Invisible Ben: 10 Scents' Worth story number six

The story

(Evil) Max and I both work for Ben who runs Afia, a brilliant, creative writing agency full of lovely people.  I do some copywriting for his website and language workshops for his clients. Ben took the team up to Langar Hall in Nottinghamshire for a meeting, and his 40^th birthday dinner. So I thought I’d make him his own special scent. Ben does lots of sporty things, and I’d never known him smell of anything but himself, so I decided to make him a body spray for after sport and showering. I wanted it to smell like extra added Ben, so he could use it to smell just like himself again, after washing it all off in the shower. Does that make some sense?

I like using cedarwood for skin scents, plus a couple of the woody smooth synthetics, and I added citrus fruits because I pictured him having an orange juice before going home. It was light and fresh and I was really fond of it. Using masses of originality, I called it Ben.

Well, he unwrapped it and just looked at me as if I was nuts, then smiled and tried to look happy and said, “Scent, errr, great! Thanks Sarah.” He’s a dreadful liar, but he was being kind. (Max, on the other hand, got really excited about the idea of knowing a perfumer, and Evil Max followed on from our conversations on wicked 80s men’s scents.)

I put it in the development drawer ready for later. Then I took it out and did a bit more work on it for the 10 Scents’ Worth project. I renamed it Invisible Ben for reasons that are probably obvious.

The materials

I’ve had to change it a little since the original. I love anthropogan because it smells like people (maybe that’s why it’s got the anthro prefix) but IFRA have banned it, so I put in copaiba balsam instead. 

Sandalwood, benzoin and opoponax (I love saying that out loud and it smells glorious so I put it in just about everything I make) and a synthetic musky/woody/softy scent give it the clean skin impression. 

Another change was adding a coffee CO₂ extract that Hermitage oils have just brought out, because Ben loves good coffee. I put in cognac absolute – birthday celebration – then orange, lime and litsea cubeba for the citrus fruit top end.

The Great Randello - a fruity toffee chypre

  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.

XHM2 - Extraordinarily High Maintenance: the story

10 Scents’ Worth

The stories

I never make a scent without a story, and with my crowdfunding project, they came from near and far.

So in order of how close my inspiration was…Here's number one.

1 XHM2 – Extraordinarily High Maintenance 

The story

I made this one for myself originally. I had this idea about using all my favourite materials, the ones I love most – all natural ones – just to see what would happen. This is not the best way to make a scent. Imagine what it would be like if you wanted to cook a meal with masses of expensive foods and nothing to lighten it. The same kind of thing happens.

 It was dense and flat and not much fun, but I kept it to see if it would improve over time. Well, yes. But it just became dense, flat and smooth.

I decided to open it up with some airiness and lightness. To do this, you bung in some synthetic molecules that stop in sinking like a lead balloon. It’s a bit like remembering to put the sodium bicarbonate in your cupcakes. That’s baking soda, for everyone who fell asleep in chemistry. With the synthetic chemicals they taste great; without them – flat, dense and sticky. It’s the same with scent. So it became XHM2. One half posh and heavy, one half light and lovely but a little airheaded. Put them together and leave it long enough and they blend to form something halfway decent, IMHO.

The materials

It’s got cedrat, coriander, cardamom, pink peppercorn, pink grapefruit, raspberry leaf absolute, oakmoss, opoponax, vanilla, rose geranium, rose absolute, davana, hyacinth and vanilla.

To open it up, I added cedramber and bergamot plus a dash of gamma undecalactone, the peachy one.