Lord's Jester

This week we’ve been preparing materials for the custom-perfume process. This process is the ultimate manifestation of the art in that, judging from which smells alone a person likes, a perfumer makes leaps and bounds to create a complete, bespoke perfume. Some perfumers like to do oodles of questionnaires so that they might better “get to know” a given client. Anya McCoy convinced me, rightly, that, since I’m not a psychologist or counselor, the only thing that matters to me is what smells a person likes. (My clients will get a brief five-question questionnaire, with questions like, “What color, if any, comes to mind when you think of your would-be perfume?”) Then comes a slew of individual essences to try (not a slew, 18 to start). The essences are anonymous to the client (only I have a record of what’s what). Depending on the sense I get with each individual, I then will send out a second batch of essences, judging from what a person liked from the first round.

These “essences” are actually diluted forms of each essence; that’s what we’ve been busy doing this past week, diluting aromatics to 10%. After a little give and take, we arrive at groups of likes and dislikes; I then move quickly to making attempts at perfumes, until we get one the person really likes. There are two things I’ll probably do to streamline the process: 1) knowing that I’m a good perfumer (I’m confident I’ll be able to customize for each person), I’ll put a limit on the number of iterations we go through (between three and five), and 2) make two price levels, one for inexpensive and common materials (benzoin, clary sage, fir), one for rarified and uncommon materials (flouve, boronia, honeysuckle). Most base-note custom samples I’ve found will need to be filtered; heart and top notes not so much (being, as they are, often from distillations; absolutes from solvent extraction have waxes and other gunk to make alcohol solutions cloudy and/or cause there to be a lot of detritus).

So far, I’ve got three female test subjects and two male. That should get the ball rolling. Just as my Australian professional-perfumer friend says accommodating changes in odor profiles of given aromatics is where the true art of natural perfume lies, so too I think it encompasses being able to do custom perfume, to get an olfactory sense of a person, to have the imagination to envision what smells might work on a test subject or client. This does take up a fair amount of time, and the process will be priced accordingly. Once you pay for a custom perfume, the recipe is secret, only for your nose and those you love. And refills, separate from the cost of doing the whole custom process, will be the same price as my regular perfume. Additionally, a client may get the perfume in any strength or forms she or he desires, pure parfum to eau de cologne, liquid and solid. As far as I’m concerned, this whole deal is going to be sheer joy. I can’t wait.

I now have at least a quart each of Ares eau de cologne, Heracles eau de toilette, and Zephyr eau de toilette. They’re waiting to be filtered; to filter that much perfume, one needs special equipment: an Erlenmeyer flask (mine is 500mls, about half a quart) with an air-evactuation nozzle, a Buchner funnel to fit the flask with a stopper, a vacuum pump to force air out of the flask and draw liquid down through the funnel (using the air-evac nozzle), and fine lab filter paper. My idea is that we can filter half at a time; that may make for a mess, but I doubt it. The night before one filters, one adds about a teaspoon of bentonite clay, shakes well, then stores the perfume in the fridge overnight. In the morning, all particulates and cloudiness will have dropped out of the solution and one can filter away. What’s left should be crystal clear.

I made a large batch of Heracles for one reason: boronia is expensive and hard to come by (this is my boronia perfume). If I’d made another test batch, I might not have had enough boronia to make a big batch (I probably would have had enough; I guess it was more that I wanted to try it). Several things about this batch potentially could be problematic: I adjusted the recipe by weight, the ambrette I used is brand new (it possibly has a different odor profile from what I’ve smelled before), and the boronia is from a new batch that I just received which definitely has a different odor profile from what I’ve smelled before. So the whole thing could be a wash; if it is I will have learned this lesson: be sure to make test batches with the ingredients you have on hand. The variation between different batches of the same aromatic material can be dramatic.

