There we go again: Welcome to another gardenia related post. Today, the accompanying picture is a simplified sketch and I wish simplification would be equally easy for perfumes. This is a quick post as I have a lot to do in the factory. One reason why I am still not there, in the factory, to do what I should do, is the DHL man who is riding his car somewhere in Zurich and I know that he has a parcel in his yellow car and I know he is going to come today, but I do not know when. It may be in a minute or in 6 hours. If I miss him and his yellow car, then I might have to wait until next week. And I am not good in waiting.

So, they day before yesterday, late at night, I sat over my excel sheet where I have the gardenia trials stored. Version 8.1, sitting there, in all innocence. So I started to write it again, having super excel calculating the individual ingredients from the two bases and putting them into the formula. With the individual ingredients from the bases, the formula grew to 33 ingredients. I printed it out and carry it with me since then. Actually, the formula is not too bad. But it is still a bit too long. I would say: Inconveniently long when you have to mix it all together.

Thus, I am trying to come up with simplifications that my intuition tells me are not going to change the overall picture too much. I haven’t found too many so far. Not easy. My goal is to reduce by at least 15% (=5 ingredients).

Looking at the formula without bases comes with a few aha!s.  Like the total amount of jasmine absolute that I put in there is with 2.8% pretty large, larger than I thought. The lowest concentration of one particular ingredient is 0.07% and trust me: It has a bigger effect than the number of ” 0.07%” would make you guess. So this one is going to stay. But maybe the cinnamon leave has to go. Ah well!…

Time for the factory.