Welcome to a perfumer's blog on perfumery

After a silent weekend: Greetings from sunny Zurich! The last few days were fabulous and here are a few highlights:

Meeting with Vero and looking at some mods. Here the highlight was our sniffing and thinking on the flower power of hyacinths. More on this still developing (argh!…never ending) story in the coming days.

Finalizing some stuff for a “thing” in one of the major Russian “beauty and life style journals”, expected to appear later this year (September?). Sooner or later I think I will need a partner, i.e. distributor in Russia!

Chatting with Ms Eie Flud on skype. The result of our skype musing will follow shortly on Heather’s blog.

Le Maroc pour elle is in stock again (I was almost running out) and the number of empty flacons is ca. 20-40. Meaning, I can finally move with my Le Maroc baby to the same visual line of my other fragrances. Thus, I had to start thinking about how to label the standard flacon. Trust me: This one is tricky, because the Le Maroc pour elle in itself is quite reddish-brown-dark. The visual that I used so far in print products is the rose, the red rose (like on the sample flyer). Now red label on top of a red liquid does not work. So, I finally decided for black on red. What I really love is the lower black line, with the “eau de parfum” text. It underlines this somewhat dark, mysterious line of le Maroc.

I will give myself some time to reconsider and then the label will go into print.

(picture: the prototype for the new label and the new bottle for the Le Maroc pour elle, in line with Tauer’s CD)

No serious, “I am thinking about”-post today: It is a holiday here in Zurich, it is raining and I am bottling Le Maroc pour elle. It is peaceful and the flowers around my nose contrast harmoniously with Zurich’s grey tonality. In a couple of hours Heather will call on skype and we will do my first podcast chat. Exciting!

Almost as exciting as yesterday evening, when the perfumer was keyless because the house keys staid in Berne, while the perfumer was moving around in Zurich, without a chance getting them from Berne before Friday… A couple of telephone calls to “AAAAAAOpenEveryDoor24hours” companies reveiled: Opening doors might be a couple of hundred Francs, without guarantee that at the end of the procedure the door will be open. A super - trooper hotel might be cheaper! You definitively don’t want to forget your house keys around here.
Lucky me there is an angel nearby, Ms S., normally helping us out in our desperate attempts to keep the apartment clean. With a last name like “Smith” it took a while to figure out her number (soory to all those who got a call yesterday evening, going like “hello…is this the Smith family who….).

At the end I got my key, my bed and my peace.

(Picture:Le Maroc pour elle, getting ready for the world….)

Sorry folks, I HAVE to make this point again: I sit in front of a miracle machine. 100 years ago I would be a magician and 50 years ago people would think I am from Mars. Without much more than a shadow of a clue how things really work,  I am sitting in the train, leaving town punctually, in clean air, at some 150 km per hour driving through the morning, in front my laptop, with my broadband card on, getting bytes and bytes on the go, listing to my preferred internet radio and writing down some thoughts of yesterday evening. This is magic. I guess it really was  good idea to get rid of some mental prisons the last 2000 years in order to come up with these miracles. Funny thought, though: Maybe you have to get rid of your childish believing in miracles in order to come up with techno miracles.

The coffee is good, too and leaves little brown spots on my white shirt, but hey! it is a good morning today….the spots land there where the tie will find its place later today.

Back to the labtop: Yesterday, after the gym, with a clean nose - there is nothing better to clean up a nose than sweating for an hour or so and then spend 5 min at 95°C and then shower- I sprayed my experimental l’eau d’épices for the second time  at this day. Interesting how different it smelled this evening. The W. factor listened to something Mendelson somewhat too loud but is conditionally trained well enough to shout “l’eau d’épices!”, when he sees the test spray bottle and smells orange flower, salivating behind his cigar. Good boy! Thus, greetings from Mr. Pavlov!, although I feel somewhat sorry for Mr. P.’s dogs.
And I go wuff wuff and wonder how things can smell differently, depending on one’s physical condition and the context of other scents around, and after a couple of more wuffs I wonder what to do next with this fragrance, because although the W. factor is entirely happy with it, I feel that I need/want/cannot but work more on it, later… because first we will do happy hand pouring and boxing.
Wuff.

