Scent Story 5 - Shazam!

The story

I met Lila das Gupta, journalist, founder of Perfume Lovers’ London and Basenotes writer, at a one day course with Karen Gilbert on synthetic materials. Lila was working on her oriental scent for real oriental women. She’d made one at a previous workshop but had forgotten to record the materials she’d used so after creating a tiny bottle of her perfect signature scent, she’d no idea how to make another one. 

A bit later in the year, I was round at her house for my Basenotes interview, and she brought out her magnificent collection of amber and oriental fragrances. The problem, I thought, was that the classic orientals were developed in the 1920s by European men who’d never been to the Orient, and had some very odd ideas about eastern women. Lila wanted a scent for real oriental women, to celebrate her 50% eastern origins – and she wanted me to make it for her. (I was stunned, honoured and scared at the same time.)

(The reason that Shazam! isn’t further down the geographical inspiration list is that Lila’s house is just a couple of miles away, over the river from mine.)

So I went for it. This is a deep amber, made with vanillin and labdanum, with piles of Middle Eastern sweetness and spicy resins, plus a dose of incense. Lila hasn’t smelled it yet. I’ll do an update when she lets me know what she thinks.

The materials

The classic amber smell (not ambergris, that’s different): vanillin and labdanum. My chocolate note, cocoa absolute (which I think smells like bacon on its own at 100% strength, but only one other person has ever agreed with me) plus caramelly ethyl vanillin.

For the eastern spice market, you have patchouli, frankincense, cardamom, clary sage and cedarwood. Pink peppercorn, holy basil, bergamot and juniper berry give it a spicy lightness.

Who Knew? Scent Story number four

The story

Still in the same family, Nick’s cousin’s twin wanted a scent for his girlfriend. We had an afternoon sniffing materials and I made up some samples using the ones which Katie was drawn to. We started with two variations and left them three weeks to see what happened.

Just because two things appeal to you, that doesn’t mean they’ll smell good together, so I played about a bit with proportions. OK, a lot. I ended up making another three that I liked, and posted them off to Katie for her to wear for a few weeks and see which appealed.

In the end we both preferred one variation, but I wanted to make a couple of adaptations because I wasn’t quite happy with it. This is the result.

The name Who Knew? is short for Who Knew I Liked Roses? Katie was convinced that she didn’t like the scent of roses, but she liked them when they were part of a blend.

The materials

Katie picked out green tea absolute, vetivert, benzoin, the thing that smells a bit like fresh sea air but needs to be used very carefully or it’ll smell like a lift full of fully suited estate agents, caramel and roses.

I added some sandalwood and cedar, plus vanillin and some other rosy stuff, natural and synthetic.

10 Scents' Worth backers - let me know what you think.

Says Alice - scent story number three

The story

At Karen’s course (See The Great Randello story) one thing that she and I played with – quietly in the corner while the others were getting the hang of things - was a base that’s rumoured to be at the centre of a lot of high street perfumes. 

(When we talk about a base, that doesn’t mean a base note, it means a blend that makes a recognisable accord, which you keep as a standard tool in your perfumery toolbox and use in different creations. It saves starting from scratch every time. I often like to start from scratch but most professional perfumers working to a client’s brief don’t always have time for that so their bases come in really handy. You build up your own library of them, and I added this one to mine.)

Karen hadn’t put it into practise before, so we mixed it up, then I added a few fruity features and a flower or two and Lo! - we had a scent that could have fitted nicely into a couple of well known ranges.

The base is kind of an industry open secret, made with three well known synthetics plus one natural material, but I’ll not be the one to give it away. Besides, my version is very probably different from the original. You could wear it by itself, and I'm sure some people do. I named my version Mr Fixer.

Then Nick’s cousin came to stay, and he was looking for a scent for his sister Alice’s 21^st birthday. I took my base, then added some fruits and an accord I’d been working on. This is the part that makes it different from the high street stuff. It’s rose absolute, jasmine absolute, honey absolute and sandalwood essential oil – the seriously costly stuff all in the same bottle. I can’t stand jasmine by itself, or jasmine soliflore perfumes, but I do like to use it at strengths that make a difference to a scent but don’t dominate it.

For me, the natural materials give a scent a soul. Synthetics can smell lovely but they just don’t do anything apart from smell. The naturals make you feel different; that’s why it’s such a shame that they are being restricted and gradually driven out of perfumery. But that’s another story.

The name, Says Alice, is borrowed from A.A. Milne’s poem about Christopher Robin's nanny.

The materials

On top of Mr Fixer, we have grapefruit, peach, rose, sandalwood, raspberry, mango, honey and jasmine.

Do please join in. If you've tried Alice, I'd love to hear what you think of it.

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.