Being Legal

That on the right is a one litre bottle of Lady Rose Lion (Monkey Unicorn) made by me a couple of weeks ago. It needs to hang around in that form for another month before it'll smell just right. The materials will macerate, mix together and combine to make a smooth lovely scent.

I know this because I've done it before.

Lady Rose Lion (Monkey Unicorn) is made with lovely things like rose absolute, jasmine absolute, honey absolute, patchouli, oakmoss and ladbanum. It also has a sparkle of gamma undecalactone, a peachy material that doesn't exist in nature, and Iso E Super, another synthetic that's woody, musky and subtle.

Without the two synthetics it wouldn't be as lovely as it is. It would be a bit heavy and dull, hard to wear. It would also be outrageously expensive.

But today's post is not about the synthetics, because it's the natural materials which are causingme the grief. I could make a whole perfume with just the Iso E Super and sell it perfectly legally. (Someone did, and hyped the hell out of it.)

No, it's the rose, jasmine and oakmoss that are causing me grief, and causing the same amount to every perfumer in the EU who loves using natural materials. They are restricted, just in case they give someone a rash. It's true, they might. But I can wear oakmoss at 20% concentration my skin and I'm fine. That's 50 times the EU legal limit.

Every wondered why you can no longer buy something at perfume strength, but you can get Eau de Toilette. Ever wondered why a lovely scent from the 90s disappeared entirely in the 00s? That's the new EU regulations. And they're going to be even tougher from 2013. It's partly safety, but it's partly the perfume people not wanting to tell you what they put in their scents.

Anyway, I've found some great techies who make software linked to the databases I need to produce my materials safety data sheets. The software will tell me if I've got too much of a material in my formula, so I can readjust it to make it legal. It costs several arms and legs, but if I want to sell through shops, I need to have my certificates. (A bit like people who make great biscuits then get an order from Waitrose, you're suddenly up a league and enveloped in legislation.)

So not long now, and I'll be in that nice shop who've been chasing me since April to get five of my scents. I'll keep you posted.      

Spend it like the 70s 7: Smelling like the 70s

I usually write about perfume elsewhere, but this week it's crossed over into this part of life.

As soon as I get onto eBay to sell things - which I'm doing at the moment, honest I am - I start to glance at other stuff.

And I got it into my head that I wanted a bottle of 1970s Diorella perfume, the one I discovered when I was 16 and wore for years, until it seemed to disappear and I forgot about it and bought something different. 

In those days most people rarely had more than one bottle of perfume at a time, and you wore whatever you'd been given for Christmas. Generally I got something in a twist-up stick from Avon, then there was Aqua Manda, with its daring ad slogan "Love me for my body". It comes up on eBay occasionally but I can't bring myself to pay £50 for it, so I'll wait for a car boot find. My gran - my dad's mam - used to give my mother Lentheric's Tweed for Christmas. My mother, with her perverse way of looking at the world, decided that this was because Grandma McCartney didn't like her. I think it was because she used to thank her so convincingly that my gran was convinced, so she went back for more every year.

My mother also had a bottle of Chanel No 5 which had come from my French penfriend's family. It was MASSIVE, and it just sat there. I think she somehow didn't feel that she was the Chanel No 5 kind of person. So she saved it for best and best never happened. Later they bought her Givenchy III and L'Air du Temps. By that time she'd actually started to wear them occasionally.

Perfume has changed in lots of ways, physically with reformulations, and in the way we buy it. We would dab it on carefully, on special occasions because it cost loads of money. It came from smart department stores, with cream carpets around the well lit perfumery booths. These days, pretty much everyone can afford a bottle of scent and you can get it at Boots and Superdrug. Posh brands and bankable celebs licence out their names to massive marketing companies. The materials costs have been cut to be competitive and the individuality and character have been sucked out of scent. They are now mass market, so they've got to be innovensive to 98% of scent buyers.

Back when I first got my Diorella (as described elsewhere) I'd saved up my holiday money, and a lovely Scottish women at a Dundee department store helped me choose. It was so beautiful I fell in love at once. I'm still in love with it. I was delighted to find out that it's recognised as one of the all time greats, but that's not really the point. The point is that I can't live without it.

