Design Your Own Perfume Invitation! - 23.1.10

For a milestone birthday last May, a friend bought me a voucher entitling two people to attend a workshop where you design your own perfume, bottle it, and even name it, all in the space of an hour! : - ) Clearly the creative process will have been compressed somewhat, with a few shortcuts taken, rather like the scent equivalent of a Betty Crocker add-an-egg cake mix. As the brochure makes it clear:

"Your signature blend will be formed from your choice of 18 exquisite blends....Each blend has been designed by a master perfumer famed for creating many of the fragrances that sell from high street shelves."

Once you choose your particular combination of blends, the consultant hosting the event will give you a choice of 20ml bottles and blend it for you. Then, having chosen a name for your new scent, you receive a certificate with the name on it and a list of the ingredients, so that you can go back in theory and obtain a top-up.

Also included in the experience is the option to purchase related products such as atomiser bottles, bath oils or creams scented with the fragrance you have just made.

The workshop will take place on 23rd January (Saturday) @ 12pm. As this invite is for two, and as the perfumista friends I know offline live too far away to attend, I thought I would offer the other place in the first instance to anyone out there in The Midlands, who could get to a location near Rugeley on the outskirts of Cannock Chase on that day.

Please contact me if you are free and interested, using the contact form at the very bottom of the home page. I will keep the place open till the weekend - in case people don't see it immediately - and if there are no takers, I will see if there is anyone in my "non-fumehead" circle of friends who might wish to go instead. Obviously I would rather someone came along who was "of the faith", even if we don't know each other!

Transcendental Experiences of 2009 - Meeting Bertrand Duchaufour

I still intend to compile a round up of my favourite fragrances from 2009, even though it is 10 days into January and a number of other blogs I follow have already covered this topic in spades. But at the end of the day these kind of polls are by definition a personal selection, so no two "Best Of" lists will be quite the same. And most of all I would like to do one as an aide-memoire to myself, my memoire being pretty shot at the moment.

But I am parking that idea for now, as I will need to hunt down a definitve list of all scents released in 2009 first before selecting my favourites, and thought I would turn my attention to another highlight of that year, namely my encounter with Bertrand Duchaufour. (With apologies to those of you to whom I related the story at the time!)

Back in the summer at one of the Basenotes mass sniffing events in London, we had been treated to a preview of the new Penhaligon's scent, Amaranthine. A number of us (including 100% of the women in the party, notwithstanding the fact that it was 11am in the morning and we had barely sipped our first glass of champagne of the day!) were dumbstruck at the perfume's originality and sultry beauty. Even the Penhaligon SA famously described it - without blushing - as "f***able". Then in September, one of the organisers of that event tipped me the wink about pre-launch parties for Amaranthine on consecutive nights in October at two of Penhaligon's London stores. Bertrand Duchaufour, the perfumer, would be in attendance to answer questions and autograph bottles. In a heartbeat I had booked my train ticket and arranged to stay at a friend's.

It was a wild, wet, autumn night, which meant that I arrived looking distinctly dishevelled and windswept, but on a selfish note, the weather also kept the guest numbers down, so it felt even more of an exclusive event. Ironically, my name wasn't even on the guest list (an administrative error, as I did book my place!) so I technically gatecrashed the party. : - ) When I arrived there was no one else there, and in the one and a half hours I stayed I split my time between talking in French to BD in bursts, then withdrawing if another guest walked in, and either talking to the sales assistants or a lady lawyer who worked next door, who had just popped in to see what the craic was. For obscure medical reasons she had no sense of smell whatsover (lending a darkly humorous touch to proceedings!), but wore Angel anyway for the hell of it.

I was so starstruck to be in the presence of one of the Premier Division of Noses that I cannot recall exactly what BD and I talked about, though I mentioned his recent Fragrantica interview with Michelyn Camen, where he went on record as saying that Dior Homme was the scent he wished he had created. We talked about my dislike of civet, which I wrongly referred to as "la civette" instead of "le civet". The French eat ragouts of "civette", which is a fawn. So I was basically talking about extracting a skanky musk from up Bambi's bottom! Then BD spoke in English when the lady lawyer joined us, and we evened the score in terms of linguistic near misses when he spoke of a gourmand perfume (probably Angel!) having "tasty notes".

BD also gave me a detailed run down of the notes in Amaranthine, of which there were predictably quite a few more than published - I remember tuberose and gardenia, and a whole clatter of spices that I have forgotten now. He explained his concept as being a creamy, white floral hung on a "green skeleton" and then dirtied up a bit.

