Happy 1. of May to you all! Like my friend Olivier Durbano said on Facebook just now: To Work with Love! That’s what I am heading for: To work with love.

My work: well…. The other day, I got an interview questions about my being a perfumer. Here’s the truth: I am creating fragrances, love to, but as I am still a young venture, and by the way I do things around here, I am working on much more: I do the talking, too.  Just to give you an example.   I do the strategic planning, too. With sometimes miserable mistakes. But we are learning  and are getting better. Anyhow,  I create fragrances, true. This morning, before heading to work with love, after getting up at 5.30 am  in order to get some email stuff done while the world is still quiet, this morning, I was smelling two formulas of mine, and looking into the two excel files where I save the formulas .

Excel is cool. One of the scents that I am looking at with my nose and eyes consists of 3 base mixtures that I came up with for this scent, put together from 20 or so ingredients, mixed with another 10 or so ingredients. The formula looks cools and simple but is a box in a box in a box thing.

In order to understand the formula a bit better, I need to write it out again, have all ingredients written out, line by line. Excel can do that, with a few copy/paste manoeuvres.  Later in the process, super excel allows me to get a rough estimate of production costs. The moment of truth. I am in a very, very, very fortunate position, though: Contrary to many working in industry, I do not have to worry about producing a 50 cent per bottle perfume (which is sort of high end in this industry).

To be honest: I think I have an easier life there. Let’s be honest: working in this industry may suck. And I have the highest appreciation of everybody being and staying creative therein. Not easy.

What I love about my job: it is a multiverse of things that I do. And sometimes I think creating perfumes is the easier part of what I do.

To finish this post, and to come to the point why I wrote this post (besides the fact that it is  May 1): Here’s a wonderful article that wraps it all up “What is a perfumer and how to become one“-, a post on “Volatile Fiction”. If you are interested in perfumes and the world behind, it will  probably find your interest, even if you do not want to become a perfumer.

Ah, and yes: Today’s picture shows you the other scent that I am smelling right now, undiluted, from a special apothecary flask. This is not work, really, but rather play time. Experimental play time. Like I said: My strategic planning is miserable.