Your scent shouldn't be something you can just try on and throw out, something you quite like on paper (in both senses of the phrase), shell out £15 for then get bored with. Your perfume should be something you feel passionately about. And let's be honest, women wear perfume because they love it, not because they think it'll help them be more attractive. Frankly, we don't give a monkey's about that. In fact, I know women who only wear perfume when they're out of their partners' smelling distance.

I now own some reformulated* Diorella, newly released by the LVMH empire. It's OK, pretty good even. But from eBay I got my hands on half a 150ml bottle of the 1970s stuff. Its bright top notes might be a little less buzzing, but after 10 minutes you've got the orignal beautiful smell. It's supposed to be Eau de Toilette but it lasts all day. That's another difference between now and then. Now, give it 20 minutes and modern commercial scent has all but vanished. They call it "fine fragrance" but most of it's not.

So now we have a handful of bottles hanging around until we give them away or pour the juice down the sink and recycle them. There's no connection between the nose and the heart. So I ask you only to buy scent that sings to you, that murmers "love me love me love me" when you put it on your skin. Forget the paper. And wear it to please yourself, every day if you like.

*Reformulation. 

Right, that's where it started,  but then I'd put some searches into place. And I got a little obsessed with smelling the before and after versions of perfume reformulations. EU regulations and US recommendations have all but forced perfume companies to take oakmoss out of scents; this is vital to the depth and darkness of classic 60s and 70s formulas.

The accountants have forced perfumers to find less expensive ways to create something that smells almost the same as the original. And let's be fair to the health and safely people; some very early scents had beautifully smelling materials in them that were plain straight poisonous, and some that weren't biodegradable.

If you used to like Coty's L'Aimant in the 70s you will hate it now. The current version is a despicable shadow of its namesake. Likewise Chantilly, the creamy, fruity, flowergarden of a scent made by Houbigant, now a heartless stink made by Dana. (Who? Exactly.)

So this week - even though I've sold my university probability theory book on Amazon for £30, dropped stuff off at charity shops, been to the recycling centre and got 16 things up on eBay - I've had a bit of a setback. Because in California is a man called Jaime who's inherited his grandfather's perfume warehouse, which had stuff in the back corners that had been there since the 1930s. A small box of those will be crossing the Atlantic heading for Ealing very shortly. The man even had some original Trophee Lancome.

But it's not just for me. My plan is to decant it into little bottles and share it with the scent lovers of the world.

And if you do want to find the perfume love of your life, it's still possible. Just bear in mind that if you want a really top pong, you'll probably have to spend time searching, and save up your pence like we did in the 70s.

That way, it's been something worth the bother; there's a connection to it. It's a relationship that's going to last, not just one more forgettable purchase on the road to filling the unfillable desire for more stuff.


Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I do think that if a thing's worth having it's worth trying a bit hard to get the right one.

Wake Up and Smell the Roses

This week I was invited to spend a morning working with business students, pushing them to invent a new product to raise money for a good cause, and create the campaign to go with it. Our two hours were organised chaos, just the way I like it, and by the end of the session we had three decent ideas which I can present to the Lush creative team (if the students remember to email them to me). One man was the bounciest, noisiest and most enthusiastic; he got his idea through by sheer determined but good-humoured domination. When I worked as a lecturer, I was always told to make sure everyone got an equal hearing. In real life, if this had been a Lush recruitment session, he would have been the one who got the job.

That evening, I was in the smart end of Victoria, Belgravia perchance, at the delightful little posh scent shop, Les Senteurs, for their 25th birthday celebrations, Marie- Hélène Rogeon of Les Parfums de Rosine and her expert perfumer, François Robert, came to talk about their range of rose scents. Marie- Hélène has a passion for roses which she grows in her own garden. She also has a perfumery heritage; her great, great grandfather made Eau de Cologne for Napoleon III. When she recreated designer Paul Poiret's 1911 perfumery, she invited François - already a respected 'nose' - to develope fragrances to match the widely varying scents of her own roses. As they talked about their different rose perfumes - one that smells of oranges and lemons (and roses of course), another of mint, then ginger, saffrom and even chocolate - a picture developed of their creative process which goes something like this.

