Welcome to a perfumer's blog on perfumery

Hurray! Spring is here. This time it’s for sure. It sneaked in a couple of weeks ago and now, suddenly it is warm and nature around us is exploding. Bäng! Buff! Tsching! And with it come side effects such as dirty windows (well, they were dirty all the time, but now you realize), sneezing, clouds of natural fragrances around every corner and red noses, the last side effect due to my Joomla manual reading in the sun. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. My tauerperfume.com website needs some spring cleaning, too: It got somewhat hard to maintain. Well, in order to be honest, I do not like it anymore because I have a hard time implementing changes on it. Thus: Time to bring in a somewhat more flexible tool, CMS, Joomla based.
By the way: The perfect excuse for not filling up bottles…

(screenshot of where we are right now on a test system)

Buying presents for my little guest expected for diner tonight (godfather child), I realized that Zurich’s banking folks downtown were somewhat slower than average, walking around like sedated, partly because they are not used to all this sun, too and partly because the pollen load is heavy. Maybe, they were making use of a perfect excuse to slow down on this beautiful Friday.
I think , although not sedated and not suffering too much from the pollen, I will slow down somewhat, too. Have a fragrant spring weekend full of excuses…

So I got this parcel from India. Well, W. got it from Mr. Fedex, and gave it to me, quite happy, because he found “it smells so Indian”, which it did. What W. referred to as “Indian” was a mix of spices, woods and some flowery traces that seemed to have impregnated the parcel’s wrapping, a palimpsest of years of natural oils and resinoids that must have passed by the cotton fabric. Cotton?, you may ask. Yes, cotton!, the parcel was sewed into a cotton fabric, by hand, with loving care. Amazing. Professionally deformed as I am, I immediately thought in packaging and seweing perfumes into a fabric, after having soaked it into the fragrance.

Of course, Swiss hand work is too expensive and I am not serious about changing my packaging concept, but there is another line of thought hidden here…Opening a box containing perfumes would be so more exciting and delightful if your sense of smell could be engaged. The idea of a somewhat antiseptical packaging of perfumes always bothered me; I feel that perfumes packaging should somehow bring about this wow!-it-smells-good-effect. That’s why I had -for a while- the idea of adding dried lavender flowers into the packaging of the Rêverie au jardin, but then I realized that I needed to somehow protect the lavender flowers from giving off their scent while the perfume boxes are stored and I did not want to got into the troubles of having to seal perfume boxes. And I did not want to invest more into bottling and packaging than I already do, which still is much less than the industry’s average. (Trying to find a recent post by a fellow perfume blogger, but could not. I will post the link later here).
Thus… no provencal delights when unpacking.

But I got an Indian delight and when unpacking the pleasure continued: Two samples of oils, that I will test in the coming days, as second line of defense against supply drops.

Yesterday, somewhat rushed, I answered Maria B’s question in her comment on the Rêverie au jardin. Her question being: …if I would classify Rêverie as chypre…., I answered with (I was in a hurry) something like “technically not really, but you might maybe call it a chypre based on its impression”. A somewhat snippy, short answer. And not entirely correct….
So I jumped into the train (last minute, but time enough to get a drink) and started to think about something you all may have thought about a hundred times…what is a chypre?

I ended up reflecting in all this stuff you think you learned it, but just accepted as facts, for practical reasons. Like relativity of time (haeh?), the concept of money (you know: paper  buys a Big Mac…double-haeh?) and …well: chypre as a class. To be on somewhat neutral ground: Here’s the simple, yet classical definition of Chypres coming from Grasse:
The perfume museum in Grasse says on its website: “This name comes from the perfume so named by François Coty in 1917. Chypre’s success made it the leader of a large family which groups those perfumes based mainly on accords of oak moss, ciste labdanum; patchouli, bergamot, rose, etc. etc. This family is subdivided into floral aldehydic, floral chypre, fruity chypre, green chypre, aromatic chypre, chypre leather.

Thus, it is the composition, with oak moss and cistus being key, paired with patchouli and bergamot. This is one reason why Rêverie is no Chypre: No cistus and no patchouli.
It is more a Fougère, a green flowery Fougère. But…there is a chypre line in it. I do not think we can address the question “is it or is it not” by looking at the composition. It is the spirits that matter. Thus, it is no chypre because it does not breathe the chypre spirit.

“Haeh? - what’s this spirit like?” , you might ask. Well, after 10 min imagining Chypre I have the scent in front of my nose, but no words. It is just an almost mystical marriage of bergamot, cistus and oakmoss. Go and get a vintage chypre. You will understand.

This is a post Easter post (pEp), featuring some profane matters, such as wonderful weather for 4 consecutive days, resulting in lots of outdoor activities and a red nose of the author; preparing stuff for the upcoming receptions in NY and LA, updating web pages and studying CMS systems again with a time horizon of a couple of months until implementation and finally sniffing some things and testing some Frankincense ideas in between.
Talking LA: Here’s the official web page on luckyscents for registration featuring a somewhat green boy in the background. Well, the term “legend” may be somewhat too much… expect a guy in jeans….

