The personality of scent, essence or armour?

Have you ever considered how your choice of fragrance reflects your personality?

Marketing folk certainly do. There’s a reason why the sultry young Jerry Hall was once chosen to front YSL’s most exotic and decadent scent – Opium. Hall was the epitome of edgy glamour, spandex clad lover of Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry - uber-groupie. She led the life that we could picture only in the most vivid corners of our imagination, far away from the reality of trudging down a grimy high street to our local branch of Boots to pick up a relatively cheap bottle of (albeit wonderful) mass market scent.

From Bryan Ferry to Murdoch, oh Jerry!

This raises a question. Do we choose our scents to complement who we are or who we aspire to be?

I recently revisited one of my favourite scents, Antonia by Pure Distance. Reviewed back in 2015, my first experience of Antonia moved me. It felt like as if it had been created just for me. I described it thus:

“Antonia is a floral of cool intentions. She is an ivy draped ethereal character who conjures a rain sodden landscape of picturesque melancholy. Sap fuelled green florals are my favourite genre, capable of summoning the outdoors in, they evoke in me an otherworldly serenity that belongs far away from my urban life. Opening with the vivid green bite of galbanum, Antonia is uplifting and spiritual depicting spring’s abundant fertility in full force.”

Cool atmospheres and outdoorsy notes dominate many of my favourite scents. I feel both serenity and invigoration in earth goddess whiffs. The forest ritual lure of Ormonde Jayne’s Woman, the mountain stream chill of Clinique’s Wrappings and the mossy earthiness of Guerlain’s notorious Mitsouko, they all echo the experience of existing deep in the countryside.

Holman Hunt captures the rural Idyll 

Nowadays I’m a city dweller, living on the edge of Manchester’s central district, I neither see nor smell trees. The view from my flat features fashionable living in converted Victorian mills, immaculately dressed young urbanites heading off to long hours in offices and a brashly plastic looking tram stop. However, my childhood was one of wellies, cowpats and nature books. I led the country life and I can probably identify most things you’d find in a hedgerow. It’s likely that my passion for outdoorsy scents is filling a gap. Essentially, Antonia and her similarly green friends are taking me home. I’m aspiring to be me. 

Joseph models the view from my window

However, sometimes I need ‘not to be me’. And in those instances, I dress myself up in an alter ego. I am not, not will ever manage to be, a cool and calculating type. I am the polar opposite of a Hitchcock Blonde. There are times in your life when you could benefit from having a personality different to your own.  And right now, I need to be someone else.

I’m currently in the middle of a house purchase. The complexities of this transaction have been stressful. I’m far too passionate and direct to handle the process with the sort of cool and detached businesslike approach required to out-swim the shark-infested system.

One particularly bitey shark is the estate agent. A few weeks ago I had to visit her office to provide mortgage documents. After some testing encounters on the phone, I’d envisioned her as heavily made up with cartoon eyebrows and an air of someone who could throw a good punch in a pub. In reality, I’d got the image spot on. In preparation for our meeting I selected tailored black clothes, properly blow dried hair and ‘business bitch’ perfume. I was masquerading as someone else, someone capable of making a huge financial investment with success. Not, my techni-colour print clad, wonky haired and kindly self. My scent of choice was the Lanvin classic – Arpege. Nothing implies control more than a stern floral aldehyde.

It didn’t work. I’m still haggling my way through the complications of buying a very old house. But at least I felt protected by my formidable scented armour for one day.  If I ever get there, I will be returning to the wilds of the Yorkshire Moors. Perhaps I shall rename myself Antonia?

Review: Clinique Wrappings, Oxygen Bottled

Regular readers of Odiferess will already know about my hibernation tendencies, and when I wake up in the Spring, I REALLY wake up. It’s as if the sunbeams, brightness, warmer temperatures and crucially, opportunities to hit the great outdoors, make me see (and smell) everything in technicolour. My mood is elevated, I feel creatively enlivened and I recall that I have a libido. Ultimately – I’m fizzy.

