Welcome to a perfumer's blog on perfumery

Off for the mountains…hurray….and next week again busy as a bee.
And here something noteworthy…Lonestar Memories on Noteworthy Fragrances.

Fragrant wishes for your weekend!

Ladies and gentlemen: May I present vetiverol.(4,8-dimethyl-2-propan-2-ylidene
-3,3a,4,5,6,8a-hexahydro-1H-azulen-6-ol)

Vetiverol, or a short post on why you might want to evolve.

10000 years ago, when living in caves and dreaming of fresh meet roasted over open fire and a day without flies, humans might already have collected roots coming from a grass, vetiveria zizaniodes. Without ever having seen a soap bar or shampoo, they might have gathered them somewhere in India and made scented things with it. They might have appreciated the earthy, musky, woody and slightly flowery fragrance that fitted perfectly with the hippest dress code these days: Fur and skin from dead animals.

A couple of generations later, having master the art of making glass, we think we are totally different beings, eating with forks and using soap. We use the same roots, sometimes store them for a while for maturation, and then steam distill these roots to collect a viscous, yellow mass, that still is quite close to the original. Earthy, warm, woody, smokey, a little hidden green and flowery touch. Combine it with Sandalwood and you are teleported in an Indian temple. It is an essential oil that is incredible complex, and features some 20-30 % of vetiverol.

Again a couple of years later, having mastered organic chemistry, driving cars, and producing scented shampoos, folks came up with a way to produce a pure compound, called vetiverol. Woody and balsamic, tones of sandalwood, and rather missing all the dirtyness of vetiver oil. A clean product in a sense. And, and here things become interesting, with a little green undertone! This undertone can be perfectly matched with citrus for instance. This vetiverol fits perfectly with the suit and tie dress code of suburbia. A decent scent, perfect for the office, inoffensive, and still quite versatile.

Use this and acetylate it and you will get Vetiverylacetate, again a clean product, but this time the scent shifts to old cellar, dry pencils, slightly smokey, with much less of green tonality.

I do not use the single compound, but a mixture derived from the natural essential oil, stripped of most of its dirtyness. And I love it for the balsamic sandalwood undertones. There is a greenness and a flower quality in my nose and this is why I thought “Lilly of the valley” and pepper. We will see later how this turns out…Excuse me now for the weekend: I am busy over the weekend, evolving further….fragrant greetings.

more on hominides on wikipedia

When in my first years on planet earth, there was bimbo, the elephant. It would follow me everywhere, protect me and make sure that I was safe in a suspicious world. “Jö, how sweet”, we might say, feeling incredibly superior and yet, our bimbo elephants are right there and we do not even bother hiding them.

Bimbo elephant 40 years ago was mystical, a fetish in a positive sense, an object with magical power, transforming dangerous places and giving the comfort of company in a world where we are ultimately all alone.

40 years later, we see bimbo again. We see its form and colour and we can feel its aura the closer we get. It is more than just an object, it is promise of company and happiness at first sight. We touch it and by establishing this physical contact our senses are engaged. We feel cold metal and glass, texture, colours, pictures and text. We sniff it, rub it, test it, and want to take it home. Because it has become more than an object. We know its history. We know the creators. We know about its authenticity.

— I had the idea for this post when watching a story about fetish puppets of an American indian tribe on Arte TV. But basically, their story was that fetish objects can be anything. As this is a perfumery blog…imagine yourself in your preferred perfumery and buying xyz…..
Establishing this emotional link between objects and its buyers is hard to plan and even harder to reach. It is a result of the interaction of a variety of sensual impressions, overlaid with pre-existing images and knowledge about an object. Key for an object to gain this fetish status is-among other things- authenticity. Hard to reach these days….—

Doing so, taking bimbo home, and carrying it with us in the days to follow, we find the comfort of knowing where we belong to. We feel safe, even in places and circumstances where we are not safe, and we bind us, emotionally, very directly to a thing. Loosing this thing might lead to tears.

Hello bimbo world.

I want an iPhone! What is your bimbo elephant of today?

When cruising at Jenny’s perfumemaking blog, and learning why too much of everything is no good in perfumery and how to work with scents/colours, please check out her post on Rêverie au jardin, too.  Here’s what happens if you put all your colours on the canvas…->

So, today we talk about Vetiver. Well, not any vetiver, but rather the pepper, orris, lily of the valley with lots of woods, that I mentioned a while ago and that sits now, slightly modified, in a 30ml glass bottle to mature. Woods here translates into vetiver. Vetiver for me is woody, woody and more woody, with a touch green and smoke, warmth and modesty.

Now, some of you may have read similar lines on this blog before: One reason why working with naturals is fun: Naturals like vetiver are complex fragrances in themselves. Depending on what you choose to go with them, they appear in different light. I am not sure about creating a vetiver experience with something pinkish marshmellow-sugargum-sweet-fruity, though. Well, I guess cacao absolute with peach-vanilla-strawberry-maltol might work. Vetiver is robust. And docile. Again…within limits.

In Vero’s vetiver scent ONDA, discussed here on this blog a while ago, vetiver is earthy and hot. In my trial, I tried to juxtaposition the woods in vetiver with black pepper, lily of the valley and orris. The latest mod: There is a touch clary sage in the head, quite some lilac in the heart, complementing lily of the valley, orris (ahhhh!), tons of vetiver (bourbon quality and vetiverol) with some frankincense, myrrh, patchouli, and a dry cedarwood accord. All mixed and now standing at room temperature in the dark, maturing.

