Welcome to a perfumer's blog on perfumery

As promised a little post before going on vacation. I will be back on Tuesday, March 13, hopefully intact and with a relaxed and at the same time energetic mind. In order to get there smoothly, I will do nothing -before flying off Sunday- than pack, shop a few things such as books and sun lotion, watch TV and enjoy the perspective of not doing anything business like for the next 2.5 weeks.

When back, things will be exciting again… the Rêverie au jardin will be ready for filtration and bottling and I really look forward to filling my sample bottles and glue them on the flyers. These bottles and boxes will finally end up in the US where I will launch the new fragrance end of April. Thus…two more months to go.

East Coast: Saturday, 20th, around 5pm, LuiLei in Brooklyn, with Andy and Amy and you..?

West Cost: A few days later, to be announced….

And here’s the flyer. Fragrant wishes…..I will miss you!

 (backside of the flyer)

 (frontside of the flyer)

Travelling today to Geneva, getting up at 5, and getting ready somewhere between Zurich and Geneva.
You may expect a last post before my travelling to Namibia tomorrow. Until then…fragrant greetings, may the silage be with you!

I remember Stanislav Lem once talking about gravity in one of his books, where aliens (or was it Golem…no, I think it was aliens) encountered humans and analysed them and their behaviour. They observed that human beings are not very developed and still fight their daily fight against gravity. They are rather obsessed by gravity. Women face their gravity problem more on the upper half, men a little bit further down. Now, Lem must have talked about gravity some 20 years ago. In the mean time we have surgery for Ms. and chemistry for Mr.

My personal fight is more entropy related. Being somewhat on the creative side of life I miss some practical skills such as thinking about shelves and making them and putting them on the wall and then putting stuff on the shelves instead of having them fill the guest room. Or get an additional cellar room to store the 25 litre cans. In the end, it all boils down to entropy, an expanding universe of bottles, scents, boxes, envelopes, flyers, papers, ethanol cans, mods, and this universe is expanding rather swiftly, without getting any colder.
But lucky me, I have W., the big, big entropy fighter, he did the shelves and together we moved around some boxes and cans and stuff. And with the Rêverie au jardin maturing in the 25 lt can, there was time to draw the line and make a deep cut.

Getting rid of all lavender related mods, tests of new ideas, individual lines such as the rose&thyme, dump it all to make room, literally and figuratively, to allow the entropy building up somewhere else.

They will meet the incinerator, the 1000°C end of modifications, next week. Fragrant smoke over Zurich, ahhhh before I forget…I will have to order new mod-bottles, now that there is space again ;-)

Still breathing peacefully, petals vigorously and juicy bending out, gleaming pinkish with a few beauty spots, premature bloom, at 22 degree Celsius…hyacinth on top of a microwave. I have always loved its scent, but so far never looked into it in so much detail. The goal, to underline, is not to come up with a copy of a scent in the end. There is no need to create a hyacinth scent that is like the natural original. People from Givaudan can do this much better, too! The ultimate goal, mentioned quite a few time around here: Bring it into a different context, imagine what happens if you stick it into the hand of Mr. Nice and Brave and add a touch lily of the valley and motor oil
Back to natural hyacinth, emanating waves of a disturbing fragrance. Quite a few are allergic to its scent, start coughing, get head aches, for some it is just too much. Looking at the scent, I do not think it is because it is too sweet. There is a sweet line, but never alone. One aspect that sets hyacinth apart: There is a disturbing, almost leathery quality hiding behind a spicy sweetness and green notes that are almost powdery. This spiciness adds a tonality to hyacinth that is -again!- rather disturbing. In my nose it is a cinnamon reddish warmth, with the silvery sharpness of cardamom. The sweetness is very salicylic in a sense, powdery, with a hint indolic dirts, that fit with the leathery undertone. Now, if I say leathery here, then I am pointing at a flowery, soft, slightly woody leather undertone.
In my nose, these are the lines that I want to bring further. So far this translated into Phenylacetaldehyd, phenylpropanol for the hyacinth spicyness, salicylates, rose, jasmin, and some more for indolic-powdery flowers, cyclamenaldehyd, lilial, bergamot, lemongrass and more for the green lines, styrax and cistus for the leathery line.

This is the hyacinth mirror. Then there is a lily of the valley story going on in the top and heart notes and the mechanic is waving from the back with vetiver and tobacco woods ….We are talking mod version 10. By the time it has finished maturing to ultimately judge it, Ms hyacinth on the microwave will be exhausted.