Marie- Hélène: I've a rose that smells of lemons.
François: That's impossible. Roses don't smell of lemons.
Marie- Hélène: No really! I'd like you to create a scent that matches my lemony roses.
François: Roses smell of rose.
Marie- Hélène: I'll send you some of them.
François (as he opens the box of roses): OK, I see what you mean.
Result: Un Zest de Rose, a fresh, light lemony rose fragrance.

After going through a similar process with the ginger scented roses, the sand roses that smell of sea salt, the mint ones, the blackcurrant and the ginger ones, François Robert was convinced. Roses don't just smell of roses.

So, after a couple of glasses of Les Senteurs' delicious champagne, I asked M. Robert if his advanced technical training had shackled his imagination. He laughed kindly and explained that in perfumery, there are two rose scents: absolute and essence. Rose absolute is light and fresh. Rose essence is deeper and heavier. Both are excruciatingly expensive. Working with Marie- Hélène had obliged him to accept that the rose's natural fragrance is rather more intriguing and variable than he had imagined. He's off to visit David Austin's extraordinary garden soon but said that his favourite is the simple rose that grows at the roadside in hedgerows. He also thinks that unscented roses are pointless, no matter how beautiful they look.

Marie- Hélène and François make up a creative team which works beautifully. Passion, inspiration and confidence, matched with technical pefection, skill and even more (but quieter) confidence, Marie-Hélène knows what she wants and François Robert knows how to create it. The result: works of art. (IMHO.)

There are three parts of creativity: ideas, skills and the ability to get it done. Sometimes they exist all in one person. Sometimes it's a duo, sometimes a trio. When it's successful it can turn into a whole company. Occasionally creative people are criticised for not having all three. Don't let that put you off. Spot your strengths and find people you can work with who have the ones you lack. Then things start to happen. What you do need, like Marie-Hélène or my bouncy business student is the determination to go get 'em.

Footnote: If you think that wearing scent is a trivial luxury, bear in mind that the world of fine perfumery fills fields with flowers, bees and birds employs Europe's travellers to pick the petals and changes our mood for the better. Put one one your Christmas list. Don't buy a big bottle of the cheap stuff instead; get a small, precious pot of the real thing.

www.les-parfums-de-rosine.com
www.lessenteurs.co.uk

On perfume. (It’s not Tuesday, I know, but I was busy.)

The word inspiration also means breathing in...

When I was a kid, women had one bottle of perfume and wore it on special occasions. You put it on after your best clothes and your earrings. You dabbed it on occasionally until it had turned into something that looked lovely but smelled a bit like vinegar. (We didn't know in those days that scent deteriorated in daylight so our mums would take it out of the packaging and stand it on their dressing tables to impress visitors.)

My mother had one bottle of Chanel No.5 that my French pen-friend's family had given me to bring back to Geordieland for her. It was massive. There is stood on the modernist dressing table, decomposing nicely until it smelled foul, but as we didn't know what Chanel No. 5 was supposed to smell like, she wore it anyway.

For an ordinary Sunday tea with friends or coffee at a smart cafe, you'd wear Avon or Lentheric that someone had got you for your birthday.

When I was 16 I bought my first bottle of proper scent. We were in Dundee, at a department store; we were holiday nearby. I'd just sat my exams and was about to go into sixth form, sufficiently grown up, I'd decided, to wear a beautiful fragrance. I'd saved up; I had cash. Looking back, I appreciate that the saleswoman was very kind to me. (Since then, I've met some apallingly snooty scent sellers.) She enjoyed my excitement and treated me like an adult with opinions of my own. She let me try several scents, gradually finding out what it was that appealed to me and finally took out her Diorella tester.
"I think you'll like this," she said, "It smells to me of overripe peaches." She was right, super-right, more right than I'd imagined possible. She had found me the most overwhelmingly gorgeous scent. It was simply the most beautiful smell that had ever wound its way to my olfactory nerve endings. I wanted to jump into its fragrant cloud and inhale forever. I was totally faithful to it for four years.