Impatient mixer that I am, a little bit of a dilution (at 15%) found its way on a paper strip and on my hand yesterday. 5 min later my office neighbour asked what it was, because it smelled…”so different compared to your others”. The W.-factor, later in the evening, forced to interrupt the cycling in France holiday dreaming on www, went like “oh…good.” This is his standard answer version 1c. Must be translated into: “Yeah, yeah… no perfume discussions now, will appreciate it later. For the time being: It is wearable”

Later, W. sitting in front of another screen with moving pictures, his standard answer version 1c was modified to “this is new. This is unlike your others. I would wear this. This is good.”

Trust me: This is a nice answer! After maturation, I will have to decide about the pepper, though. Until then: Smiling behind the woods.

Saturday afternoon brought -after heavy, heavy rains on Thursday and Friday- clean air and light that was brighter than usual: Ideal for playing in the woods with a camera and hunt for inspiration for the vetiver, paired with pepper and lily of the valley.
Thursday was doomsday. And the thunderstorm in the morning made us think of the last day on earth. I never, never, never ever experienced a darker sky at full day. Not even during my year in Texas. It made me think of Armageddon, the beast returning and all these pictures of heavenly revenge that cling on some neurons, even in the enlightened brains. No wonder: Even spammers send dirty mails to innocent perfumers using some hacked Christian websites. Checking a particular mail address for the corresponding website, I came across a Christian network nodal point last Saturday, and then using their Christian search engine -entering SEX (well, I couldn’t resist…don’t forget…I was spammed by them!)- I came to Lot and his pour wife and the miserable people of Sodom. And -like 30 years ago- I still do not get it. Poor Ms Lot! What a punishment for a glimpse back.
Thus, in memory of Ms Lot, we do not look back, but rather look forward:
If we are brave enough, we gonna talk about possession, fetish and perfumes, later this week on this blog. And now: Let’s move on, turning left towards vetiver…

Sorry folks… I was busy driving forth and back to the hospital for visiting and making sure things are ok. They are in a sense; we got modest in between all these high tech tools.

Next week should see me again posting here.

I send you fragrant greetings

Well, I must admit: I am somewhat proud.

L’air du désert marocain made it into the top 25 list on Makeupalley. Hurray, tatitataaaa! This is wonderful. See the complete list here on Makeupalley.com

(you need to login to see the list).

Thank you all!

Having enjoyed a wonderful, perfect summer evening down town Zurich, featuring beer, wine and conversations on everything, my bike brought be back home through a Linden tree jungle. At least it felt like that. What a wonderful fragrance; sweet, slightly spicy, green, powdery, fresh, clean, heavy but lacking suffocating, sexy, dirty indoles. A decent, elegant natural scent. Without this indolic dirtiness it fits perfectly with Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse where you find Linden trees all over the place (a great shopping street if you have money. If you don’t: Do not go too far towards the lake….you might fall into a depression or in depths. )

Driving through this scent I can not help thinking in white, clean linen. I wonder why. I guess a synthetic variant is found in laundry powder. And I wonder what future generations will associate with these natural delights. Lilac might bring up pictures of your high school toilette in Alabama, lily of the valley is the fragrance of your window cleaner. The scent of violet flower might remind future generations in vacuum cleaners and cedarwood might be the next BMW scent to cover up plastic emissions. Soon, we might all associate dishwasher with linden blossom.

Verdantiol is a compound that comes already quite close to natural linden blossom, a schiff base, between lilial and methylantranilate. Cruising for some more information I came across a patent  6630438, excerpts you find below.
(Copied from www.wikipatents.com )
(…)BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Perfumed products are well-known in the art. However, consumer acceptance of such perfumed products like laundry and cleaning products is determined not only by the performance achieved with these products but also by the aesthetics associated therewith. The perfume components are therefore an important aspect of the successful formulation of such commercial products (….)

And it goes on and on and on….trust me: Making scented dishwasher tablets seems tougher than flying to the moon!

(Picture: Thinking about dishwasher tablets …again. Original Lichtenstein picture from: http://www.artland.co.uk)

Some of you may know this already, for those who do not: Tauer Perfumes started more or less out of the blue, wasn’t really planned,  and owes a lot to Pascal, the shop owner in Zurich, where folks can buy my perfumes. Pascal had the idea of asking me to make him a perfume for his shop. This is how it started. Actually, it was and still is a book shop. Specialized in books on medieval things, very specialized indeed, and it would not astonish me to find a book there on “Forks and knife, an evolving pattern of dining etiquette at southern Scotland’s courts at the turn of the 13th century”, or something like that.

But wait: There is more. There are a lot of books (and music) on Arabic things and the Maghreb (north Africa, around the Atlas). And there is honey from Georgia, Argan oil from Morocco, carpets, glass ware, wood things made from cedar wood or olive tree wood, lanterns, and true, real damask silk from Syria!

And perfumes. Tauer Perfumes, that sell quite well, I have to admit. Sometimes I wonder why and how he sells them. One reason is: Cross-selling. Watch out: If you buy a book on Hammams there, you might well end up with the perfect perfume going with the book.

Another reason: Authenticity. Pascal does not seem to have a concept, except for one thing. He will only sell things that HE finds good, too.

This brings me to the end of this post, remembering my stay with LuiLei in NY. Maybe we have a selection criterion for future perfume shops representing Tauer Perfumes. At the latest next year I have to come up with a somewhat streamlined vision on how to move on with distributing channels. Authenticity in that sense might turn out to be a good guide. We will do some thinking there. I could feel that Amy and Don follow the same line of thoughts on quality and authenticity, which made me feel very comfortable,  maybe they are less cross-selling oriented, for there are non silk ties at LuiLei’s, yet.
By the way: Damask silk scarves anyone?
(a look from the inside out: Pascal’s shop, featuring true damask silk ties)
(Books, Argan oil, perfumes…)