Working and playing on Joomla again. My Joomla design seems to be ready and soon I will start filling in content, mostly coming from tauerperfumes.com, to start with…without many changes. Later I will add some more functionalities, Joomla is cool stuff, but needs some time until you master it. Well, I do not think I invested enough time yet.
hmm…why a new website design, why a new Content Management System?, you might ask. Good question! One reason: Because I feel like it…..Other reasons being the ease to change data, keeping things up to date, mid-term integration of the blog, moving towards a client-oriented communication platform, integration with a yet to be defined CRM,…but reason number 1: Because I feel it is time to start making the next steps.  Ha! and this, this is what I call freedom.
“You know, I am very privileged, but I -of course- pay a price for it, as there is nothing like a free lunch in life; having absolute freedom to decide where I want to go with what in which way and when. Following my instincts, that so far guided me quite well, doing things in my speed. And in my tonality. I like things sometimes to be quiet and calm. I do not like hypes and hysteria. Let’s address perfumery the way it should be: Taking our time, taking care to make our clients happy and make excellent perfumes. Without running forth and back.” This is more or less what I said to Don, the Lui at www.LuiLeiNy.com, drinking a coffee on their balcony, Sunday late afternoon or at dawn, I do not remember any more.

We were discussing the next steps of Tauer Perfumes. And some “musts” and “do-not’s”. Now, Don was very understanding, and being an entrepreneur himself, he knows exactly how easy it is to say “you must do this”, without having to do it yourself. You know: If I ever followed any of these *you must do*…., a perfume like the L’air du désert marocain would not exist. I would probably have launched a fruity floral soup de je ne sais pas quoi and would hide in a corner, ashamed and bankrupt ;-)
Bottomline: Sooner or later www.tauerperfumes.com will be in Joomla,  and more decisions about how to proceed and how fast to grow will follow in the coming weeks and months.  To be honest, we are all somewhat excited.
(picture taken by Don from LuiLei in Brooklyn, April 2007)

sent waves of something aldehydic, metallic, sharp green, soft floral, sweet and yummy over the table towards the right side of the couch where -since years- is my preferred position in the living room. I watched the lily of the valley that my brother collected in the nearby woods together with his child number 3. Just a few flowers, a few white little bells arranged on a string, with a green wrapping. A closer inspection reveals a natural fragrance that is -in all its softness- sharp and almost aggressive. Coming home with the scent still in the nose, with the Diorissimo on a paper strip, I admire Roudnitska’s genius. I think, his creation is about as close as you can get, an abstraction for sure, but you can feel how the artist just set the light a little bit, added a touch background. And, his creation is - like the original- not just beauty, there is a hidden metallic sharpness, a white innocent flower, laying on a sharp knife. Just beautiful.

Happy Mothersday to all mothers out there!

And good luck to all sons and daughters cooking for her this one day, after thousands of meals prepared by her…I am out there, too; visiting mom, cooking and sharing memories, and I would like to send all mothers fragrant wishes. Enjoy these moments.

There is a perfumery kind of story developing on Perfume Posse that is absolutely hillarious. I couldn’t recover and somehow, I don’t know why, I can’t fight the feeling to know these guys and girls. *perfumer staring at the keyboard, watching his finger nails, grabbing for the banana scent bottle, sniffing*

I read it while working down my Excel file wherein I have foreseen a little bit less C12 for my rose/frankincense scent and was almost at the bottom of the file, meaning at the lightest head notes (I always start from the dark base to the airy top). So I read the post and the comments and I could not help adding some bergamot and patchouli.Oups.  With the nose somewhat blind right now I can’t say what it turns out like. But whatever the result: I ‘m blaming perfume posse and Maria. The labdanum was -by the way- already in the mix (base note; I can’t help it:I like my scents dark most of the time.), the rose, the frankincense and some cistus with lots of other woody stuff and flower supporters. A more heavy mix than the previous version that still matures but that already now seems to be too C12 dominated (no, no: This C12 is no fruity banana thing, more on the vibrant ambra side….)