Talking Frankincense: This Easter trial (not finished yet) is somewhat neroli-orange flowery, missing the church touch. Maybe Easter is not the right time to think about church scented lines in a fragrance, as you rather want to think about something else! More to follow shortly. I , to be honest with you, am somewhat baffled about how strong this neroli-orange flower came out and pleased how woody Frankincense in combination with vetiverylacetate is ….

Finally looking back to Easter egg searches: Here’s the latest pEp cartoon on my daily visited savage chickens blog. It wonderfully combines my love for Easter Rabbits and Alien (1) (Warning: parental advising recommended….)

Looking at perfumes -own and others- I find it very difficult to see and understand how individual components build up a scent and interact. When constructing a fragrance surprises always happen and you sniff and wonder how this happened.

At least partly, rudimentary in a sense, we (meaning I and Amy or Franco) will give some insights when at Luilei’s and with Luckyscent. I will bring (and pray for nice custom’s officers) some dilutions of stuff that goes into Rêverie au jardin. Not all components, of course, as I want to carry some private items in my suitcase, but key ingredients like the lavender, fir balm, ambrette seeds, maybe ambroxan , and a few other synthetics.

These dilutions will mature until end of April and will allow us to sniff individual components next to the final fragrance and see how a single line disappears in a fragrance and is reborn as part of a grand dance. There is an educational aspect: Show what goods stuff smells like and how difficult it is to combine things, and a fun part: Transforming a little part of Brooklyn and Hollywood into a fresh, green and musky corner.

And finally, if the Easter Bunny is nice with me, I may find some time to fiddle around with other scents in new combinations.

May the Easter Bunny be nice with you, too!  Fragrant greetings and more posts after the holiday break.

Coming home today, I found W. (you know…the guy responsible for the W. factor) in front of the TV, checking some 100 plus TV channels we have now.

I am afraid, but Tauer Perfumes will come to an abrupt stop in the coming days: We have Sci Fi Channel now! And others. And even more. Stuff that would end in my spam filter if it came by mail, too. As a matter of fact, taking my zapping time of about 30 sec. from one channel to the other into account, I can easily spend about 1 hour just zapping. Now, that is wow. Real WOW. Not Vista wow.

I can watch Alkazeera in English (did already and saw arab man singing lovely), I can watch Polnish, Kurdish, and so many channels more. But then, switching to the local TV station, I realized that good things usually are closer than you think. Watching Bettwaren Fischer adds is about as good as a TV evening can get. W. and me laughed, as we do everytime when we see the add, and believe it or not: We have been customers there and would go there anytime again. It is a serious business, only using feathers from dead animals (meaning that the goose are dead and not deprived of their feathers while still being alive) and a serious add. For those familiar with German: Here’s the add on a blog. It has cult status by now. You have to watch it about 400 times and you will know why.

It runs daily on TV and I can be depressed like having lost Troya…I will laugh.

Greetings from behind the TV, watching Sci fi….

Old English Fern by Penhaligon.

You see: Today I am not in the mood of writing epic stories about whatever. I wanted something classy, not too dominant, a decent office scent, but not one of mine. So I went for the full coumarin programme. I like it a lot, in its simplicity (in a positive sense) and clear language.
Talking office…. there are probably not many scented offices, respectively toilettes, like the one I am working in Berne. Except for the Le Maroc pour elle, I placed all my products there, as somewhat exclusive room spray and -if my colleagues care- as scent for an office day.

Featured product these days: Rêverie au jardin. It is used quite heavily, mostly as room spray though.

Greetings after a room spray enlightened office day.

Let’s have a cocktail together and chat: April 21st, NY, Brooklyn, at 5 pm.
Here’s the official announcement and some comments from LuiLei in New York. Greetings and a wonderful spring evening to you.

Dear visitors
For external, technical upgrading, the webpage www.tauerperfumes.com and all subsequent levels are not accessible for a limited time:
Thursday, 5.April, 5pm-0am, local time

Thank you for your understanding

 

After 36 hours on the strip, revisiting Frankincense.
Frankincense is truly fascinating. At least, if it is of good quality. A herbaceous terpene-dominated start, campherous, airy, fresh, but….also with something citrus-like in it, some limonen showing off. This almost cries for citrus top notes, bringing this citrus line up and supporting it. Contrary to other qualities I’ve got, the CO2 extract from Eden botanicals lasts for almost ever. It is full and intense and very incensy. From an almost floral heart, but not salicylic powdery, more crisp and clean, it develops very dry woody notes and with brings about an old catholic church feeling, this sweet, almost wet, dusty scent with a disturbing annotation of flesh and sin; I guess there are few places where people have talked more about sin and made semi-public confessions than a catholic church in -let’s say- Sicily…well, maybe the Betty Ford clinic is another such place, modern version.
Frankincense, mysterious, rough and subtle at the same time. Thus, in between all these parcels of green luscious daydreams, I am looking at 3 strips with Frankincense, vetiver and castor, looking at three lines that might fit together. I definitely want to visit Frankincense over the Easter break. Thinking in past sins…
(picture: a little bug seen in Namibia, sitting on an Euphorbia that is very toxic. Even if only using the dried branches of the bush for your barbecue you might end up dead the next morning. Definitely a no-go for mystical fumigations)