 My happy place, Marsden Moor

During the Odiferess Spring, I need a scent to match my mood. Jour D’Hermes is ideal with it’s bubbling grapefruit and rhubarb vivacity. Les Eaux de Caron Fraiche emits sunny sharp lemons,herbs and moss, my personal fragrant Prozac. But last weekend these scents were temporarily shelved in favour of an enchanting and unexpected birthday present – Clinique’s extraordinarily effervescent ‘Wrappings’.

A vintage advert for Wrappings

Wrappings is a rarity in the UK. It appears in Harrods as a brief Christmas gift set then buggers off into a secret hidey hole for a year. I have no idea why Clinique choose to limit distribution as it is by far the most creatively exciting of their offerings. Also, it really doesn’t suit Christmas, it’s a gambolling spring lamb.

Wrappings smells ‘clean’. Not a scent-sation that I tend to speak of with positivity. Clean implies boring, as if scent is a mere cleanser, a ridder of bodily secretions. It is the olfactory world of white musk and laundry powder. To understand Wrappings’ cleanliness you have to ponder the word clean from a different viewpoint, specifically the cleanliness of the natural world; the smell of mountain air, water in peaty streams, freshly cut grass, wet limestone rock, soil, crushed leaves and oddly – snow.

Olfactory Heaven

There are plentiful woody and green wonders out there (Ormonde Woman being my personal witchy favourite), but I have not smelt anything that additionally smells airy. I am astounded that a scent can invoke the feeling of being cooled by a breeze in the countryside. I can only deduce that it must be due a whopping great dose of aldehydes which offer a peculiarly ‘metallic’ chilly edge to the intensely natural composition. Oxygen bottled.

This week I took a hike into the Yorkshire moorland with my friend Kerry. At the onset of our ascent, we encountered an ancient stone bridge under which a stream flowed, delivering a rapid burst of peat rich water from the hills. It was magnificent. Both in it’s historic spectacle and it’s olfactory sparkle. Cold wet stone is an underutilised note. Comme Des Garcons, this sounds like your type of thing.

The ancient Easter Gate Bridge on Marsden Moor, West Yorkshire

As I stood at the bridge I momentarily thought of Wrappings. If I’d laid underneath motionless in the icy waters and allowed them to wash over me (whilst holding a piece of steel close to my nose), I could recreate the scent in a sort of performance art/extreme spa activity. I didn’t, but I might return when it warms up a bit!

A look at the notes on Fragrantica reveals a fairly accurate readers interpretation of what you can detect, with green notes, cedar and moss sitting at the top of the list. I am surprised that aldehydes and leather feature lower in the list as both have a strident presence. Forget the florals, they are barely discernible apart from an edge of quirky hyacinth which tends to read as more sharply green than floral to me.

Who would I recommend it for?

• Hikers
• Naturists (naturalists?) Who are the folk who like being outdoors in the nude?
• Steel workers
• People who couldn’t afford to shell out for Andy Tauer’s Noontide Petals but rather liked it
• People who were eager to smell but ultimately disappointed by Comme Des Garcons ‘Blue’ series
• Menfolk, it’s a great unisex despite the ‘for women’ tag

I’d like to say thank you to Mags and Mum for finding this magnificent gift, it will be worn with joy. Thank you also for risking the wrath of your husbands whilst ignoring the boarding calls at the airport perfumery!

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From Ambre Sultan to Chanel No. 5, A Curious Journey In Taste

Eight years ago, I lifted a curiously understated rectangular bottle of fragrance to my nose and inhaled. At that moment, my concept of ‘what perfume smells like’ changed forever. It was Ambre Sultan by Serge Lutens.

This revelation occurred whilst I was teaching in Dubai. Being so deeply opulent and spicy, I assumed it was an Arabic brand. Not being a certified fume junkie back then, I didn’t buy it, waiting instead until my bottle of Opium ran out to consider a purchase. Of course I did re-visit the store to indulge in it’s heady lure several times. 

