I find it utterly difficult to describe perfumes and admire every blogger who can and does. Thus, before digging deeper: Please visit Perfume Smelling Things today and see what Tom made of Miriam and make sure you take your chance to win samples. Click here for his post. Love it!

Here, in Tauerville (if you are on Facebook, the last uploaded picture shows you serious we take tauerville…) we are utterly busy preparing orders before I leave for a week to the states. Right now, we are getting flacons for the PENTACHORDS White labelled and ready. The picture to the left shows you the labels that we folded and that will go around the flacon, that needs to be polished before and that needs a lot label on the back.

Now we are on this state: 150 flacons with the labels and the ribbon on. Ready to be filled with parfum and sealed with the crimping machine. We look at the backside of the white flacon, where a label holds all together.

You get an idea what we are doing these days. In between I am trying to answer mails. Like the W.-factor said yesterday: ” You must spend about 40% on your time mailing”. – “Yes”, I replied, “because perfumes is a communication business”.

“I thought it is about smelling”, he wisely came back, and I fear he is wrong.

I feel it is utterly important to talk to you, be it by mail or by blog posts about what I do and why I do it. Perfume business is a communication business, but unfortunately I most often miss the proper words to describe my scents. Thus, we all stick to notes and pictures. And memories. On PerfumeSmellinThings you can watch Wendy today, sharing memories of her grandmother and perfume. This interview with Wendy is just amazing. You can also watch it on Vimeo. It was done by Brian Pera and is part of a series of interviews, supported by Luckyscent.

“Big Personality”: Wendy from brian pera on Vimeo.

Anyhow, I got this mail from a customer who invited me to reply by posting here, in order to have a larger audience. There we go….

The question was: “…. One of the things I like In L’air du desert is the way it breathes. Of course I also like the scent and the way it evolves but what impresses me most is it’s breathing.
What is the secret?…. ”

The answer is difficult. Let me try nevertheless:

If there was a secret: I for sure would not tell you. Perfumers tend to be discreet about their perfumes and what they put in there, why and for what effect. There is actually not a secret to it. It is the construction, the way I create perfumes. I so far never used the term “breath”, I usually use the term “light”. Perfumes need to shine from the inside, you must be able to see right into their hearts. They must, in order to use other words, breath, from the inside to the outside and back. How do you get there: By composing your perfumes in a way that renders them to some extend translucent, transparent, breathing in a way. It is the construction that makes the difference. Construction means: Putting the ingredients in a proper way together.

This is not easy. And one of the most often heard complaints about experimental compositions from my side is: ” Oh my, it is so flat, there is no light inside, it is dull, it is like covered with a suffocating layer. ” From now on I might also say “It does not breath”. This dullness is one of the aspects that I find on a regular basis. It is annoying and needs a lot of creative work and experiments to get over it.

Of course, there is another aspect: it is what you put inside. And here, trust me dear client, the quality and choice of the material makes a difference. It is about how much money you put into a construction, too.

By the way, on a side note: Miriam is the most expensive perfume I created so far. The natural rose, the Mysore sandalwood, the violet leaves extracted in France add up. Actually, it is prohibitively expensive, but I do not care, as long as it breathes and shines.