Making Stuff

  

I’m a painter, and have just moved my studio from the “bonus room” in my house to a space at a new arts center. For the first time in years, I have room to work. I’ve played around with making room scents before, but it helps, a lot, to have a good-sized space.

Like many of you, I’m in a strange position regarding perfume reviews. The mainstream fragrances coming out now are deteriorating in quality. Just as perfume bloggers predicted a couple of years ago upon hearing about the new IFRA regulations, much of it is purely synthetic, and in spite of that, it doesn’t last long. Niche perfume, once the alternative, is often priced in the stratosphere now. Sure, I can order little tiny samples (.7 mls, something of a new standard). I don’t think these do a scent justice, though. They’re certainly not enough for a proper review, in which one experiences the scent for at least a few hours. So I’ve become more resourceful, trading and buying splits, and swapping.

Lately I’ve become more interested in essential oils. I’ve been mixing custom blends with them. I still have the vexing problem with botanicals; they don’t last on my skin. But these are ambient scents that can be used as hair or body oil, in a room diffuser, and so on.

Most people I know who “do” essential oils wear one or the other. It might be patchouli or lavender -- the two most common I’ve seen -- and they stick to that one. It might be an aromatherapy concept, like the use of lavender as a relaxant. They buy them already mixed, usually at health-food stores. 


I began to wonder about mixing custom blends. That’s what I’ve begun to do, combining botanicals I already have and even some aromachemicals for longevity, with jojoba oil, and testing the mixes in a small diffuser. Mine is about the size of a doughnut, with a warming element that plugs into an electrical outlet and a shallow well for the oil. It takes awhile, but I can scent a good-sized room this way. (In the case of orange blossom, a good-sized house!) When it’s time to leave, I’ll often pick up a few drops of the mixture on my fingertips and apply it to my hair or skin. Or I’ll wipe the well out with a paper towel, and crumple it to put into a drawer as a sachet, or just leave it on the entryway table as a sort of room sachet.

I’ve experimented with making a chypre base from the classic chypre ingredients -- landanum, oakmoss and bergamot, with a drop of patchouli. Or ambers, using the resins, and vanilla. Rose-based scents. And so on. It’s fun. It feels like play. 

There are all kinds of references and resources available; recipes, discussions of the ingredients and so on. There are botanicals companies who will sell you a sample, sometimes just a drop, for a couple of bucks. Since these are pure and can be mixed with quite a bit of perfumers alcohol or oil, it’s an economical way to learn. (I can’t imagine paying the going rate for quantity on orris butter, but I can afford a drop of it!) I think it also teaches you what professional perfumers have to go through, with their tiny ingredients budgets. 

I suspect that I’m not the only perfume blogger who does this. Once you get used to a life surrounded by fragrance, exploration just happens. 

How about you? Do any of you mix your own?

Resources for botanicals and essential oils: (there are many, these are just the ones I’ve used): Eden Botanicals, Anatolian Treasures and Snowdrift Farms (for perfumers alcohol) and The Perfumer's Apprentice, for just about everything. 

The Bible: Essence and Alchemy, by Mandy Aftel, and the Anya's Garden web site, from Anya McCoy.

The photo is from the classic Mel Brooks film "Young Frankenstein."

Special Valentine Edition: Vintage Must

When I was in my late twenties, I lived next door to an older Englishwoman who worked the perfume counter at Saks in Beverly Hills. She would feed my cat salmon croquettes, so I usually knew where to find him -- at her back door -- and she would bring me samples of all the latest perfumes. 

It’s hard to imagine this now, but there was a time when perfume companies actually gave out samples of extrait. I think back on some of the stuff she gave me. Diva, Moschino, Nahema -- Chanels, Balmains. You get the idea. I still have a few of these, but they’re cooked. I didn’t know back then that you weren’t supposed to let perfumes sit in bright light. I kept them in a silver bowl on my dresser, which was next to a south-facing window. The horror! 

Anyway, she gave me a big sample of Le Must de Cartier Parfum. I made it last.

The modern version of Must that Luca Turin called “cheap Russian chocolate” is a sort of generic, overly sweet amber which hardly resembles the original at all. It was one of the first decants I ordered, when I discovered decants, and that was when I also discovered that some perfumes weren’t quite the same. All I knew about Must back then, and it was all I needed to know then, was that it made me feel like a messy, luscious early-eighties femme fatale. That’s powerful stuff.

