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Finishing a large pile of Tauer Perfumes sample discovery sets is on the to do list today.
And for speedy production, we do 50 batches at once, laying the folded boxes on the floor and filling them one by one with samples. Thus, making sure that neither me nor my cheap labor force (the W.-factor) make a mistake and forget one.
The beauty of large, repetitive patterns.
Picture shows 50 sample discovery sets, on the floor, with the Le Maroc pour elle inside.

Saturday will be sniffing fun. But more about this later…enjoy your upcoming weekend!

I am cleaning up some folders on my computer, putting the most important stuff in one folder, allowing me to extend my backup routine and do a simple full scale copy of the most important stuff to bring it out of the house on a regular basis.

So far, my back up strategy consisted of printing formulas and store them outside of my house, do gradual back-up of all files on the computer on isolated hard disks with every computer start and store the website data on my hosting server and make local copies every week.

Now, I have the most important files (about 7 giga) also outside of the house, on a flash drive, after a friend told me about burning appartments next door, and the smoke being worse than the fire and the water, destroying everything.

While going through the data, I fell onto a folder with a few birthday scents. I completely forgot about them. one of the formula consisted of cocoa absolute, dark cistus, patchouli, cinnamon notes, vetiver, complemented by green spices and light rose notes. It was a birthday scent, that I called aqua tenebrae, water of darkness, and I remember it vaguely as being ok…
Looking at some other formula, about 4 years old, I realize how far I have wandered just to come back to the same ideas. The same ideas but implemented differently, using a different palette. Sometimes cleaning up is fun.  and now…. back to boxes and flyers and ribbons.
Picture: the sticker for the birthday scent, 4 years old…

Fragrance discount store seem to pop up like mushrooms in autumn everywhere. You own a bottle of xyz, you have a computer: And there we go! And we have another super trooper fragrance store around the e-corner. I just wonder why a shop like fragrancex would want to present a niche within a niche within a niche scent. It does not make sense to me.
Now, if you ever come around any of my scents on fragrancex or any other similar site… forget it! It is either not the real thing, or they can’t sell it to you. Now, to be honest, I am somewhat annoyed. Thus, I just joined their waiting list for my Rêverie au jardin. (if you search for andy tauer on yahoo.com you will find this treasure). I can’t wait for their price.
While I write theses lines, another super trooper personalized spam comment backlinking to thisandthat wants to appear on this blog…hehehe…and off you go, you stupid comment, sent to spam comment hell.

  Picture: mushrooms, popping up in August 2008, above Airolo at 1800 meters above sea level

This month’s magazine of the German Duftarchive features Africa, with “L’air du désert marocain” finding its place on the High Atlas. And immediately, it is there again, this disease that you can’t be cured off. “male d’Africa”, this desire to visit and come back to mankind’s cradle, Savanah that has seen our first steps on two legs, a trait that allows us to walk more effectively and to watch the sunsets better. Ah well…
For my readers in Germany and Switzerland: here is the link to Duftarchive’s magazine (German) featuring Africa.

And for all readers not familiar with German: I am running around  with a 12% dilution of the fragrance that has the working title “gabriel”. Amazing how different it is compared to a previously tried 18% dilution. A touch styrax in the back (soft gentle elegant leather) comes out much more pronounced. There is -in this concentration- a distant relation to the hyacinth and mechanic fragrance. I prefer 18%. There the lily of the valley finds its place better, between the green rose, powdery jasmin and fresh lilac.

Please give me some more time to do some thinking… I have my ideas for this scent but want to allow them to settle first. In the mean time:

Let’s enjoy a peaceful picture from Africa:

  Picture: man selling cactus fruit seen in Tunis 2005, by Andy.

Autumn is around the corner here in the middle of Europe. Even if the days are still warm and bright, the sun changed its light, and the trees get ready for their autumn fashion show, featuring colors, colors and more colors.

Every year the same story: Looking back and wondering. “ok….that’s it, right? Getting ready for winter, right? Time to think in wool sock categories again…

Time to prepare the house.”