The one potential problem with Zephyr is that, I suddenly realized, this latest batch of orris-violet co-distllation smells quite different than the previous batch. I’m starting to realize that one should always make perfume with the materials on hand; one should _never_ expect that botanicals from different sources, or even different _years_, will smell the same. I’ve noticed this phenomenon with a few other botanicals I’ve gotten recently, things I had before but now are coming from a “better” source. Boronia, juniper, nutmeg, jasmine sambac, and cedar are a few that all smell different than what I had before, different but not worse; different enough though that recipes need to be changed/adjusted to make for a perfume that smells like what I want. With Heracles and Zephyr we made large batches without ever testing to see how they might have been changed. We can only hope for the best–and never do it again!

As one friend has it, this forever changing aromatic landscape is where the true art of natural perfumery lies, in knowing how exactly a given recipe must change according to specific changes in the odor profiles of components. Ares eau de cologne I’ve heard several positive reviews of (from men), and there are no changes to the recipe; I’m confident it will turn out right. As of now, I plan to send in six perfumes to the Natural Perfumers Guild  to gain the title Professional Perfumer (PP), all liquids: Ares EdC, Heracles EdT, Selene EdP, Demeter EdT, Chronos EdT, and Zephyr EdT (Zephyr used to be called Cuir du Farceur, and is my leather scent, with 19 notes altogether). Solid perfumes will come with my next submission: Anthea is my ode to jasmine (seven notes altogether), the point of Helios is to highlight patchouli with citrus (15 notes altogether), and Selene is a powdery carnation/orris affair.

That’s a lot to submit at once, but I’m certain I’m ready, and I have all packaging, labels, boxes, etc.; my view is it’ll be good to get the PP title sooner rather than later. This will enhance numerous aspects of the business, the price my perfumes will command at market, instilling confidence in potential customers, getting apprentices, etc. The hardest part will be getting ecommerce up and running; I can do it myself; it’s a matter of how long it will take. I want total creative control over how my web site works and looks. As with every other web site I’ve designed, minimalism is the operative word for me. Also I want it to be a “manly” site; that is, a site where men will not feel funny ordering. This will definitely not be a feminine site, no pretty flowers, no quaint but insipid imagery, none of that stuff. This will be utilitarian, elegant, and simple. Check out the beginnings: lordsjester.com.

Here’s my latest article for Fragrantica, a perfume site with more than 550,000 registered users. The editor added a number of gorgeous images to the text. (Link is Alchemy and…):

Alchemy and the Power of More (and Less):

There is one imperative with natural perfume, an artistic one. That some natural perfumes have aromatherapeutic value, while itself important, is not the point of natural perfume. I feel strongly that this art is the highest of all arts. I make this grand statement only because I myself have practiced numerous arts so I feel justified. I’ve been, and still am, a writer in various genres, but I’ve also been a professional photographer and graphic designer, a jazz musician, a spoken word artist, and an actor. In my mind, natural perfume ties all these arts together into a complex, incredibly rich, and emphatically spiritual endeavor.

For many of us, natural perfume is a multi-sensory experience, showing us colors and music and poetry. Needless to say, because of this fact, inspiration is never hard to come by. I know perfumers who base their perfumes on their favorite paintings, or their favorite classical music, or their favorite literary works. How could a perfume be based on such things? You see, this is where the magic of the art comes in: each individual decides for her or himself how, say, a sculpture might inspire a perfume. And we all have different sources of inspiration; for some it could be a beautiful lady (I myself am guilty here, as charged), or a beautiful day, or a play.

The possibilities are as endless as there are people on the planet, and certainly as rich as the wild earth Charles Darwin saw when he wrote, “It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.” Ah, yes, Mr. Darwin, but we natural perfumers have a purpose for much of what the earth provides. The real art of it lies in compounding perfumes which speak to, sum up, and reflect the various facets of this great blue marble, the memories, the joy, the fantasies. We all have fantasies and natural perfume, all of perfume, speaks to no one if it isn’t, even just a small bit, fantastic.

How does natural perfume work exactly? The gist of it is that you take a handful of aromatics and dissolve them in high-proof alcohol; solid perfumes are a tad different in that the aromatics need to dissolve in fixed oil. Many aromatic materials (but not all) need to be rendered usable before a perfume can be made with them. This means a hot-water bath must be used (benzoin, for example), the material must be diluted before use (orris butter, for example), or it must be macerated for some time in a substrate (ambergris, for example). I myself made my own ambergris oil-infusion, so determined was I to make solid perfumes with ambergris; I have the tincture as well.