From discussion with fellow fumies, it appears that many of us began our journey into niche with this creation. Unsurprising when you consider that the most popular genre amongst contemporary niche fans tends to be orientals.

As my interest developed into a hobby increasingly more compulsive than a serious train spotting habit, I smelt a great many niche perfumes. I developed a distinct personal taste that was dominated by; citrus chypres, intense orientals and outdoorsy feeling woods. A jasminophobe, I was highly unlikely to feel the love for a full on white floral or (gulp) the horror of an old fashioned floral aldehyde.

So, how the hell have I fallen hard for Chanel No. 5?

Whilst having a boozy dinner at my beautiful friend Jo’s house around Christmas time, we delved into her very grown-up stash of fumes. Jo Loves ‘proper perfume’, i.e. the likes of Moschino, 24 Faubourg and Chanel No. 5, that which we associate with drinking champagne in an immaculate dress. Or more relevantly to our friendship, glugging Asda’s Prossecco in tatty clothes. My overriding sensation whilst sampling Jo’s grown up lady scents was a sense of exoticism, they smelt extraordinary, innovative and otherworldly. Odd, because that’s exactly how I felt when I smelt Ambre Sultan.

As I dozed off in her absent son’s big red tractor bed that night, I pondered the curiously soapy whiff radiating from my arm. The Chanel No. 5 was emitting the fizzy sherbet like quality of aldehydes over a complex mélange of sappy woodland greenery and an abstraction of floral delights. It was beautiful. I was astonished.

 Harry, a budding fumie takes a shine to Jo's Rochas Alchemie..

..but decides that Moschino is more pleasing

And so to Ebay. A bottle of Chanel No. 5 Elixir Sensuel was rapidly obtained and a couple of days ago, an EDP of the original arrived courtesy of a kindly regular swopping buddy.

What’s essentially happened is that over the last few years I have smelt so many repetitions on the theme of amber and woody orientals that they have become ‘normal’ and no longer feel unique or ‘niche’. Ambre Sultan has been emulated so many times that Chanel No. 5 feels like a contemporary innovation. The mainstream has (with exception of some truly awful leaden fruitchoulis) become the exotic.

So, you can expect to see some changes at Odiferess this year as I embark on a journey into new genres. This year I will be mostly seeking out notes that I didn’t used to like (yes, I am emitting a vociferous air of jasmine from my wrists today courtesy of No. 5 and enjoying it enormously) and seeing how far my tastes have broadened. I have on my current list of things to review; fruity hedgerow delights from Mark Buxton, Penhaligon’s ‘busty’ Cornubia, Caron’s ‘shining happy people’ scent - My Ylang, Boucheron’s dazzlingly snooty - Place Vendome and Le Labo’s unfeasibly sticky lily- Lys 41.

The result of a google search for 'Woodland Flowers'. This is better than woodland flowers.

I shall be continuing to read the insightful words of some of my favourite blogs written by men who love a lavish bouquet. In particular, The Scented Hound who has a penchant for Caron and The Silver Fox who is as unafraid of a strident white floral.

Disclaimer: Despite my current adoration for No. 5 I reserve the right the state that Brad Pitt looked and sounded like a complete buffoon in the recent fragrance advert which was as humourous as Tom Ford's 'naked female bottom-crack scent smelling strip dispenser' was vile and sexist. I want to hear a secret tape of the associated marketing exec meetings, what were they thinking?!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on matters of taste, has anybody had a drastic shift in recent times?

Make Your Own Perfume - The Magnificent Perfume Making Experiment, Part 4, The Result.

 The view from my apartment at 10am, a very grey Manchester.

Last night the clocks went back, this seasonal shift arrived in collaboration with a morning of grey be-fogged rain. It’s exactly the kind of autumnal gothic horror that I wrote about when I began to compose my first perfume making experiment. It’s timely that today, the day I proclaim it ‘finished’, is a drab Mancunian soak-fest. If you recall my intention, it was to make a perfume that possessed a sparkly top note and a sense of ‘light’ through it, to counteract the sense of entrapment that comes to those who suffer with light depravation in the dark months - the fragrance equivalent of Vitamin D. As a reminder, click here to read the first article.