That’s what we did! With the sample and perfume business growing, it got time to invest in some infrastructure: A working table. Allowing us to use the living room to live and watch TV again and have guests without having to scavenge packaging material from everywhere. The working bench needed more space, thus we got some more infrastructure…

This week sees me working on a CV that needs to be done by Wednesday…grummel. I am not good in writing serious CV’s…somehow I can’t take things seriously enough when it comes to me. hehehehe and schwuubiduuuuuuu…..
Picture upload by myself, petunia in summer light.

Your chance to learn more about Vetiver dance, my newest baby, to be launched October 4: Please follow this link to Elena’s Perfumeshrine blog and make sure you take your CHANCE TO WIN ONE OF THREE BOTTLES Vetiver dance there!

!!Attention!! The drawing is on the perfume shrine site! If you want to be included: Do not comment here, but rather there ;-)
Have a wonderful weekend!

The sun is shining and the summer shows us what we will miss soon again. When packing the first 60 bottles this morning, the sun was shining right into the bottles when putting them into the box.

Lovely.

(Of course, they won’t be exposed for a long time).
Thus: Enjoy this picture and an interesting review on  one thousand scents.

I went to bed with Gabriel yesterday; Gabriel was version 8.0 and in a sense I slept  in angel land, with dreams waking me up again. Sleeping is like being dead, except for the fact that you dream and that you will (usually, but no warranty on that!) wake up again. In a sense, this is comfortable as I rarely worry about my being not conscious when sleeping.
Gabriel is about Lily of the valley.

Gabriel version 8 is beta, like bloglines.com is beta and unchanged since months. Gabriel is opulent, to say the least. I used it at a perfume concentration (around 30%), and it lasted into the morning. Gabriel is about green lily of the valley, roses, rich flowers.

Gabriel is a consequence of vetiver dance and the other way round. I used what I learned when playing around the lily of the valley for the vetiver fragrance. And the vice versa.
Slowly but surely seeing the vetiver bottles filled I will starting thinking more about gabriel (yep.yesterday.200 of the vetiver dance filled.I couldn’t lift my toothbrush anymore.)

Next: Thinking dilution factor. Extrait versus edp versus edt…

The meditative bottle pouring, planned for yesterday evening, took not place, but instead I found myself meditatively translating English text that describes the idea behind the Vetiver fragrance to German. Which is not easy, even if you have written the English version yourself. Languages differ by more than just words.

I will use the text in the coming days, together with the shop in Zurich, and my point of sales in Germany (Berlin , Munich, Bruchsal) to present the Vetiver dance to a German speaking public, on the internet, for preordering. And I need to talk to the German and Swiss press, in one way or the other. Thus, I needed this text urgently.
While translating and later packing envelops for the post office today, I watched the Dow sink again, wondering where we are heading because we have entered an interesting technical pattern (triangle). Well, I guess: fundamentally, we are still in grey territory. So this one is for Simone… the difference between grey and sunny is a glimpse of an eye.
  clouds over the Alp, right before the sun breaks through.

(close to Gotthard, August 2008, temperature inside clouds below 0°C)

This is a post Alpine post…the two days in the Alps were just perfect. Starting in Airolo at 1200, through forests, accompanied by butterflies, hiking upwards, for hours to get to the hut, almost in the clouds, at 2570. And yes, in order to answer Marianne’s question: We had a touch snow over night. Just enough to cover the mountains in a white night shirt.

The next day brought us further up, peak Beremengo (or something like that), then down and up again and then down down down to Andermatt.

While the legs had to move the body, the brain started wondering around, in sort of trance. This is the nice part of hiking: It makes your mind free to think, and thus I meandrated… from recipes for ground hogs (yes…hungry!), to soaps for Christmas, and text for vetiver dance…

I will continue pouring bottles today for a true labeling and packaging feast towards the end of the week. And hopefully, one day soon will see me posting on something else again!
  on the way up…

  a look into a cool but sunny morning

and finally….

  on the peak at 2630

and fat folks on our way down…