People who don’t wear perfume fail to appreciate one very important thing. It’s not about smelling this way or that way to others. It’s about feeling, and projecting, a certain persona. If you feel beautiful and alluring, it gets out there. Others pick up on it. It’s the real reason for perfume.

The Must, to me at 28, smelled like a night spent in bed, not alone. So I’d wear it when I went out, which I did a lot, because I worked in the music business and had to keep up with the new. I had a taste for the underground, too. (Last night, “Less Than Zero” was on and I watched it for a few minutes. Remember the scene where the couple combs late-night L.A. , looking for their coke-addled friend? All the speakeasy clubs and so on? Uh-huh; I recognized every one of them.) But if I knew I’d be going to a place where all the women would be wearing black, I’d sometimes wear white -- and Must. Look like an angel; smell like the devil herself.

In one of those strange synergies, I’d been expecting a package from a reader who had seen a comment I’d left somewhere about the original Must, and offered to send me a mini -- of the perfume! I forgot to pick up some mail, but remembered this morning, and there it was. (Thank you, Sharon! Your generosity overwhelms me.)

Alright, already, what does it smell like?

Galbanum. Musk. Amber. Leather. Tobacco. Vanilla. More.

The torn-leaf galbanum hits first, and then the leather. It’s not a bitter overdose of isobutyl quinoline, but something smoother and deeper. There are ambers, but they’re not sugary. Musks, deep down. Opopanax. (I’m still not the greatest at identifying “notes.”) But I can tell you that it’s a rich, not sweet, complex, dark, after-midnight scent, similar to vintage Shalimar but with a smoother ride. I guess if I had to classify it now, I’d call it a leathery Oriental. 

Of course, back then I just knew it smelled goooood...and made me feel, well, I already mentioned that. 

I’ll wear this the next time I go out, with my husband, to whom I’ve been married nearly twenty years. I was wearing Must the night I met him.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody!

(Check here Tuesday, Feb. 15 after 6 a.m U.S. Eastern time, when I’ll post the name of the winner of the Barbara Bui and Miller Harris samples.)

The painting is “Love on the Lookout” (some sources say “Cupid on the Lookout”) by William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1890. Image in Public Domain, from WikiMedia.

Sore Subject

I was working, doing consumer counseling, the day in autumn, 2008 that Lehman Brothers fell apart. The phones lit up with calls from elderly people begging us to reassure them that their retirement savings would be safe. I went home that day, fixed myself a nice big cocktail, and wrote "Fiddling While Rome Burns" for this blog.

The post was really about my own feelings of guilt, writing and obsessing about a luxury item while it felt like the sky was falling. We don’t talk about money much here. It’s taboo, in a way. We all know perfume is a luxury item, and if you can’t walk the walk, don’t talk the talk. But I’m not much of a spender, myself, especially since I’ve amassed a pretty sizable collection, mostly though bottle splits, fleabay, discounters and the like, and an even larger collection of decants and samples, through purchases and swaps. I laugh now when I think about my sticker shock -- just over 2  years ago -- at the sight of a $150 price tag for a bottle of EDP; that seems quaint now, since Barney’s New York is charging $300 (plus ever-obscene New York taxes, and shipping) -- for 100 mls of  Frederic Malle’s “Portrait of a Lady.”

Here’s the thing though. “Portrait” sounds like something I’d love, and I plan to sample it. So a little while ago, I went to my favorite samples/decants site to order some. And saw that their price for a 1 ml sample is (are you ready?) $8.99! 

You know, I don’t really think I can spend that on 1 ml  -- of anything. I have the $8.99, (plus shipping) but it just doesn’t seem right.

So I did a little price-checking around here and there. “Portrait” can be had in 50 mls, though not at Barney’s, apparently. Les Senteurs, in London, has it. At the equivalent of today’s Euro/dollar exchange rate, the cost would be $181.70, plus  overseas shipping, no doubt; my guess would be pretty close to $200 total. LuckyScent doesn’t carry Malle.  They do carry “by Killian” though, whose newish “Love & Tears Surrender” will set you back around $225 if you buy it from them and $228 from by Killian’s online site, for 50 mls, plus shipping. Samples on fleabay? None, except for a few of the more popular Malle scents like “Carnal Flower,” which is selling at $19.99 for 2 mls. Courtesy of “Fell Off a Truck, Inc.,” I suspect.