It goes without saying that I bought the perfume, which BD dedicated to me in a silver pen - sigh! As importantly, he SMELT me several times on both arms - one wearing the parfum and one the EDP - and said that the scent smelt on me exactly as he had envisaged. It was gratifying to hear that I had textbook skin! : - )

I left on a cloud from which I have probably not yet quite come down. Amaranthine was my favourite launch of the year back in August when I first smelt it, and having met - and crucially been sniffed by - its creator, that top spot has been resoundingly confirmed...

Unidentified Perfume Object - Blue Grass (Or Is This Just Fantasy?)

The other night, both still in our pjyamas in the evening due to his and hers colds of depressing tenacity, Mr Bonkers and I were watching some footage of a Queen concert from Christmas Eve, 1975. This got me wondering what I was doing on that day, aged 16 as I would have been, and eagerly awaiting my haul of presents on the Big Day.

Well, according to my five year diary from that time, the first part of the day of the gig doesn't exactly make great copy, for I apparently "felt dizzy" and "hoovered my room". Things pick up momentum later on when I read a novel by Colette, decorate the tree and attend a carol concert.

Then my eye strayed to the entry for Christmas Day, where I list my gifts:

"Budgies (green and blue), white gold ring, writing paper, jigsaw, Goodies File, Hardy books, book token, perfume, hair curlers, handbag. Sung Eucharist at St George's. Turkey inedible. Did jigsaw. Named budgies Thaddeus & Joshua."

Well, after my successful mastering of turkey roasting this year, I would be quite interested to know why the turkey was inedible in 1975, for my mother was a pretty accomplished cook. But even more intriguing is the reference to receiving a bottle of perfume - at age 16!

This all took place...er...34 years ago...and I have no recollection of being given perfume, let alone wearing it. I have been puzzling over and over as to what it could have been, and so far have only come up with Blue Grass as a possibility, as that was the signature scent of my English teacher at the time, whom I considered to be the last word in elegance and style. But other than that, I am frankly baffled...

Anyway, in pursuit of my youth I have ordered the very bottle pictured from a vintage seller, for just £9 including postage. It is an original from that era, and I am fully prepared for it to smell more like silage than grass. The plus side will be to own a period bottle of what may have been my very first scent!

And I will leave the last line to Queen, from the track Killer Queen, Sheer Heart Attack being the first non-compilation album I ever bought...

Perfume came naturally from Paris (naturally)

Calendar Idea - With Perfume Bottles, Not Naked Firemen!

I am looking despondently at the complimentary calendar on my office wall, courtesy of a curry house in Birmingham. It's big, it's glossy, it features a different curry ingredient every month - January seems to be star anise - which I am guessing from the shape, not being much of a cook from scratch.

It is okay, but it doesn't move me, and I want my office calendar to be tasteful, colourful and MOVING! Past art calendars that fitted the bill have included Rennie Mackintosh, Paul Klee and William Morris, but I couldn't see any this year that I liked particularly.

So this morning I googled "perfume calendar" and "perfume bottle calendar" and the best I came up with was the Events Calendar of the International Perfume Bottle Association, which is something entirely different indeed. Yet when you think of the combined membership of sites such as Fragrantica, Basenotes, Nstperfume, PerfumePosse and so on, what a large target market that would be for a perfume themed calendar, selling for £10 or $15, say?

It could showcase a beautiful bottle for each of the past twelve decades (just about - we may need to resort to Jicky to make up a quorum!), which would be like that beautiful coffee table book by Roja Dove, The Essence of Perfume, effectively turned into a calendar.

Or I could see one comprising just Lalique bottles, or Baccarat bottles, or Bohemian crystal flacons, or pretty atomisers with puffers, or a mix of all four. Or you could have just Guerlain bottles of whatever provenance, or just "vintage" bottles from wherever, or "drugstore classics" (for a laugh and a bit of nostalgia!), or an iconic scent created by each of twelve well known perfumers, or one created by a perfumer in each of twelve countries (if there are as many nations of noses!), or even portraits of the twelve perfumers themselves, holding one of their creations - after all, there are quite a few of them who are easy on the eye and/or my personal heroes!

What do you reckon, folks? If it seems like a goer, I might start googling some calendar manufacturers next. I shan't suggest doing one of "naked perfumers" at this stage...

What A Lovely Surprise! He Thinks I Smell Nice - Wearing Perfume...

Still suffering from this painful blocked ear, and nearly didn't bother wearing perfume yesterday, then thought a dab or two just might cheer me up. So after a bath I applied the remains of a tube of Sarah Jessica Parker Lovely scented body lotion, sprayed the EDP on top and, freshly anointed, went downstairs into the living room, where the conversation went something like this...