If I continue reading perfume posse, I might end up putting ananas in my mixes. *perfumer watching the imaginery sign at the ceiling,”reading blogs may endanger your perfumes”, then stars at his keyboard again, sighs, goes to the fridge for a beer*
Fragrant greetings to you all, and this time with hugs for Maria

Enjoy your weekend

*perfumer thinks about ananas again*

… you really made me happy today. That’s what I whispered into the phone today, after finally, after two hours on the phone with Microsoft’s helpline, talking to the most charming PC supporter guy in Brandenburg that I have ever came accross, after quite some oups!, my computer was running again. It looks as if, for whatever reason, the hard disk got a little scratch, right there where a kernel file was. I was already checking my bank account for some extra money to get a new machine….
Bottomline: I am happy, the service man too (finally! He could go home) and my schedule for today got changed…. no perfume making, no gym, just a running PC again.

I have to start a new category for this blog: Reasons for happiness

Being in a three day meeting somewhere in the rainy countryside…. more posts after Thursday I guess.
Fragrant greetings from green and moist again (after 1 month without rain) Switzerland

While at LA I was asked what I think about decanters, folks selling decants of my perfumes, back in the good days on eBay (….), later maybe on their dedicated shops. I gave an answer that I would like to repeat, before going into another rose loop:

We do not mind decanters making decants and selling these. I just ask them to label the decants properly (like the proper name on the bottles and to decant properly….please do not let the scents stand in the sun…) I do not consider decanting to be a competition. In the contrary. What folks get when ordering samples from my website, they get a minimum 1.5 ml (it is actually more on the 2.5 ml side ^-^) of samples in pump spray bottles, on top of a flyer, telling in a few words something about the scent and giving an indication following EU regulations on the EU-must-label-compounds that are in there. Like Linalool, coming from Lavender oils. We have to charge for shiping (right now, postal fee here is about 4 $US for a sample while we charge 3.5 $US for one, two, three, four…samples).
Thus, no, we do not mind at all. Decanters may help me spreading the message that there is a guy out there making perfumes that you may find interesting. Please continue doing so… if you are a decanter and need pictures or whatever: Please contact us….
-> Now that was the official decanter statement from Tauer Perfumes.

Back to roses. Rose and Frankincense and woods is still very much in my nose and mind, I already know / guess that I did a little bit too much with the aldehydes… more to learn while the mods mature. While we are waiting some more thoughts…
The famous W.-factor said the other day, looking at the roses in the vase that mankind has managed perfectly getting all the scent out of the roses you can buy around the corner. What a pity, he said. This unfortunately is true, because the more they are scented the less they last, and the other way round. It looks like being a rose and making rose scent is a tough job. There are however, as always in life, exceptions. Like
this one: This is the most heavily phenylethylalcohol scented rose you can get these days, and I was happy enough to get a couple of these once by Vero, my perfumery body in arms. You sniff it and you go: “phenylethylalcohol” and you realize why people say rose, when they sniff diluted phenylethylalcohol.

Rose scents are not easy, and the more dominant you want your rose to be the more difficult things seem to get; which is kind of paradoxal. Besides jasmin, there is nothing better to round up a compositon by adding a little bit of rose. It is like “Ping!”, the composition opens up, becomes softer and things suddenly hold together. But if you want the rose to be there and develop, oups!….there are tricks like eugenol (clove!), linalool (lavender!), citruses (bergamot et al.), aldehydes of course, and some floral notes (propylethanol, irones, salicylates, etc.) or damascenones and others helping you to extend the scent a little bit.
Thus, you can build beauties that are colourful, dark, with a green line (for instance using geranium). They last, but natural rose, even if pumped up, will never last beyond the heart of a scent, being a transient beauty, and a difficult one.
Even when working with the most expensive rose absolutes, they tend to smell like the cheapest soap bar you get around the corner or they fall apart, reminding you in death of all beauty on this planet, a memento mori that you do not really want to have around you.