Welcome to a perfumer's blog on perfumery

Talking blogs (see previous post)…. Here is another one. A lovely one…. Greeneye’s Sweet Diva posting on L’air du désert marocain and how well it behaves in cold weather. Thank you Greeneye!

Well, I got my answer, finally. No chance to run typo3 on my host. They would not allow me to use exec() in php… which is not a bad news at all, at least I know now that I do not have to blame myself and can start looking for another solution…. studying Joomla right now…hmmm.
I remember when I did my first home page, back in 2000. The idea fascinated me, simply typing in a few command and voilà whatever I have to say is there, for the whole world to see. “Hello world” and then …silence…for there was not much to say anyway. Well, that was in the stone age (pre Web 2.0), and looking at my blogroll it becomes obvious: Things changed. A lot. Hello world everywhere.

Having the world at your fingertip, listening to what you have to say, is a dream come true of generations before us. Imagine Mr. Luther, in Wittenberg, who had to post his writen message on the door of a church, if he was blogging now! The question remains…would the Luther.blogspot.com be read? …the world has become quite small these days but somewhat loud…and Luther might consider investing in some marketing today.

In that sense, I want to make sure -for entirely selfish reasons- that the Non-Blonde-Blog is known, featuring Tauer’s perfumes today… And in order to continue blog marketing: For all those interested in leathers, burning chypres, study the “hello leather” post on Colombina’s blog…

 

Sodeli….While having a coffee and a break: Here is the promised litte post-featuring the latest thoughts on the the hyacinth playground. Yesterday, I went back to where it all started, first sniffing and later composing, trying to combine what was good so far (like the aldehydes for instance) with what was good before and somehow got lost in the mean time (like the incredible strength…). I realized once again: Creating a scent is a constant forth and back. You may advance eventually, but it takes a while. Especially if you happen to walk blindly as I sometimes do.

So far, we have advanced to a mod that is very, very powerful (somewhat too much) and got better due to the aldehyde stories and some dirty notes in between. 

The next step: add more softeners, a touch more wood and calm things down, just a little bit….

After all, what is this fragrance going to be? Hmmm… I am still dreaming of Mr. Mechanic in the background with the hyacinth flowers in his hands. A mechanic’s flowers or Charleston…hmmm… I start thinking again “Gatsby”. Funny, somehow these visions all fit together….

Sitting in the train right now, chatting with a colleague from 20 years ago, therefore….this day’s post follows later if at all…..

greetings

This weekend: Working in e space, rather unsuccessfully. You may wonder why an adult human being is willing to spend a Sunday behind a screen and trying to figure out what settings on his host server/file access rights are not appropriate for a particular Content Management System install. Trust me, it just happens…. You wake up one day, thinking it is about time trying to install it on your host. You grab your coffee mug and download and upload and start to wonder about cryptic error messages that your super-trooper book just won’t mention. But your not alone. Your fellow sufferers in cyberspace have posted about their similar problems and some just gave up. Thus, you sit there with your mug, coffee getting cold, feet too -as time goes by- you think in nice things such as Casablanca and Humphrey and how easy life could be.
While uploading or downloading a quickstart install you pack parcels and order stickers, and you come back with another mug to your wonder-machine providing you with yet another set of error messages.

Bottomline: Nope. No Typo3 so far on my system, which is far from tragic. I do not need it right now, but sooner or later, I want to move on with the webpage on a more versatile basis. A basis that -once installed- I will probably face little troubles as I am quite familiar with its extensions and some scripting.
Ah…before I forget: Saturday was computer-free! sniffing mods….more about this tomorrow! Now, let’s do some host queries….

I need a ghost writer. Desperately. You know the sample flyer’s design, with a picture on the front side (Orris was featuring a visual interpretation by the artist Sands Murray-Wassink) and a fading colour in the back with some EU declarations and a white area with a few words. For the orris I was lucky enough to come across Sands’ perfect sentence. Having a couple of ideas in my head but none really there yet…. I have these flashbacks, 35 or more years back, Sunday school, “Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” (Matthew 5)

Earlier and rather naively I thought this meant that we are supposed to only say yes or no and I always thought that’s kind of tough but would be a nice change to a world drowning in blabla, at least for a day or two… it might allow us to heal somewhat. The same is true for writing. Imagine…. posts like “yes”. Maybe with a title allowing to guess what the post is all about. Thus we would have: “Orris, yes”. Or “tuttifrutti no”. Cool. It sure would help to cope with the ever increasing wave of blogs that all interesting and come up with posts I want to read …sorry fellow bloggers….
“Yes or no”,  would also solve my writing problem with the flyer for the samples and the packaging….yes…. that would be simple. On the other hand something like “a dream between day and night, earth and sky, … ” is somewhat more romantic.  Well, as I have said… I need to do some thinking there. Definitely, yes.
Now, I am grown up and know that Mr. J. back then on the hill had something else in mind. He knows us human beings quite well, I guess, thus he knows that our oaths will never last, we tend to forget about them, thus: just don’t do it.  …. The same day he mentioned something about zero tolerance concerning affairs (adultery) which is rather harsh. I think we need to negotiate a better deal there. Well, at least we are not asked to tear our nose off the face. Which brings me to the end of this post, answering a question by Kelly in his comment of yesterday. I am somewhat liberal and follow the line “personal freedom to do things stops there where it takes away the freedom of others”. What is within this area is ok. This is true for perfuming oneself. As long as you do it in reasonable limits, anything goes. Just do it.
Would my mods of yesterday be considered as women’s scent? Yes.