In most cases we are on our own to render materials usable. From there, the building blocks are known as chords, or accords, one for each section, base, middle, and top. The conventional wisdom holds that a chord is three or four notes (see how nicely musical analogies work?); I use chords with anywhere from three to eight notes. I know I have my own ways of doing things. A perfume with 24 notes? Most perfumers balk at the idea, but in my experience that many notes are needed for a deep, bowl-you-over perfume experience. So the trick is this: learning to balance all that olfactory substance. The balance might come by way of contrast (ambergris and rose), or reiteration (rosewood and palmarosa), or a tiny touch of some particular ingredient (black pepper).

Natural perfumery is in fact descended from alchemy. While alchemy was considered part of science, many of the same principles apply: that apparent opposites might actually reinforce each other, that certain combinations are synergistic (patchouli, for example, has an amazing effect on rose; when the two combine, it suddenly smells as if you’re sniffing a dozen fresh rose bunches, or a hundred rose bushes), that less is often a lot more (of a particular ingredient). In our art, which is also partly a chemical science, a little bit can go a long, long way, and a lot of it simply can’t be explained.

The remake of Heracles is quite good. I don’t think the recipe is finished yet. I cut down too much on the black currant and not quite enough on the boronia. Also, I reversed the amounts of benzoin and labdanum, and while labdanum is also an excellent fixative, I prefer benzoin (for its fixative properties; labdanum itself is one of my top three favorite aromatics); I will return to the first way I did it. But Uta said she liked that it’s lighter than a lot of my perfumes; really, the trick is to make it, changed as above, in eau de toilette strength. It will be just right at that strength. This time, because boronia is expensive (I don’t want to waste any on another sample), I will change the weights themselves; I’ve grown accustomed enough with weight that I’m quite certain that will work just fine.

Helen, with 24 notes, is mysterious and fascinating, but it needs more time to mature maybe; it’s been three weeks but think, with that much olfactory material, the more time the better for maturation. Oddly, though it has only one note in it which might be considered edible, it smells highly edible to me. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it smells like some kind of fruit, or nut, or wine. It’s exotic, that’s for sure. Like some kind of exotic dried fruit. Maybe a cross between dates and raisins and earthy wine; a liqueur scent to be sure. After half an hour, it turns suddenly brighter, which is mystifying because the top is extremely bright; after a couple of hours, it’s mostly balsamic, which makes sense because three of eight base notes I consider balsamic. It has good lasting power, but it’s a tad odd, so whether or not a person would like it while it lasts is a question. We shall see.

In my opinion, the perfume I made with no top section is a total failure. It has no life. Perfumers add top sections with good reason. Maybe with synthetic perfumes it would work to have no top; with natural perfume, in order to make a perfume something with character, with resounding qualities, one really needs a top. This brew is just dead on the skin. It’s not that one smells nothing (as I had, ludicrously, feared); it’s more that what one smells is severely lacking an important piece–the top! I’ve learned from this experiment that a full and complete natural-perfume recipe _must_ include a top section. Otherwise, it’s quite as if one isn’t working with a full deck; the full impact of a natural perfume definitely comes from carefully planning each part, base as well as heart as well as top.

My feeling is that a lack of olfactory education leaves us unable to speak intelligently about that most important of all realms: what we _smell_. Here’s a very brief intro to olfactory terms. (This is reprinted, with permission, from Mandy Aftel’s Natural Perfume Workbook Level I.):

With each major category above, there are different subsets. For example:

If a person were to say to me, instead of, “Smells like my grandmother,” more succinctly, “This is a soft floral, with sweet woody overtones, and a touch of the animalic,” they would certainly have a champion in me for life.

