Welcome to June 5!  When opening my email first thing in the morning, like I always do, before coffee, and totally unbalanced, I got the pdf from Forbes Life May 2013 which made me very happy. I shared the picture with the Lonestar flacon in the middle on facebook yesterday evening, under a brilliant evening sky, but did not realize how nice it is to be featured in Forbes Romania. And I love the picture, the arrangement and what folks at Forbes did with the colors. Great stuff!

Thus, this is a nice hop into June so far. The first 4 days saw me packing perfume, fiddling with photoshop, indesign, and today excel again. And screening and searching for a simple, affordable manual cellophaning tool: There are markets that demand that the packaging comes sealed in cellophane. I do not really like the alternative, shrink wrap, in PE or PP, as it does not look half as nice. Cellophane, sits neatly around the box (the cardboard sleeve in my case) and protects perfectly. So… In order to help my friends in these markets, I need to be able to offer a cellophane wrapped packaging.

Of course, there a companies out there that can do this for you. But I do not want to outsource this step either. By keeping as much as possible in my hands, and maybe the hands a helping fellow, I can keep costs down, am connected to what I do, and do not depend on minimal volumes and minimal transactions.

But compared to following  the European Cosmetic legislation that comes into force the next few weeks, the cellophane wrapping is nothing. If you want to get an idea, just a glimpse into how the EUROPEAN UNION feels there: click here and have a look at the pdf file with its 150 pages and uncounted annexes. Please have a look at the pdf file and imagine what it must feel like, for a young entrepreneur, somewhere in one of the EU countries, who wants to start a perfume = cosmetics business. And don’t get fooled and think that you do not have to follow this law: In some regions (think South of the Rhine), there is an administration in place that enforces this law. Without merci.

Basically, you cannot do artisanal perfumery in the EU. And this is just one example of what is wrong in this European Union of today. How uncool is this: I have perfumer friends who move to Switzerland these days, to start their venture here, because it has become virtually impossible to start there.  As nice as it is for Switzerland: This is so wrong. Sorry for being so explicit.

Anyhow, in the EU, nobody really seems to care, and the citizens seem to accept whatever comes from above, and so I shouldn’t worry either.

And I stopped worrying about cellophane wrapping. I think I found a very simple manual tool. I will give it another day of thinking, though.