The quandry here, for a perfume collector, is this: it’s increasingly silly for me to buy a full bottle of anything. No matter how much I love it, I have quite a few bottles of things I also love, and I doubt if I’ll ever use up all the decants and samples. If you like perfume, some, and like to wear a “signature” scent, then a $300 bottle might just make sense; at $3/ml, sprayed generously every single day, it’s going to last you nearly a year; with normal use patterns, probably closer to two. The Love & Tears by Kilian --  the one that costs $225-8 plus tax &; shipping -- is an outlay of 75% of the cost of 100 mls of the “Portrait,” for half as much fragrance. OK, so I’m splitting hairs; the point is, do you love it? Say you can’t live without it? Have the means to buy it? Do -- just don’t go into debt over it. Me, I’ll get a decant (probably not this one though!) or wait for a bottle split or manage to procure a bit of it in all the ways I’ve learned...or I’ll just live without it. Sacrilege! I know. Go ahead. Revoke my perfumista card. 

It may be that, if in fact we are all writing for each other (“preaching to the choir” as they say down he-ah) the high-end perfume companies know we aren’t the ones out there buying those $300 bottles (or $720 ones, in the case of Clive Christian).  We might buy one and -- the horror! -- split it, though.  I read somewhere recently that the fragrance market pie will ultimately be divided into a huge slice of cheap, synthetic “designer” and celebuscents for the hoi polloi, a smaller one of outrageously expensive niche fragrances for the tasteful wealthy, and a tiny slice for anyone in between -- a fitting metaphor for the state of things in general, imho. (I hope that the artisanal lines will be able to step in there, but the expense of the raw ingredients makes their product pretty pricey, too.) I see it happening now, when a fine-fragrance line blithely doubles their prices in two years. The price of a piece of cake loaf of bread has gone up, but not that much!

For this reason, I find myself more interested in and writing more about vintage perfume. It can still be found reasonably, although it’s a lot of work. But that's ok. This is still a labor of love. As in any long-term relationship, though, I’m seeing more flaws that I did at first.

How about you?








Pile of money photo by Olfacta. Use it if you like.

La Rose Jacqueminot: Coty's First Perfume

My first sniff of “La Rose Jacqueminot” was from a sample vial. Few perfumes have surprised me as much as this one did. It smelled so modern. I had been expecting, oh, something ghastly-sweet, old-fashioned and of its time. This, instead, smelled timeless.

La Rose Jacqueminot was the perfume that the young Francois Coty threw his famous tantrum over, after an unsuccessful attempt to sell it to the Parisian department store Le Grands Magasins du Louvre. He smashed the bottle on the floor, drawing a crowd of women demanding some for themselves. (By some accounts, there may have been some hired frenzy-starters in the crowd.) In this unlikely but imaginative way, the Coty company was launched.

Nice story. I’m more inclined to believe it now than I used to be.

The bottle I have looks like it’s from the early Eighties. There’s a bar code on the bottom flap of the box, which is made of soft paperboard with slightly embossed printing. The “Div. Of Pfizer” sticker on the bottom means it was manufactured sometime between 1963 and 1992. 


Obviously, this is a rose fragrance, and there are violets, and maybe a bit of carnation; hints of green and spice and, definitely, some civet in the base. I don’t smell any “old aldehydes” here, either, but the bottle came from Alaska, so perhaps wasn’t exposed to much heat. The scent, though, is less about “notes” than about a feeling, a gestalt.

When I received this last week and immediately applied some, at first I thought I’d been duped. It seemed too subtle for an eau de parfum, and I wondered if the seller had diluted it. I was busy, though, and went on with my to-do’s. A short while later, I became aware of the most wonderful floral haze surrounding me. I felt like I was walking inside a rose-scented cloud. The perfume had bloomed, and now it was flowing all around me.

I’ve tried so many perfumes, hundreds and hundreds, some with no sillage, some with way too much, but this particular effect was new to me. I thought of two other perfumes I’ve sampled, YSL’s (vintage) Paris and Rosine’s La Rose, both of which are rose/violet powerhouses. I’ve smelled ionone, the synthetic violet aromachemical, from my perfume notes kit, and violet soliflores, and rose attars, soliflores and absolutes, and all kinds of rose-based perfumes, and there are not many I like this well.

How this stealth blooming quality was achieved, I have no idea. There is little information available on this scent. My bottle is probably between 25 and 30 years old. The rise-up-and-envelop action happens whether the scent is dabbed or sprayed. And it lasts, for hours.

This won’t be one of those the-past-was-better laments, because there are lots of great rose-based perfumes out there, vintage and modern -- (most of) the Les Parfums de Rosine line, many niche specialties featuring rose and vintage treasures like L’Arte de Gucci. I was merely curious about this one, until I smelled it. And realized that it could be more than a relic. Back and forth I vacillated, the usual fleabay dilemma, but when a fairly reasonable bottle showed up, I grabbed it. Now I feel like I own a piece of history. Best of all, it’s a wearable one!