I do not know how roaring the twenties for the average guy or girl were. I do not know much about the twenties anyhow except for the average stuff you learn in school, and what you find in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book by the way that I’ve read in my own early twenties.

Nevertheless: Twenties, champagne, prohibition, charleston, the movies, hollywood, women smoking, women dancing, black music, glamour,…. that’s about what I thought when getting the latest mod of my hyacinth lily of the valley in the woods play under my nose. There is glitter (less than before, I have decreased the aldehydes), there is dirt (I have increased the jasmine absolute), there is a movement (I have added a touch more Ionones), there are flowers, lots of them, heavy, like after a heavy rain in May, in the afternoon, when the sun comes out behind the clouds again, and suddenly the air is filled with the scent of a thousand flowers.

Well, …. we will see how this mod behaves. The nose hasn’t woken up entirely….

Yesterday, after reading Bois de Jasmin’s Diorissimo article, that I highly recommend reading - go now, do your reading!-  I found myself going to bed with Diorissimo, with snow flakes gently gliding down outside my bedroom. Whenever I sniff this scent (and I do not even have a vintage version…) I feel the extraordinary power and creativity of its creator, Roudnitska.

He mastered to create a fragrance that is on one hand incredibly close to nature’s original, yet never is a simple copy of a wonderful natural scent. There is always a second agenda, a secret story unfolding below what seems to be lily-of-the-valley at its best. Better than nature can do it. In this sense it is a baroque scent, a fragrant trompe l’oeil, a joyful, seamless and almost mathematically logical composition. A clear and straight composition, but with hidden warmth and flesh, the flesh that churches are fighting since centuries, as it makes us sinners, a memento mori in between, poison in a crystal glass of champagne.

Simply wonderful.

 

 

“Well, a touch too much”, I thought yesterday evening on my way towards spareribs and friends in a decent cloud of rêverie au jardin. Not too much rêverie au jardin, but aldehydes in my hyacinth mod.
I think you need to bath in the “rêverie au jardin” to get too much of it! I have not worn it for a while, but thought it might be a nice cosy scent to go with a decent diner, friends and cooler temperatures (outside). I was kind of puzzled how nice this scent is. Aehmmm, I am somewhat biased here, of course, but nevertheless, …I loved it.

On the other hand, quite literally spoken, there was a heavy dose of aldehydes sending vibrant shock waves up and down the spine. I have a love and hate relationship with these R-CHO ’s. I hate it when a little bit of nothing spoils it all after a hard day of work, especially as there is no one to blame except me.

And I love what the R-CHO’s can do. It is scent magic. You start with a Hyacinth long after its best days, late May, tired and exhausted by a week’s bloom and the constant fight against snails, a flat little something, and you add a couple of microliters of C12, 4-iso-propylbenzaldehyde
–(sounds shocking..doesn’t it? well, it is just the aldehyde giving cumin its taste… no reason to worry there)–
and others little aldehydic helpers and bang!buff!dsching! the flower starts to brilliantly shine again. It transforms into a higher being, absolute purity, beauty beyond nature’s limitations, an essence of the perfect flower, and sets off for a hyacinth ascension. Well, at least in theory.
Now, the take-home message of yesterday: A touch too much, BUT the somewhat vibrant woody base together with the C12 and the others R-CHO’s is just perfect! At least, that’s something.

Perfumery is about expressing thoughts on scents. In that sense I was quite expressive this weekend. Besides the usual stuff like sample making, filling international shipment boxes with little l’air du….boxes, answering mails and sending samples to the world (you guess right: It wasn’t a relaxing weekend in a sense), well besides this usual stuff I found finally time to work on re-constructions of a wonderful natural fragrance: Hyacinth and lilly of the valley (muguet).

Re-construction doesn’t mean copying, more trying to catch one line and bring it into contrast. For the hyacinth line I came up with something involving hydrocinnamic aldehyde, anethol and cyclamenaldehyde for a green line, jasmin, lilial,bergamot, ylang and salicylates, with some rose, clove, phenylethylalcohol supporting. Quite complex for one line. The lily of the valley is similar complex and on a slightly leathery, woody base the whole thing gets, as W. pointed out rightly, somewhat sweet, with an undertone that is somewhat shocking.

The whole soup is nice, somehow, but needs clarification and less compromises: A brave knight, cutting through the wilderness of too much side branches, setting free the true colours I want to see. I want more green, more crying blue flowers, more dirt in the back. And I still haven’t found time to touch my oil colours to match my thoughts with a paint-brush.
In order to have the true fragrance master in front of my nose, I bought a little hyacinth pot, smelling so wonderfully, so intense, and misteriously green. Nature doesn’t seem to make too many compromises! Thus…back to the lab, paint the scent picture in loud colours, without compromising! In the mean time, working on the flyer for the rêverie au jardin….
Picture: Snapshot on hyacinth