1. The Great Randello

The 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 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.

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…

 XHM2 – Extraordinarily High Maintenance

The scent 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 perfumery 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.

I've been trying to find the time to chain myself to my desk and develop some new scents. They are work in progress, they exist in bottles and in my head. Can I get the time finish them?

So I've started a project - crowdfunding with Sponsume - and after two hours I was 5% funded.

Have a look here if you like:!0 Scents' Worth

Make your own bespoke scents, why don't you?

"Why are you here?"

One of our coursemates had seen me speaking at perfume events, and wondered why I'd come along to Karen's five day workshop. She wasn't being rude, just curious. If I'm already making perfume, why would I need a five day masterclass?

The same thing happens when I'm teaching yoga. I qualified in 2003, but still study with senior teachers because there's always more to learn. Some of my students furrow their brows when I tell them I'm going to be away at a weekend workshop. Surely after 16 years I've learned yoga by now?

No.

It's like everything worth studying, the more you learn, the more you realise there's a lot you don't know.

I know quite a bit about natural fragrance materials: how they smell and what they do, how they work together, which ones are light, which are heavy, powerful, gentle, fleeting or enduring. But for indie perfumers, it's very tricky to get familiar with all the man made aroma molecules out there. I can't afford to buy them all and I wanted to learn more about their purpose and use, so I could decide which ones would help me to make lovely quirky scents, and which ones just make perfumes smell nice enough to be commercial.

My scents tend to tell stories. It's not important whether one of mine is a floral or a chypre or an oriental type. It's essential that they evoke a time, place and feeling. So in the way that I like to learn new words to express myself better in writing, I went along to Karen's course to broaden my olfactory vocabulary, so that I could explain my feelings in perfume. I am aware that this sounds as if I'm disappearing up a dark place, never to return. I'll get back to earth in a second. But you see what I mean, I hope. I wanted to learn what the synthetics can do, so I can use them in a way that helps the natural materials say the right things.

Day one at Mary Ward House - citrus and floral

To be continued...

I wrote this for the nice people at afia who give me lots of writing work, but I thought you might like to read it here too.

The brain, the smells and the words to describe them

Why is it that we can smell something we recognise, but not be able to say what it is? Then when we’re told, “That’s orange,” or “It’s vanilla,” we say “Of course it is! I knew that!”

During the 14 years that I wrote for Lush – the ones with the smelly shops and huge cakes of soap in the window who run hard-hitting campaigns against animal testing - the issue of describing scents cropped up all the time.

The creative team would introduce a new product and around the room we’d have comments like:

“Oh yes, it’s a bit like… don’t tell me, I’ll get it…”

“Is it…? Oh, what is it…?”

“I know this. I recognise it!”

“Does it have lavender in it?” “Liquorice?” “Mint?” “…Jasmine?”

Then the perfumer would read out the aromatic materials he’d used and we’d all kick ourselves, annoyed because we didn’t have the ability to put our recognition into words.

The theory is that putting smells into words is hard because the brain’s speech centres developed long after our ability to recognise scents. Human beings and our even earlier ancestors needed to be able to spot food or danger and react very quickly, long before we learned to say, “Right lads, I smell cherries. Let’s head that way.”

Or, “Lion!”

There’s a marvellous website for ‘fumeheads – people who are passionate about perfume – where you can go to read users’ reviews of almost all the scents that have ever existed. It’s called Basenotes and it’s run by the nicest couple ever, Danielle and Grant Osborne. www.basenotes.net Most of the perfumes which are currently in production have a list of the ‘notes’ they contain: the different individual materials which you can recognise if you’re very good at it. There are top notes  - like lime  - which disappear quickly because they’re lighter molecules, mid or heart notes – lots of the flowers and woods - and basenotes which stick around for hours or days, like the sticky vanilla, frankincense or rock rose resins.

The reviews often mention these notes in lavishly creative descriptions. But when the notes aren’t listed, the reviews are rather more sparce. Even ‘fumeheads have a hard time saying what they’re smelling when no-one’s given them a list of clues.

Pictures of perfumes

Which is probably one of the reasons that perfume marketing has almost no words. You get images or films of beautiful people in beautiful clothes (not many) in beautiful settings. And you get a famous name attached, a designer or a celebrity or a luxury brand. (I still think that Mont Blanc’s perfume should smell of ink, but it doesn’t.)

Last weekend I spent a day with Karen Gilbert, a friendly, knowledgeable perfumer, at her workshop on modern synthetic scent molecules. When we smelled one of the aldehydes (the things that make Chanel No 5 so attractive) a different Karen said, “Wow!” That’s not a scent, it’s a sensation.” True, it was a tingly, sparkly thing. We can describe scents as things other than smells. They can be feelings or textures: smooth, spiky, lively, metallic. Really, when you inhale rose oxide, it’s like smelling a shiny, smooth rose formed from a piece of aluminium. They can be living things: rose, orange, lavender, cucumber, raspberry. They can be shades and colours: dark, light, silvery, pink, green. There’s one that smells like just washed stone floors, others that smell like leather, horses, paper or wet dog. No kidding.

How do you do it? Practice. Build up a collection of scents that you associate with different occasions and places. Karen Gilbert told us that Dior’s Hypnotic Poison reminds her of the back of a kitten’s head. Although they’re probably not going to use that in their next ad campaign, maybe they’d sell more if they did.