My leather scent, Cuir du Farceur, is better than expected. For the first few moments it smells a little spicy; after a minute or two the leather doppelgänger creeps in, and it’s quite elegant. I’m really impressed with myself: I was able to intuit which notes would add to the leather effect with surprising precision. This is a perfume one would wear to meet somebody important; both men and women will enjoy this perfume. The question now is: which strength suits it best? It might be one like Ares (used to be Adam’s Amber) which I will offer in several strengths. Anya McCoy explained to me that a perfumer changes the basic recipe according to the strength of a given version; for example, it might be that one gets the sense the eau de cologne version of a perfume could use extra benzoin and lavender, while the eau de parfum version needs less of each. This is another area where I find I have excellent imagination; I can “picture” what needs to change.

I know now that I am nothing like other natural perfumers. For example, when I first started Mandy Aftel’s course, and read Essence & Alchemy, when she wrote about smelling a perfume while you’re making it, I found it didn’t work for me to do so; it took a couple of years for me to figure out that’s not the way I work. It does me absolutely no good to smell a perfume in process–all I smell is alcohol. I never really did much examination of individual extracts; others spend years just involved with individual notes. For me, from the beginning, perfumery has been about whole compositions; I have been concerned with making complete perfumes, all in one go. My perspective is that study of an individual extract does me no good at all. A given note will smell totally different in a finished perfume than it does on its own. Same for dilutions; some perfumers swear by diluting all aromatic materials; I _only_ pre-dilute those materials which I can’t use straight from the bottle (for example, orris butter, immortelle, and pine needle).

I am not trying to know individual components; I am aiming to understand how individual parts play in a finished perfume. So to “get to know” benzoin alone is a waste of time for me; I’m concerned with how it smells in a finished perfume. I have smells cataloged in my brain; I don’t need to be near my perfumer’s organ or extracts to compose a new recipe. My imagination for natural perfume is second to none. I compose in complete “thought forms.” Sometimes a given recipe fails; more often the finished product needs a little tweaking, more orris, less lavender, less in the top, like that. I make a perfume then wait two weeks to a month (perfumes with more notes need longer to mature than simpler ones); from there I can see what parts are working and what parts are not–by applying perfume to the skin, which is the only way to get a sense of a perfume, after a complete one mixes with skin chemistry. I don’t need to have an in depth relationship with, say, labdanum to know whether or not I used too much. It’s finished perfumes which concern me.

So how do I know I’m on the right track? Feedback from other natural perfumers. “Normal” people are not so reliable; why? Because olfactory education is non-existent–a serious thorn in my side. Despite the efforts of some modern philosophers, the olfactory sense is the highest of our senses, with more potential for sublime effects than any other. I know from experience that my methods are unique to me, and also that I can make perfumes with far greater longevity than most. Pleased is she who learns of natural perfume; this art, as it was practiced in days long gone, is truly sacred, inspiring us to live grander lives, helping us to sense honor, and grounding us firmly in beauty wrested from the earth. There’s a reason rabbis, priests, imams, and shamans were the original perfumers: sex and reproduction once were sacred endeavors. And (natural) perfume has always been about sex appeal. Now, if we only had olfactory language to use to talk about what we smell!

When I first started in natural perfume, about five years ago, recipes for me were quite strict, i.e. I had to use 60 drops aromatics in 15ml alcohol, had to have a top section, had to follow standard protocols. Now that I make perfume by weight (I still make samples volumetrically), everything has changed. I’m only worried about the total weight of aromatics; from there I can make any concentration, EdP, EdT, EdC, etc. I also am not so worried anymore about proportions of top to middle to base. Now when I draw up a recipe, I’m familiar with the odor intensities of different aromatics; I let that guide me in terms of proportions. I compose each section, look at odor intensities, and determine which part gets how much.

Recently, I was talking to Michelyn about a perfume with no top section, just base and heart. I have long thought of doing this, because often, when it comes to top notes, there’s nothing I really want on top; still, I’ve felt compelled always to create a top chord. However, recently Michelyn tried my immortelle perfume, Chronos, and her reaction was, “It’s fantastic, but I can do without the top.” Just the base and heart of that perfume are perfect; I added a top section only because I felt compelled to. No more. I’ve always been inclined toward base and heart anyway, and in truth, every note is in fact complete. Base notes contain base notes within them, as well as heart notes, as well as top notes. (Certain recipes of course do need a top.)

