellow rose pickers, everytime when I spoil a drop of Bulgarian Rose absolute….

Greetings from pre-winter Switzerland and fragrant wishes for your weekend.

Yesterday was a mailing day, a telephone day, an unpack parcel day (lavender!) and a prepare for today day; it wasn’t a creative day. Today won’t be either. Hence, I grab my Carpenters CD and hope for inspiration; listening to “For all we know”. I look at an almost full moon, on a grey morning sky, thinking about Americans soon hoping around there again. I definitively have to make this astronaut perfume, at the latest in about 5 years it must be ready, to be tested by NASA. I imagine it to be a roll-on, rather concentrated (transporting goods into near space is somewhat expensive…), with some of the most beautiful flowers this planet has to offer (NASA has usually quite a big budget, ESA too!), hence we are talking rose de Grasse, and some other goodies. I have to rush into the lab!
I wish you all a creative day. Enjoy!
“…look at the two of us, strangers in many ways, we’ve got a lifetime to share , so much to say and as we go from day to day…..” text from Carpenters “For all we know”

ahhhh … I forgot in my post of this morning: Santa Claus greetings to you’all.
HOHOHO

Today’s post deals with relativity, as you may encounter it in perfumery. Here, one relativ aspect is the troubling impression that even perfumes you have created yourself seem to smell differently from day to day. This effect is less pronounced on paper strips, and seems to be accentuated on skin. Whether this is really true, I do not know. Fact is: Some fragrances are like washing maschine fragrances, like a kaleidoscop changing colours all the time, dancing in endless circles in front of your nose. I can imagine that not everyone likes this caleidoscope effect; you can not really hold the fragrance, like a woobly mass it keeps on changing in front of your nose. You find yourself like a litte boy or girl in front of the big glass eye of the roaring machine and watching colours fly by in circles, mouth open, you wonder why this is.

Since I can think, washing maschines excerted a strange phascination on me. When I was a child I used to draw washing maschines. Basically it was a box with a circle in it and lots of colours. Wasching maschines are materialized human will to fight against entropy, against the dark side of this world. You put in dirty stuff and with the help of a little bit of white powder out comes a new shirt, transformed into a state of cleanliness, wet, immaculate like an reborn christian, ready to be ironed and face the world again, where we all get dirty again, an endless cylce of collecting dirt and cleaning. Sometimes, this transformation process fails and your shirt turns pink…..and will for the rest of its life stay pink. It looks like no wasching machine can undo its own mistakes. Isn’t this mystical in a sense? Food for thought and enlightenment in these dark days before Christmas.

Orris, I have learnt, is very relative. So is the lavender trial.

For dubious reasons my mail accounts are flooded these days with Sallies and Robs and Ellies telling me that this or that stock is exploding and that I should buy now or never. Sometimes with charts, mostly with very limited text, no nice story. Somewhat nostalgicly  I look back to days when I got mails promoting medical tools to help with my natural deficiencies or hand-written, long mails wherein I was asked to help transfering money from far away places…. always reminding me of the bad days of Europe’s colonialism when the king of soandso decided that one particular white spot on the globe needed to be conquered, christianized and a small donation was later asked from the inhabitants of the then not so white anymore spot to cover the expenses of bringing them closer to modernity.

So far I never got any hint as to which put options to buy on the US dollar. Which is a pitty, I could need an insurance these days (that’s basically what put options are…). Some of you may have realized.. the dollar is loosing value against other currencies, as a matter of fact it falls at a speed that is remarkable. In the newspaper they said this morning that the speedy fall is -among other hard facts- due to traders who borrowed in low interest currencies like the Franc or the Euro in order to then invest the money at higher interest in the US $ area. With the $ falling they all want to get deinvested again, hence putting more pressure on the greeback. hehehe… some of them have lost big money.

Why bother? Well, for one: It might be a perfect timing for us here in Europe for some essential oil shopping in the US. Second: If things go on like that, I will need to do some adjustments next year… in the mean time let’s hope for some brave traders, investing in greenbacks again.

This Sunday on “Weltspiegel” on TV, there was a report on an old perfumer, in his 90-ies, one of the last true old fashioned perfumers in India. A summary of this report in German you may find here. While watching this old man sitting in front of his shop I was preparing samples and dreamed of past days of perfumery.
I prepared samples of the L’air du désert, to be ready for the last Sunday before x-mas. It is the last Sunday before x-mas when the shops are open in Zurich (usually, all shops are closed on Sundays… with the effect that the few shops that are open in railway stations and airports and gasoline stations are crowded like the world would go down tomorrow…) Provided the weather is alright, I will stand in front of the shop in Zurich, praising my perfumes, and hand out samples as sunday gifts to innocent shopers passing by, and maybe hand out a glass of something sparkling, or something warm. I love the idea of presenting my perfumes this way, to discuss perfumery and to proof that perfumes can be made without a mulit-million marketing unit checking sales figures and designing media plans.

If we had an indian climate, I would probably sit in front of the shop every weekend, but here in Zurich I will probably stand in thick clothes, carrying my umbrella  with me and paint images of a far away maghreb desert.