I am delighted to say that I think it works!

Here’s the recipe to make roughly 35 ml (I know that’s a bonkers size but that’s how it worked out). 
EO = essential oil, PF = synthetic from Plush Folly

Top:
6 drops of Grapefruit (EO)

4 drops of Petitgrain (EO)

8 drops of Bergamot (EO)

18 drops of Rhubarb (PF)

15 drops of Aldehyde 2 (PF)

Middle:
3 drops of Orris (PF)

5 drops of Ylang Ylang (EO)

15 drops of Rosewood (EO)

Base:

12 drops of Vanilla Bourbon (PF)

10 drops of Atlas Cedar (EO)

8 drops of Frankincense (EO)

6 drops of Ambrettia (PF)

20 ml of Perfumer’s Alcohol (PF)

So what does it actually smell like? It’s impossible to review my own scent in the effusive manner that I write of the atmospheric effect of others. Though I do know that it smells original. Having experienced a lot of genre mutations recently i.e. amber this, oud that, it smells very different to current trends.  It does however have a slight feel of the Miller Harris creation - Figue Amere if the fig were replaced by rhubarb.

Rhubarb - green, sour and earthy, a delight to smell and eat.

The rhubarb is delicious. It imparts a sourness and earthiness that is recognizably rhubarb. Because it’s used in combination with equal amounts of ‘the green side of’ citrus notes (comprised of bergamot, petitgrain and grapefruit), it has a real sensation of cut sap and oily greenery. The soapiness imparted by the aldehyde softens the zing of the citrus and keeps it from being too acidic.

As the top notes evaporate you are left with a woody, soapy, sappy and (very vaguely) green floral scent where you can’t really pick out the individual notes. I think this is positive as the word ‘seamless’ is often used to describe harmonious scents where notes don’t jar for attention. A base of frankincense and cedar give a little weight to the otherwise flighty volatile quality. Although there is a hefty quantity of Vanilla in here, you can’t really smell it. It acts to ‘smooth’ the scent rather than literally smell of vanilla.

The beautiful (and endangered) tree from which Frankincense is harvested.

In the process of making it, a genuine intuition arose. After many initial experiments, I gained a significant sense of what to drop in next, or what proportions to alter. It was no longer a random trial. This experience has given me a great drive to play at perfumer again, with the next experiment (a woody coffee, as dark as number 1 is light) already sitting in the fridge waiting for my next move. I don’t think Odiferess 1 is a masterpiece. I think it’s a first attempt that’s inspired me to keep going.

The difficulty with creating your own scent is that you are inevitably going to compare it to your favourite perfume. Judged on it’s own merits, I feel Odiferess 1 is a curious and original creation. Hold it up against Mitsouko or Eau de Reglisse and it smells like the pointless kitchen lab foolery of an amateur!

If my experiment has inspired you to play at perfumer, here’s my advice based upon my own experience:

• Spend money, you can’t truly experiment unless you have enough notes to blend together.

• Unless you have cash to waste, consider how you’ll use the rest of the ingredients. I burn essential oils at home and make my own candles. My investment will become hand made Christmas presents.

• Read books. Mandy Aftel’s Essence and Alchemy is practical, informative and entertaining. She writes of the history and culture of scent with grand atmosphere and provides a ‘how to’ guide to creating your own scent.

• Start with ‘easy’ notes. Notes such as citruses, patchouli and vanilla are really easy to work with. Rare floral essential oils will cost a fortune and be hard to combine unless you know what you are doing, which I don’t. I really wanted to play with undiluted rose absolute and immortelle but managed to reign myself in before committing a frightening credit card transaction.

• Consider your aim. Are you making it for you and your friends, as a hobby or do you have a real desire to become a perfumer? I came to it from a ‘fun in my kitchen with cool stuff’ perspective so I won’t be devastated if it the resulting perfume is not a ground breaking master work. If you want to become a perfumer there are some restrictive issues to contend with, in particular, finance and EU regulations. You are going to need money and tenacity in addition to a natural ability to blend scent.

