The Great Randello - the second of 10 Scents' Worth
The scent story
Not long ago, when I was about to give it up all and turn to
watercolours, or something else that isn’t regulated to the point of
strangulation by the EU, I was spending another evening attempting to get to
grips with the multilevel database bespoke software I use to check that my
scents are legal and produce all the paperwork.
I said to Nick Randell (AKA Randello), “Do you think I
should just pack it in?” and he said, “If you were going to give up, you’d have
given up long before now,” so I kept going, and a couple of sessions later I
cracked it: legal labelling and a nice list of EU allergens for the three
scents I was about to deliver to Les Senteurs. (Compared to the regulations,
making perfumes is a doddle.)
So I thought he deserved a scent. The Great Randello was a
Welsh magician, probably related to Nick as that’s where the London Randells
came from some generations ago.
In 2012 I went on one of Karen Gilbert’s five day courses,
which was wonderful. I needed to work with more synthetic materials - just
getting access to them is hard for little perfumers – and this gave me a good
crack at sniffing and using a load of things I’d heard of but not experienced.
One of the scents I made there I called my Friday Afternoon
Chypre, a dark woody mossy fruity concoction, and I was pretty happy with it
but wanted to do a bit more work. I decided to adapt it for Nick, taking out
the blackcurrant base I’d used (because I couldn’t find out exactly what was in
it) and adding a load of strawberry-toffee scent instead. The technical term is
an ‘overdose’; what this really means is that you accidentally shake the measure
a bit too hard and drop in three times what you meant to use.
The Great Randello turned out to be a deep dark chypre
inside a sweetshop.
The perfumery materials
The depth comes from oakmoss, opoponax, patchouli and vetivert.
In the middle there are clary sage, sandalwood, bergamot, synthetic musk and
ambergris. The fruity intensity comes from raspberry leaf absolute – which is
darned tricky to work with but I love it – raspberry ketone and a synthetic
which has an amazing fruity cinder toffee scent. Then on top there’s a citrus
blend I made up which includes lemon myrtle, lavender and tangerine.
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