Me: "Now you smell this, because it is a perfume I put on about this time a year ago and I am sure you said you quite liked it. Possibly because you couldn't smell it?"

Him: "Well, that's funny, because just as you walked into the room I was going to say that for once you do actually smell nice."

I proffered my wrist.

Him: "Yes, okay, it is a bit faint, but it smells of an expensive soap."

Which all figures really, when you think that my partner liked the fragrance of Heyland & Whittle Tea Tree soap on my hands, and has submitted to the recent soap gentrification programme more compliantly than I could ever have hoped for.

Now SJP Lovely is classed by Osmoz as a "floral woody musk", so maybe I should try him with a few more in this family? What he appears to be picking up on as "soapy" is what I would indeed call "clean and musky", as I don't generally like perfume that smells "soapy" in that aldehydic, sneezy way. Anais Anais is a case in point, or Serge Lutens Fleurs de Citronnier, which I so wanted to like on account of its pretty name. I also don't care for fragrance that smells soapy in an out-and-out detergent sort of a way, such as the new Byredo Blanche or L'Artisan's L'Ete en Douce - I agree with Luca Turin that the latter is "laundry-soap-on-steroids".

The funny thing is that SJP Lovely was the first full bottle I bought after this perfume hobby took a hold, so as far as my partner is concerned, I could have stopped right there! Well, Lovely is nice, but no more than "nice", and sometimes you want to smell of something a little more dangerous than soap...

In Sickness And in Death: Reasons To Be Scentless

Yesterday was a bad day. I woke up around 2pm, checked a couple of blogs, then felt so unwell that I went back to bed again, stirring briefly to read a bit of the weekend papers before again retiring to bed. I am currently suffering from swollen lymph nodes due to some kind of localised infection, blocked and sore ears and sinuses, headache and queasy stomach. I think some of those Christmas leftovers should simply have been left, rather than eaten... The sensations in my head were the worst part, though: it was so stuffed up that it felt ready to explode at any moment, and I would happily have agreed to have it chopped off. Though I might have regretted it later. Or not, as my partner helpfully pointed out.

I felt so out of sorts that I didn't apply any perfume yesterday, and believe me, I have to be really unwell not to do that. Last year's bout of flu was another occasion, plus the odd day written off to a migraine. A head cold doesn't normally deter me from applying scent, as I rarely lose my sense of smell, and don't feel quite as under par as I did yesterday.

I was trying to think of what other events apart from illness would deter me from wearing perfume. A really bad argument with my partner would - and has! Also the death of a close relative, though I lost both my parents pre-perfume mania so I cannot test that one out for real. The day my partner's father died I wore Ralph Lauren's Notorious, so he cannot have been close enough, plus I was in another part of the country at the time, which distanced me somewhat from events. Both my partner's mum and I wore scent to the funeral - Burberry Women in her case and PG Brulure de Rose in mine - but maybe scent on even such a sad occasion is only like adding a final touch to your outfit, and as such is a mark of respect.

I think if there was a nuclear holocaust I might also forgo perfume. I might even not get washed. How funny that an ear nose and throat ailment appears to have mushroomed into a consideration of perfume usage in apocalyptic scenarios. Clearly, this ENT business has affected my sense of balance...

A Musky Misadventure And The Virtues of Being Vertical

I am going out tonight with two female friends (the last of the festive shenanigans before I completely collapse from a mixture of staying up till eyeballs-on-stalks-o'clock, drinking too much and eating elderly leftovers). I fully intended to wear Penhaligon's Amaranthine, but managed forcibly to perfume myself whilst not splitting an infinitive (notwithstanding yesterday's disturbing tale of third party acts of fragrance GBH). All I did was pick up a silver atomizer of Ava Luxe's Gardenia Musk to examine the remaining level, whereupon the juice proceeded to dribble all over the desk and both my hands. So there was nothing more for it but to smear my neck in the stuff too and resign myself either to a novel layering experiment later on or a jolly good scrub in the bath.

Up to now I have stored my small decants and atomisers in a recumbent position in a couple of boxes, and it never occurred to me that they might leak while lying down. After all - at the risk of being indelicate - our menfolk typically take a leak in a vertical position. But perhaps my system is flawed after all. Though I am not sure that the atomizers would all stand up nicely if I tried to make them do so, owing especially to their varying heights, and possibly also to their differently shaped bottoms. Plus I would need a specific quorum for them to be packed so tightly that they stayed wedged upright. And the overall height might no longer fit the drawer/fridge shelf where they currently live. And I wouldn't be able to read the labels as readily, which are on their sides.

I'm making a strong case for the horizontal, aren't I? But be assured that the next atomizer that leaks will prompt a major Logistics & Materials Handling review.