Do you have a favorite rose perfume? What is it? Leave a comment by midnight, Monday, Dec. 6^th, U.S. Eastern Standard Time. I’ll do a drawing and send the winner a sample of La Rose Jacqueminot. 

The painting, by John Singer Sargent, was done in 1904, the year La Rose Jacqueminot was (by most accounts) released. Titled “Lady Speyer,” the portrait’s subject was Eleanora Speyer, daughter of a Prussian noble who fought in the Civil War. She shared superficialities with most of Sargent’s wealthy clients, but was very accomplished on her own. She was a virtuoso professional violinist and a Pulitizer Prize-winning poet who only began writing after her children were born. 

La Rose Jacqueminot shows up occasionally on auction sites. The prices vary, but it’s generally $2 to $3/ml, sometimes more. Some sample and decant sellers on the perfume forums have it, too.

Thanks to the website "Cleopatra's Boudoir" for providing information about the scent and its history.

Outlaw Perfumes: Cannabis by Dupetit

Cannabis by Dupetit

Perfumer: Alfredo Dupetit-Bernardi

“Hey bud, let’s party!” 

“That was my skull!”  

(both lines from the immortal character Jeff Spiccoli, played by Sean Penn in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High”


Cheech: "It's Dave. Lemmee in, man! I got the stuff!"
Chong: "Dave's not here, man!"

Cannabis, by dupetit, does smell like the Evil Weed. Not Humboldt County skunk, though, more like a nice homegro -- er, never mind.

Actually, this is great-smelling stuff. It’s citrusy, like grapefruit, with a smooth, rich base, redolent of tolu balsam and perhaps vanilla, although that’s not listed in the notes. At the first instant,  the “bud” note is obvious, but then it recedes and becomes one instrument in the chorus. If I was smelling this blind, I’m not sure I’d even recognize it, as such, but since I know it’s there, it’s obvious.

If you’ve been to California in the last few years, you know that, with a doctor’s prescription, one can walk into a “dispensary,” offering many different variations on cannabis, labeled as to taste, strength and effect. Without editorializing too much, this is civilized. I’m surprised that, in the recent election, the same state that put Governor Moonbeam back in office also defeated the marijuana legalization initiative, but hey, that’s California. (And I like Jerry, make no mistake.) Just imagine the tax revenue from that industry, in a state desperate for tax revenue? Well, it makes no sense, nothing does in the US at the moment, but I digress.

The perfumer, Alfredo Dupetit-Bernardi, makes a good point in his literature. He says that if this proposed IFRA no-no list goes through, instead of substances tested for thousands of years as perfume ingredients, we will instead be spreading on skin, and breathing, untested substances of unknown origin. He also likens the IFRA’s efforts to control perfume ingredients to the way cannabis became outlawed in the 20’s and 30’s, with lots of media help from the Hearst corporation (and, though he doesn’t mention this, good ol’ Harry Anslinger and the FBI) thereby ending its use for recreation, but also medically.  Interesting that medical use has gained the Evil Weed its new foothold in quasi-legality.

I’d wear this fragrance. In fact, I will wear this fragrance. Just not to the airport.

As always, the notes on the IFRA's proposed no-no list are given in red italics.

Notes:

Basil oil (holy), Bay oil (West Indian), Bergamot leaf oil, Birch tar oil, Citronella oil, Clove oil, Geranium oil, Ginger oil, Grapefruit peel oil, Jasmine Sambac absolute, Lemon peel oils, Lemon verbena absolute, Lime peel oil (expressed) Mace oil, Nutmeg oil, Orange blossom absolute, Orange leaf oil, Orange peel oil (bitter) orange peel oil (sweet), Peppermint oil, Rose absolute, Rose oil, Rue oil, Taget (marigold) absolute, Thyme oil (thymol CT) Tolu balsam extract.

A Promising Development: Atelier Cologne

Presentation means a lot, don't you think?

When looking through my samples haul from Sniffapalooza, the one package that caught my eye most came from the French company Atelier Cologne. Wrapped up in glassine and tied with a purple satin ribbon was a series of five post cards, in individual envelopes, each containing a generous sample. 

Most of the time, samples are given with a little card, if that, and not much else. A list of “notes” doesn’t mean much, as they are often couched in overblown phraseology like “gentle white woods in the rain” or “a rainy spring day in Monet's garden."