Readers, if you have made, or intend to make, your own scent I'd love to hear from you. For those who are inspired to have a go, I wish you a fruitful time!

I’m giving away a small sample of Odiferess 1 to a lucky reader. If you would like to enter the give-away, simply leave a comment below or at the facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/odiferess). 
I’m so sorry to my international friends but our postage rules here in the UK prevent us sending perfume abroad. Please do join in the comments though!

Make Your Own Perfume - The Magnificent Perfume Making Experiment! Part 2

You are reading part 2 of a series of posts entitled “The Magnificent Perfume Making Experiment!” If you haven’t read part 1 it won’t make any sense, for enlightenment click here.

After much delight tinkering around with pipettes and amber glass bottles (which I find appealing to the point of fetishism), I bring you the encouraging results of my first few weeks of amateur perfumery.

The joy of mad scientist equipment

My olfactory imagination pictured an effervescent sparkling scent, something to offset the grim menace of the upcoming winter. I suffer greatly in winter, being one of those for whom travelling to and from my day job in darkness brings a flattening of spirit. Winter nights often see me curled up in bed with a gruesome thriller and a peaty whisky by 9pm. I’d be fond of the life of a hedgehog. Were it not for the brief romance of Christmas, I’d be quite content to sleep in a deep pile of leaves for 4 months. With this in mind I want to play with natural aromatherapy oils that effect a feeling of enlivenment and happiness such as; grapefruit, bergamot and cypress. I see it essentially as a sharp chypre softened with a comforting woody base, something to bring about a beam to my grumpy November face.

My starting point was to create the base i.e. A pre-mixed solution upon which you can add extra notes. A useful metaphor would be to think of the base as the foundations of a house, the underground layer upon which you’ll add additional floors. This is how I did it:

• Cut vast quantities of smelling strips (from artist’s cartridge paper) and select combinations of notes to dip them into. After dipping 2 or 3 strips each time, fan them out and waft them across your nose. This enables you to make a choice of notes that work harmoniously ‘in the air’.

• Place 5 ml of perfumer’s alcohol into a small bottle and begin to add very small amounts of your notes bit by bit into the solution. For the synthetics you can use a calibrated pipette (with millilitres on). For the essential oils you can simply use the dropper in the bottle. As you add you’ll be able to sense when to stop by closing up the bottle, shaking it, then having a sniff of a strip again. Write down every single measurement as you do it. I really liked the combination of Plush Folly’s slightly floral and very bright Aldehyde 2 with various wood notes so I made several bottle variations i.e. A2 + cedar, A2 + rosewood, A2 + sandalwood etc.

• Stop messing with it and go to bed, leave the bottles alone for a few days somewhere dark and cool.

• Smell them again and consider where to go next, you can repeat the smelling strip fan process now using your favourite of the first blends alongside new notes. Split the blend into 2 bottles and experiment with adding another note or two to each one. Be prepared to pour it down the sink and start again when it doesn’t work (I attempted to add teeny amounts of castoreum to my blend. Just the very tip of a pin dipped into the bottle and added to the base caused it to emit a stench akin to multiple cattle farts).

• Leave it alone again for a few days.

• After some time I found success in the combination of A2 + rosewood + cedar which gave me a wonderfully deep woody vibe. Rosewood has a similarity to oud in that it possesses a slightly rosy sharpness but without the removal of all the mucous cells from the back of your throat. I vastly prefer it to oud. Alongside the cedar (the scent of opening a flat pack box of untreated wood IKEA furniture), it gave a rich gravitas to the blend. It needed a tiny touch of sweetness to counteract the sharp so in went a few drops of synthetic Plush Folly’s Vanilla Bourbon. This is exceptionally strong so be careful with not to obliterate the gentler natural notes. 

