Scents of Identity: Silver Fern

'Scents of Identity' was the culmination of our 9 months' residency at Studio One Toi Tu, but it was a progress report rather than anything hugely significant. It involved some raw materials, some experiments showing wildly varying degrees of success, and a perfume called Silver Fern.

Silver Fern captures the scents I remember as a kid in the 70's at my nan's state house in Mt Roskill. It's a fougere, with fresh lemon and grapefruit layered over lavender, oakmoss, pine, and vetiver. It smells like citrus trees in a mossy garden by a pink-flowered hedge. It brings to my mind the silver dollar tree ("Imagine if every leaf really was a dollar!") , and the perennial pile of lawn clippings, as well as the rotting monkey apples my sister and I threw at each other, killing time.

That house is long gone - the tenant on the other side lit a fire that got completely out of hand - and there are other houses there now. But I smell this, and I'm back. The past is another country, but perfume really can take you there.

The Perfumer Is In

In residence, that is - I'm one of four Artists-in-Residence at Studio One Toi Tu for the next nine months. It's tremendously exciting and I'm enormously grateful to the lovely people at Studio One and the Auckland City Council for the opportunity.

I'm ensconced in one half of The Brick House - yes, it's former life was exactly what the colloquial suggests it was - and it's a tiny space but wonderful to work in; I can sit in one place and swivel, everything at my fingertips. The project I'm here to pursue is of course NZ perfumery. More to come about that.

Studio days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Drop me a line if you feel like catching coffee sometime.

Spring Workshop: The Floral

Saturday, September 10, 2016, 10 am - 1 pm, Studio One Toi Tu

Of the five main fragrance families, the floral is the best beloved. Endlessly versatile, used in both masculine and feminine scents, floral scents make up the majority of perfumes today. In this workshop we’ll look briefly at the history of the floral family, then concentrate on some of the beautiful natural aromatics that are typically used in creating these fragrances, such as rose, geranium, jasmine, tuberose, and ylang ylang, We’ll explore blending accords, and you’ll make your own floral perfume to take home. 

Please bring a pen; all other materials supplied. Maximum 12 participants.

This workshop builds on the material we cover in the Introduction to Natural Perfumery workshop, but it is not strictly necessary to have done that workshop to participate.

NZ PERFUMES

What's distinctive about our place, our climate, our landscape, and our culture? How might that smell as a perfume scent? Welcome to the new frontier in perfumery. In this hands-on workshop we'll look at the state of perfumery in 2016, discussing some general trends and new directions before focusing on our ideas of what a "NZ perfume" might smell like. We'll look at some NZ-specific scents and perfume materials, then work individually on a perfume to take home.

Those of you who know me know how passionate I am about developing a specifically NZ scent/perfume culture. So I'm really really excited about teaching this NZ perfumes workshop in a few weeks (July 2) at Studio One Toi Tu, Ponsonby Rd. It's a world first! There are still a couple places left, so if you're keen to come, contact the lovely people at Studio One, http://www.studioone.org.nz/booking/  

Parsonsia heterophylla, native jasmine

The King and Queen of Flowers

I love the scent of jasmine. Jasmine is known as both the king and queen of flowers, and the cliche runs that there is no perfume without it. Certainly to very many noses, it's a heavenly scent: sweet and intoxicating, with creamy green facets and a kind of musky undertone.  That undertone owes a lot to the presence of indole and skatole, aromatic organic compounds that are both - surprise! - found in feces, as well as other flowers such as ylang ylang, gardenia, and tuberose. It's the skatole which smells of shit (it's named for the Greek word for it), while the smell of indole in isolation has been described as smelling more like ink (the word comes from 'indigo' and 'oleum') or mothballs. 

Of course, the wonder of these aromachemicals for us as perfume lovers is not really the way that they smell isolated, but rather as facets of a fascinating whole. Maybe for every three people that swoon over the scent of jasmine, there is one who sniffs in disgust... I don't know. I must be somewhere in the middle, for despite the fact that I declare myself a lover of jasmine, unblended I usually prefer the greener, spicier jasmine sambac to the richer jasmine grandiflorum, which always shocks me with its lasciviousness; rot and decay lurk just beneath the heady sweetness. The scent of jasmine is very Baudelairean, I think, reminding me of the poem, Une Charogne , that is,  A Carcass. (You can read it in the original French and in several translations  here.)

Cheerful jasminum polyanthum is blooming everywhere now that spring is just about upon us; it's a pest plant here in Auckland! It's scent is lovely, though. I am tincturing some, and I'm planning to try an enfleurage, too. Enfleurage is the traditional way to extract jasmine's scent; however the extreme labour-intensiveness of this technique has seen it replaced commercially by solvent extraction. But it still takes up to 1000 kilos of jasmine flowers to make one kilo of jasmine absolute, hence its costliness (currently about $370 NZD for 25 ml). Both jasmine sambac and grandiflorum are at the heart of Iris Moss, and of Violet Moss, too, though in smaller quantity. 