After that I was seduced by Chanel Cristalle, Yves Saint Laurent's Champagne (which was surpressed by France's Champagne producers then reappeared years later as Ivresse). Guerlain's Eau de Fleurs de Cedrat distracted me for a while then I dabbled in sundry citruses.
Decades after I found my partner perfume, I went searching for another. I have many fragrant friends, including the one and only bottle of Lynx Sarah McCartney - really - but I found the liquid love of my adult life in Paris, on another quest, at a small shop that my husband found for me. He tells me he doesn't regret it.

Editions de Parfum Frederic Malle is an interesting place. The chap himself invited the world's top perfumers to create any scent they wanted to, with no restriction on cost. Natural materials vary between £5 and £2000 a kilo. Synthetics are cheaper and that's what you get in most of the 21st Century scents you'll be attacked with as you cross the threshhold of a department store perfumery.

There we were in the small, dark, intensely modern shop. To smell the scents, you sniff a column of pure, fresh air perfumed only with the fragrance of your choice. You smell the effect you will have as you waft by. Once you've sniffed, the chamber is whooshed clear, ready for you to smell the next one. Just like my first time, the assistant asked me to describe the scents I usually like and I told her that I wanted one that reminded me of red berries. She filled the tube with Lipstick Rose and I fell for it instantly. Now, I carry it with me everywhere in a small, black metal tube and sometimes I allow other people a bit of a squirt if they ask very nicely. Their Dans tes Bras perfume reminds me of the way I used to smell at the end of a day at the beach: sea water, suntan lotion, skin, damp sand, sunsets, happiness. I'm very fond of that one too.

I still dabble, notably at B Never Too Busy to be Beautiful, where the stunning scents (also made with no limit on materials costs) are the best value for money that you will find in the world of fine perfumery. I love Superword Unknown and Two Hearts Beating as One. L'Artisan Parfumeur has several that I love, including Bois Farine ("Biscuits!" said my goddaughter, Bella) and Vanilia.

The thing about scent is that is it evocative, hard-hitting in an intensely emotional way. The nerve endings for our sense of smell are unprotected from the big wide world, unlike touch where skin is a barrier between the stimulus and the brain, so it deadens the feeling. The place we first detect a smell is close to the emotional centre of our brains so we are vulnerable to the effect of a stray smell that takes us inawares.

Find a scent that makes you smile, lifts you up and takes you to a pleasant place and you'll have yourself an emotional time-travel machine, an instantly intoxicating, inspiring tool. Dab, inhale, wait, create. I think I'll just have myself a quick helping of Lipstick Rose as I settle down to write. That should last me the morning.

Footnote: the film
Seek out a copy of Jasminum, a Polish film about perfume, love and other things. Ignore the badly translated subtitles and use them as a means to indicate what the characters really meant to say. I'm waiting for someone to watch it and bring out a Bird Cherry fragrance.

Footnote 2: the shops
Buying scent is not everyone's idea of fun. If you'd like me to help you, email and I shall. Really. First stop is Liberty, London W1 and head for the Frederic Malle collection on the ground floor. Say hello to Peggy and Albertino and tell them I scent you. Liberty's perfume collection is marvellous, but the service is unpredictable and you do need help. You might find a helpful, knowledgeable chap, but you might not. Ormonde Jayne in the orange Georgian arcade off Bond Street is just lovely too. Department stores are difficult. People are there to sell their particular brand not help you in your quest. The Arabian perfume shop opposite Selfridges on Oxford Street is an experience, and their scents are beautiful too. When you're in Paris, go to Detaille, Rue St. Lazarre. In New York, you want Bond No. 9.

Footnote 3: I mean it about helping you out. When you find the scent you were born to wear there will always be a beautiful place you can go to cheer yourself up, rain or shine. Now that I've found mine, my quest is to help the rest of the world find theirs.

PS By the way, I recently rediscovered Diorella. Although it's slightly different from decades ago (they reformulate now and again) it's still marvellous and makes me feel as though I've just passed all my O levels and my life is just beginning.