Smelling it tonight (about 2 weeks into the process) I am delighted with my base. Here’s the current recipe:

6 ml of perfumer’s alcohol (Plush Folly)

4 drops of synthetic vanilla bourbon (Plush Folly)

6 drops of aldehyde 2 (Plush Folly)

5 drops of rosewood essential oil

2 drops of cedar essential oil

My recipe, pictured with the terrible castoreum mistake.

This is a very heavy concentration that will need some serious maths work as future notes are added. I’ll ultimately use Mandy Aftel’s marvellous natural perfume making manual ‘Essence and Alchemy’ to determine what amounts will constitute an EDP or Parfum Extrait.

Tips:

Buy a lot of pipettes to avoid cross-contaminating your notes. Wash them in warm soapy water, let them dry, swill them in a little perfumer’s alcohol or rubbing alcohol to sterilise them.

Fiddle A LOT to get the right base, it is after all your foundation.

If you detest maths and adore stationary (this might be a female thing), invest in an object of desire for your record keeping. My gorgeous Moleskine notebook made recording measurements a pleasure.

A bizarre thing happened to me when I created my base, I could see clearly where to go next with my notes. It’s as if some sort of intuition occurred and stopped it all being the purely hit and miss testing that formed the multitude of sink fodder in the early stages. I can’t wait to test my ideas this week and see if any of them work.

See 'number 3', my chosen base in it's little bottle. 'Jumbled up' is a few discarded trials mixed together, it smells infuriatingly good and I haven't a clue what's in it..

Keep an eye out next week for an interview with Plush Folly’s Sally Hornsey where she speaks of her own adventures in perfumery. 

If you enjoyed reading this fragrant waffle, use the free subscription service (on the right hand side) to ensure that you never miss a post.

Make Your Own Scent - The Magnificent Perfume Making Experiment! Part 1

I’ve a damn good nose. Or so I think..

Having always been utterly obsessed by the scent of things and places, I imagine that given the chance, I could be a perfumer. This is a dream shared by so many of us, especially after the BBC televised a three part series about the industry several years ago. One episode in particular was enthralling, as Jean Claude Elena was shadowed at work with his fortunate apprentices. No one could forget the sight of this strikingly handsome fellow with his nose pressed to the metallic edge of his patio doors, inhaling deeply and speaking of the conceptual scent of ‘cold and smooth’ in his mellifluous French accent.

JCE at work, sniffing an asthma inhaler?

When researching my article ‘The Scent of British Spirit Part 3’ (click here to read it), I encountered Sarah McCartney of 4160 Tuesdays. As a more or less self taught perfumer, Sarah creates a splendid range of quirky but wearable niche fragrances that prove that you don’t need an extraordinary amount of scientific knowledge or years as an apprentice churning out flavours for laundry detergents, to create a fragrant delight.

Think about your existing knowledge, if you’ve been using Fragrantica and Basenotes for years you’ll already know many of the notes that form the top to base structure of a perfume. If you use aromatherapy essential oils at home you’ll have experience of which fragrances blend together harmoniously. The experience of years of sample smelling will have taught you what works and what doesn’t, both in terms of personal taste and generic success.

If we assume that we have a little talent, what we are really only lacking is access to the enormous range of ingredients that make up the ‘perfumer’s organ’ (which appeals enormously to my puerile sense of humour..), the masses of money that pays for endless revisions to our experiments and minutely accurate scientific measuring equipment. There is no way around any of these immense problems so we’ll just have to accept it and try to make something less complex than the professionals.

So, I’ve decided to have a go at making my own scent. As I’m hugely impatient, slapdash and overly optimistic, this could be a pit-falled adventure. It’s already gone dreadfully wrong with the spillage of a little aldehyde C11 on my fingers, queue copious gagging at the extraordinarily tenacious scent of undiluted plasticky whiffed torment!