Whatever. 

These are different. Each postcard is a scenario, a desk or tabletop. A collection of objects, designed to evoke a time and place, and to give information about the scent. There are five of these colognes, and the cards convey a the idea of a journey. Brevity allows me to show just one of the cards here: “Oolang Infinity” (image above).

Here we see an antique typewriter, on which someone has been writing a script or play in an old-fashioned serif font. A leather-bound notebook and horn-rimmed reading glasses. A glass of whiskey, with ice. Fountain pens. Bowls of potpourri, or possibly tea. A passport wallet, tarnished silver objects, a blue light bulb. Folios, cards, paper. And -- almost as an afterthought -- a bottle of cologne, just one of the objects, a supporting player, not the star. A writer’s desk from another time. 

The fragrance itself is an exploration of, as the name says, Oolang tea. It’s strong, laced generously with bergamot and neroli, but not musky like Earl Grey. This is a cup of tea meant to wake you up, get the juices going, as they say, to be used as a writer uses tea or coffee. Very Anglo, manly, colonial: Rudyard Kipling’s desk. (Not sure what the blue light bulb is about, though -- any guesses?)

Each of the five fragrances has, as its calling card, one of these scenarios. For “Orange Sanguine,” which opens with perfect replication of a jug of fresh orange juice, it’s a breakfast table at an Italian seaside villa -- shells, starfish, coral, driftwood -- and a yo-yo, another odd object to guess about. Tea, again; a postcard with a scene of an Italian fishing village. For “Bois Blonds,” we see an antique movie camera, a compass, very old binoculars, a map, dice: an explorer’s belongings. The scent is of sweet tropical woods, a bit of incense, orange flower and vetiver. For “Grand Neroli,” the most feminine of the scents, a bohemian woman’s vanity table: an antique mirror with rococo frame, flowers, shells, silver-topped powder jar, whimsical ceramic Siamese cat. The scent is a mix of citrus, orange blossom and a little amber, reminiscent to me of a morning in Redondo Beach, the water still placid but the sun already strong. “Tréfle Pur” is shown to us with a tabletop, an antique photo, sprays of ivy, a silver hurricane lamp, pressed fern frond in a frame, stuffed tropical bird, old books; the scent (“trèfle” is French for “clover”) a bracing green tonic. It’s violet leaves, new-mown grass, bitter orange, spices, moss and musk.

I love these postcards, and the scents. They’re as refreshing as the visual concept. They’re obviously made with fine, some natural, ingredients -- the website says “Grasse-sourced” -- and, for colognes, long-lasting, even on my skin. 

I wish all perfumes were presented this way. I’m really tired -- and I bet you are, too -- of perfume advertising consisting of silly posed supermodels and pouting, staring celebs. Spare me! This is the art of fragrance, presented as, well, art. Beautiful objects painting a portrait, not just of a smell, but of an imaginary wearer, a touch on a shoulder, not a hammer to the skull. I hope we’ll see more ideas like this.

The details:

The postcards were conceived and assembled by Nathalie Cassegrain, a set designer, and photographed by David Meredith.

These “cologne absolues” are prepared in 12 to 20% concentration, quite high for cologne, yet the prices are reasonable: between $145 - $175 for 200 mls. (That's right: 200.) All are unisex. 

Notes include:

For “Oolang Infiniti”: bergamot, oolang tea, tobacco, jasmine, guaic wood, “blond leather,” vetiver. Perfumer: Jerome Epinette (Byredo’s “Bal d’Afrique” and “Gypsy Water.”)

For “Trèful Pur”: violet leaf, freshly cut grass, clover, bitter orange, cardamom, neroli, “Patchouli Moss,” basil. Perfumer: Jerome Epinette.

“Bois Blond”: “unique and precious woods,” incense, orange flower, vetiver, neroli, pink pepper, musk. Perfumer: Jerome Epinette.

“Grand Neroli”: orange blossom, musks, petitgrain, bergamot, galbanum, vanilla, neroli, birch leaf, “white amber.” Perfumer: Cecile Krakower (Mane Yu, and, er, Paris Hilton “Fairy Dust.”)

“Orange Sanguine”: orange, orange peel, geranium, jasmine, “amber woods,” tonka bean, sandalwood. Perfumer: Ralf Schwerger (Malle’s “Lipstick Rose,” Hermes “eau de Merveilles” (with Nathalie Feisthauer) and the currently controversial "M Mink," for Byredo.

Disclosure: I got this package at Sniffapalooza Fall Ball 2010.