For example, with my osmanthus perfume, Phoebe (the latest version of which I’ve found to be delightfully powdery), the first thing I smell is osmanthus; I’m sensing the top notes of osmanthus which is, nevertheless, considered a base note. As to other perfumes, recently we remade Heracles, one of my boronia perfumes; it was a failure, too much black-currant bud and not enough boronia (17 notes all together). Another iteration is in order. Still waiting for the remake of Cuir du Farceur to mature. I am very hopeful about that one. On the NP email list this week, somebody asked what to do with failed perfumes. Anya McCoy responded that she does as the big perfume houses have always done: she makes “mille fleur,” which means literally “1000 flowers.” I’ve started a batch which I call 10,000 Flowers (in China they say 10,000 when they mean a whole lot; we’d say “a million”).

My article for Fragrantica, found at The Original Art of Seduction, was a big success. Anya McCoy, president of the Natural Perfumers Guild, raved about what I had written. Many other perfumers, natural and otherwise, were also impressed. Best of all for me, Mandy Aftel, the premier natural perfumer in the world, whose course I took and passed with flying colors, commented on the article; she too fairly raved, and said she was happy I’d be covering naturals for Fragrantica. The fact that _everyone_ was impressed I think bodes well for a natural-perfume presence in the main. I will see to it that no one forgets the way it used to be: natural perfume was part of the original arts of seduction.

I have written my first article for Fragrantica, a very large perfume web-site. My significant other, Michelyn Camen, invited me to try being a guest writer, on the topic of natural perfume. The publisher raved about what I wrote so I think there’s a good chance I will become a regular writer for them. I’m just a short time away from launching my natural-perfume business, so this couldn’t come at a more perfect time. Fragrantica has some 550,000 registered users, and I encourage all my friends to join. If you comment on this, my first article for Fragrantica, you will be entered in a drawing to win a jar of my fabulous solid perfume, Anthea (now in its third or fourth revision).

The remake of Demeter is perfect. I intended to brighten it and that’s exactly what I accomplished. Sandalwood in the base, orange flower in the heart, and neroli, templin (distilled from fir cones), juniper, and pink pepper (among 14 notes altogether) combine to make a perfume that retains the earthy, smoky, sexy nature of the original, while resulting in a brew not quite so dark as the original, with some lift. I also made it slightly sweeter with more benzoin. I’m also waiting for three other remakes to cure: Cuir du Farceur (my leather doppelganger), Heracles (my first boronia perfume), and Chronos (based on immortelle, one of my favorite extracts).

For my application for Professional Perfumer (with the Natural Perfumers Guild), I plan to include five perfumes, 3 liquid and two solid: Ares eau de cologne, Demeter (name might change) eau de toilette, Selene eau de parfum, Anthea solid (my ode to jasmine, sultry, erotogenic), and Helios solid (made originally for my father, who wanted a smell like the orange-patchouli candle he came across a while ago, which was not natural; it is extremely difficult to scent candles naturally). I am working now to get ecommerce up and running on the Lord’s Jester web site.

Michelyn is a very successful fashion and perfume writer. I am an esteemed natural perfumer who will soon be writing the great American novel, and plays, and will soon be recognized for 20 years of great poetry. If all goes well with Fragrantica, I too may become a force in the fashion world. Something tells Michelyn and I are going to conquer the globe. In the mean time, I will be madly working (it might take years) on a signature fragrance for her. Michelyn and I agree that the best art has always been inspired by love. Perfumers making perfumes for their lovers has a long, long history. Natural perfume has been about enhancing one’s allure since the dawn of civilization. Onward and upward!

This week I picked up a perfume we made when I was in Florida; I was calling it Euros, but I think I’ll end up calling it Cuir du Farceur (The Jester’s Leather). To me the first iteration smells leather like, but it can smell more so, somehow. The salient notes, out of 15, are pine needle, orris-violet, frangipani, and jonquil. I toyed with the recipe a bit, and plan to re-make it with my assistant next week, with a total of 18 notes. Tobacco, cedar, star anise, and black pepper might turn it into something more like what I’m looking for. Old leather does strike me as basically dull with just a hint of sharpness. Leather scents are quite common in perfume, especially men’s.