Ethical Civet

A little while ago, I read an interesting blog post by Dan Riegler of Apothecary's Garden on 'ethical civet'. Civet is a substance secreted by the civet cat; the civets use this secretion to mark their territory, but perfumers have long prized it as a fixative that imparts a sexy, dirty muskiness that attracts some and repels others. As with so many industries based on the exploitation of animals, however, the production of civet traditionally has been pretty cruel; so much so, that most perfumers today choose either to exclude it from their palette, or use civetone, a synthetic version.

The Western boycott, however, hasn't benefited anybody except the big companies who do still buy civet - very discreetly indeed - at the lowest possible price. As Dan relates, captive civets are still kept in appalling conditions by farmers, most of whom remain desperately poor, the price of civet having plummetted due to low demand.  There is hope on the horizon though; he and others are working to establish a model farm in Ethiopia, in which civets are kept and treated humanely, and the farmers are paid fairly.

After a lot of mental churning, I found that I agreed with Dan Riegler. It's like supporting free range farming even if one is vegan. One might wish that no-one eats any animals at all, but as that's clearly not going to happen anytime soon, it is far better to support good living conditions for farm animals, I think, even if slaughter is their ultimate fate, than stand aside altogether. So I put my money where my mouth is, and bought a tiny amount of the ethically produced civet Dan brought back from his latest trip to Ethiopia. It's tincturing now. I reeled when I first smelled it in its raw form, I must say - it's overpoweringly fecal, and yet there is a fascinating complexity to the scent, which, after a time, smells also rather like jasmine, and gardenia,and honeysuckle - white flowers which contain the (natural) chemical indole - just as feces does... It's weirdly compelling, and I'm looking forward to working with it, actually.

No question that this is an ethical issue, so your comments and opinions are especially welcome :)

Civet cat, from the 1857 classic, The Art of Perfumery and the Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants by George W. Septimus Piessse.

The civet cat - not technically a  cat at all. (Wikipedia Commons)

All Is Vanity

I've just put some vintage Vanitas compacts on the site, and it started me thinking about the notion of vanity. Obviously, the word vanitas on a perfume compact case isn't much more than a knowing nod to Beauty. But being the Latin for that loaded word 'vanity', it inevitably recalls the saying (biblical!)  "all is vanity" .

It's also the name of a particular kind of still life, popular in the 17th century, that depicts great beauty alongside such delights as skulls, wormy apples, delicious bread moulding,and divine flowers decomposing. These kinds of works are - at least they were in the 17th century - supposed to remind one of mortality, and therefore of the ultimate futility of all one's thoughts, hopes, and deeds... I find that on the contrary, they remind me to live in the moment (and to refuse to accept the moralizing of bigots, religious or otherwise :))

Anyway, the vanitas painting here was done by the Dutch painter Maria van Oosterwijk. Born in 1630, she made her living by her art. That's always inspirational. And, fun fact that I have just discovered, she painted Vanessa atalanta (Red Admiral) butterflies into most of her major "still" lifes. Brilliant!

Vanitas Still Life, 1668, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Summer Daze

I think it's been three weeks since we've had rain - unheard of in rainy Auckland - and the scents of summer here in Waiake - wine, roses, sea salt, stonefruit, seaweed, warm earth, grass, and Mediterranean herbs - are intense. The baking-hot, lazy-by-necessity summer days have been perfect for reading, swimming, and the traditional January dreaming,plotting, and planning.

2014 was a big old year. I started a business at last and dared to start calling myself a perfumer. Fleurs du Mal attended the wonderful Auckland Fair in early December; it was a gorgeous event that I enjoyed very much. (Lots of glamorous people, it's rare in our casual city to see so many stylish folks in one place!) And there was fun and lovely feedback from another couple of markets during the Christmas rush, too.

My friends Michael and Stephanie kindly took this pic at the Auckland Fair.

Keeping the summer reading productive, I immersed myself in Ayala Moriel's Foundations of Natural Perfumery, which was really enjoyable; Ayala has the enviable knack of making the reader feel as if s/he were having a conversation with a friendly mentor. At least that's how I felt reading it. I admire Ayala Moriel very much, she's generous with her knowledge and always has something good to share. This book is aimed at the natural perfumer, of course, but I think anyone interested in perfumery in general will find lots to like in it.

New Perfumes

"That's brave," remarked a dear friend of mine when I announced the name, "calling a botanical perfumery Fleurs du Mal!" Fleurs du Mal, flowers of evil; it's the brilliant and evocative name of a collection of poems written in the 19th century by the great French writer Charles Baudelaire.

(You can even say it in a sort of hiss, as my 10 year old daughter does, pronouncing the 's' that would be silent if we were all speaking French.)

And it's true; perfumeries - particularly natural perfumeries, such as this one is - tend to be named for the pure beauty of nature, rather than its darker side. But I've always loved those poems, with their dissonances and harmonies, and the way they entangle beauty with disgust, love and desire with bitterness, abandonment, and exaltation. Like poems, perfume can evoke all of these sensations, and more.

Forget your perfect offering 
There is a crack in everything 
That's how the light gets in.  (Leonard Cohen, 'Anthem')  

Perfume, far from being a merely venal luxury, may even be a way to reach the gods.