“And it reminds me of the smells around my late father-in-law’s gas station/car dealership. Happy memories for me.”

more on Lonestar Memories and l’air du désert marocain on SavvyThinker.com. Enjoy…

I could not resist…here it is, in her full beauty. Hyacinth. I bought another little pot just to feed my nose and brain. Standing right on top of my micro wave right now, it seems to fill an entire apartment. Sitting there, it allows me to sniff hyacinth when washing the salad, the dishes or preparing the tomatoe sauce for the spaghetti.

I was thinking quite a lot about this scent, without ever watching the flower in itself. What a pity. In the garden, it will never be as immaculate as it is on my microwave… after this mild winter I expect a snail invasion, and I know they love hyacinths, too.
More on this pink fairy tomorrow.

Greetings

Make your own choice, listen to your own voice!

That’s what’s playing right now on lounge radio dot com and it fits just perfect to this post on things that FIT together. Humans tend to see patterns where there are none, or to make sense where there is none. We seem to have troubles accepting to accept that sometimes things do not make sense. Thus, we fill our world with reasons and patterns. Well, sometimes it is just statistics fooling us, like the proven correlation between number of storks and number of babies per couple. In this sense: a couple of things fitting together this weekend….

- Sniffing things with Vero.  I got a compliment on my latest mod of the hyacinth flowers and a mechanic. Hmm…I definetively need a name for this fragrance…. Slowly, very slowly, we are getting somewhere and more’s to follow shortly as this one at it is featuring an interesting line and twist in its composition.
- My flyer for the Rêverie au jardin arrived on Friday late afternoon. I love it and will post about it at the end of this week. I find it fitting wonderfully with the scent. And I wonder how many new scents will be launched this year. And I think about how to make sure that people know my scents are out there. And I wonder whether there are not enough scents out there already.
- Sniffing more things with Vero. Paehhh. Read more on Colombina’s today post about beauty and fashion. What a nice pattern to see her think on similar issues.
- Sniffing Aqua di Colonia, by Farina, and did so many times in the past days. Funny, isn’t it? Never, never, never in mankind’s history we had such a choice of scents and fragrances. Yet, it may be worth going back 300 years to find true beauty!

After finally getting my Palm to synchronize may mail and cheating my firewall, there is time again to think on things, like the meaning of modern life, flying from here to there and a fragrance with lily of the valley, hyacinth and a mechanic holding it all together.
Well, to be honest, all my thinking hasn’t helped me a lot and I feel like walking on these belts in the airports where you make easy, little steps and at the same time you move at a speed of a young cow, first time out on the green, after a long winter. But here, the belt seems to go in circles and I seem to pass by the same bottles over and over again. Undecavertol (grrrrreeeeeen! like ivy), lilial, jasmine and this and that and what comes out is a flowery something. Not mille de fleur, but something flowery with some dirt in the back. Without going epically into details: I do not get my scent the way I want it and I think it is time to get off this belt, walking slowly, not through modern architecture but maybe woods….I have seen this before, there is something missing, and I know it is there, somewhere in the shelves….

More activities this weekend: L’air du désert marocain, bottling and boxing and fiddling around with orange ribbons. W. is ready to hit the boxes this Saturday, modern perfumery slave, as always not asking for more than a few spritzes of the l’air for free. W. be praised!
Greetings and my best fragrant wishes for your weekend. Off the belt now…

(picture: Brussels airport corridor as seen last Wednesday evening)

Back from Brussels, and this time travelling was much smoother. Except for the ride with the tube yesterday…Fully loaded with tie and suit and everything you need to look boring and professional I ended up in the metro, standing somewhere below Brussels, for good 15 min, packed like a sardine with other sardines. Which is fun for the first 2 min, but after this initial “hohoho…we are trapped in the metro…great…I have my next post ” thought your forehead gets sweaty, your fellow human beings loose their attractiveness and you just want to get out. Finally, we were moving again down there in the underground and the sardines were liberated to administer Europe…
The flight was rather short, as I fell asleep immediately once I sat down, and only the final “thank you for choosing Swiss” made me wake up. Protesting silently: I never chose Swiss for this flight, as I have no choice.

For my US flight I had the choice and I guess this is the reason why I end up paying less for travelling there. Thus, this is the good news of today: The sun is shining, the weekend is approaching and I will fly to the US (NY and LA) end of April.

I almost forgot to post that there is no post today ;-)

I am off, heading for Brussels-> no post tomorrow, too. I hope for a nice flight….

Greetings and fragrant wishes

 (picture of the EC Commission: BBC News)