It finally really struck me how easy it is to make the different perfume strengths, eau de cologne, eau de toilette, eau de parfum (EdC, EdT, EdP), and parfum. I made an EdC once with 140-proof alcohol, but it doesn’t really work (the alcohol isn’t strong enough to dissolve some aromatics). From now on I will make EdC and EdT with 180-proof alcohol, and EdP and parfums in 190-proof. Once you have the right alcohol (to make 180 from 190 is easy), all you need is the total weight of aromatics; then you can calculate exactly how many grams of alcohol to add to make a given strength. I take it this is not the way most perfumers do it.

To this end, I got a nice digital scale which can weigh up to 1200 grams; the digital scale I have now is 100 grams max. It’s accurate to .005 grams, whereas this new one is only accurate to .1 gram, so the old one is for aromatics and the new one just for alcohol. In this way I can be ultra precise, as I like to be with most things (poetry not so much; precision has no place in poetry). Here are the sizes of containers I will be using (last week I wrote about it in ounces which makes no sense at all): liquids in 5ml open-top bottles and 10ml bottles with three kinds of tops (open, atomizer, roll-on), and solids in 7.5ml tins and 20ml and 30ml aluminum with white glass jars.

Last week a lady came to my house who has some renown as a perfume writer. She loved my perfumes, in particular the one I call Demeter (used to be called Blondie), based on tobacco, hay, and 14 other notes. [We are in discussions now as to the proper name for it.] She said, with a very large readership, that as soon as I get ecommerce going on my web site, she will write about my stuff. She said Demeter is one of the best tobacco scents she’s ever smelled. !!! Also, I sent some samples to a friend in Australia (Selene and Phoebe); her business partner said my perfume is in the same class as Mandy Aftel. !!!!! In natural perfume, there could not be a better compliment. Ms Aftel is without a doubt the best in the business, and founder of the Natural Perfumers Guild.

This week my assistant and I remade Demeter, and also Heracles. With Demeter, my goal was to brighten it up a bit, to give it some lift. To accomplish this, I added sandalwood in the base, and neroli, juniper, and templin in the top (templin is distilled from fir cones). We’ll see; I may go back to the first or second recipe. With Heracles, my goal was to tone down both the black-currant bud and the boronia, which were way too strong in the first iteration (which I called Down Under). Again, here, I took the total weight of the aromatics and calculated how much alcohol to add to make a light parfum. First whiff makes me think the black currant is still too strong. Time will tell.

I am simply overjoyed that I now have an ounce of orris-root/violet-leaf co-distillation; the only company I know who sells it has been out of stock for months. I can work magic with orris-violet, especially when combined with the orris dilution I now also have. A Facebook update: ‘I am beyond excited that a rare co-distillation is back in stock at Floracopeia. It’s like my life was on hold while they were out of stock. Magic has returned!’ And also: ‘I’ve discovered I have a sense of a certain completeness, knowing I have all the aromatics I need to make great natural perfume. I want for nothing if I can rest assured that task is feasible.’ I might even be able to get some more boronia soon.

Also this week I did more work on Lord’s Jester Inc. I got a corporate bank account, enlisted the services of an accounting firm, finalized packaging, etc. I will offer liquid perfumes in two sizes, .17oz and .4oz, and solid perfumes in three sizes, .25oz tins (cool retro tins that snap shut and are highly portable), .68oz and 1oz jars (great aluminum jars lined with retro white glass). The small perfume bottles have very small openings, small enough that you can turn the bottle over to put some on you finger, or put some drop by drop onto a handkerchief. [By the way, samples of handkerchiefs embroidered with the company name are on their way to me from India.] For the larger bottles, I’ve now got screw caps, spray tops, and roll-on tops; combined with a handkerchief, this will offer the user multiple options for application.