I’ll be updating you about this adventure roughly once a fortnight as the experiment progress, but for now here’s how I’ve started:

 1) Last year I bought a tiny bottle of Agmark Mysore sandalwood essential oil and a bottle of perfumer’s alcohol. I used it to make a pure ‘authentic’ sandalwood scent. This arose out of discussions about the death of ‘real, i.e. Mysore’ sandalwood in perfumery. Priced out of possibility, manufacturers began to replace it with cheaper species from Australia. The blend was magnificent and possessed all the creamy, unctuous, softly wooded qualities that I remembered in Sandalwood scents of years ago. It felt like meditation in a bottle and fuelled my enthusiasm to create more.

 2) A few weeks ago I ordered a plentiful wodge of essential oils and absolutes from Neat Wholesale (see listing and link under the ‘shopping tips’ page). I couldn’t afford to buy any expensive florals (though I’d loved to have tried their Champaca and undiluted Rose and Neroli) so I stuck to a few that I have used and loved before such as Rose Geranium and Rosewood and a few small quantities of things I’ve never smelt before such Roasted Coffee and White birch. The sensation of smelling their Lavender Absolute (the purest concentration of Lavender) was extraordinary. This bright emerald green liquid contains so very many notes within itself that it was a stand alone perfume, lavender bright with a musky, mossy warm undertone that I’ve smelt in By Kilian’s Taste of Heaven and Caron’s Pour un Homme.

Some of my little bottles of EOs from Neat

3) I also made an order for synthetics with Plush Folly (again see the shopping tips page) who specialise in ingredients for making perfumes, candles, cosmetics etc. I ordered three types of aldehyde, a sample pack of animalic notes, some ISO e Super (of eccentric molecules fame), a musky ambrettia base and some perfumer’s alcohol. The box arrived at my work address and upon opening, stank out our tiny office. It obviously provoked disparaging glances and wrinkled noses from my co-workers as I ran to open the window. I think a little of the aforementioned Aldehyde C11 might have leaked. It wasn’t pleasant.

Tiny curious bottles of Plush Folly's synthetics

Upon arriving home, I started to mix small amounts of the synthetics with perfumer’s alcohol, to enable me to smell then without overpowering my olfactory sensors. The most exciting of these ingredients were the two musks – Castoreum and Civet. I handed them to my partner for his thought’s.

“This is civet, what can you smell?”

“It’s piss. Defintely piss, and erm.. that one we smelt in Selfridges, the brown one”

“The Francis Kurkdijan? Absolue Pour Le Soir?”

“Yup, think so”

“This is castoreum, what can you smell here?”

“Piss, piss and cowpats”

It was a fairly accurate description of the notorious ‘skank’ note that we enthuse over in it’s purest form. This maybe a revolting association but I imagine that either of these notes would beef up a soppy floral or add some quirk to a strong oriental base. I was impressed.

I was also mightily impressed by the Ambrettia base. My curiosity for this ingredient was sparked by my love of the ambrette note (derived from a plant called the musk mallow) that appears in my beloved Annick Goutal’s Musc Nomade. In actuality, the Ambrettia potion is both enlivening (bright, optimistic, sparkly, slightly floral) and grounding (depth, strength, powder). I’m looking forward to making something with a ‘vintage’ feel with this one.

Of the aldehydes, numbers one and two were marvellous, projecting an airy bright opulence, each with a distinct character. I imagine that these will ‘lift’ compositions beautifully if used sparingly. Aldehyde C11 upset my sensibilities so much that it went immediately in the bin, double bagged for the safety of never smelling again. I surprised myself in that I can cope with the smell of, in Andy’s words ‘piss’, but can’t cope with the smell of ‘plasticky ironing’.

4) I’ve made a beginning with the bases of two scents. The first (a coffee and woods combo) smells so good that for now, I’m keeping it a secret (sorry!). I’ll be splitting the base and fiddling with top notes over the next few days.

In the making of the second scent I’ll be revealing every step and ingredient in upcoming posts here at Odiferess, telling you of the successes and failures that will make this either a good quality, wearable scent or complete bin fodder. We’ll see..

Make sure you check back in regularly over the next few months to follow my adventure.