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  1. Do we make it look easy?

    me and my perfumes

    We’ve learned how to make and sell perfume, legally, complying with the EU regulations. Today two of our perfumes have been shortlisted for the UK’s fragrance awards.

    It’s not easy, but we love it. Have we given the impression that it’s a complete doddle?

    Every day we get calls and emails from people asking for advice on how to do it themselves, so we’ve decided to tell you how. Just not here…

     

    How did we get here?

    In five and a half years we’ve built a very small but quite interesting perfume company with a huge range of scents and a constant need to make more and more. People ask where the ideas come from. Really, the difficulty is turning off the flow. Every day, there’s something I see, touch, smell of course, hear or feel that makes me want to blend a new one.

    We make them for our own range, for other brands, for private customers, for events, corporations and weddings.

    Today we found out that two of our fragrances, Maxed Out and Midnight in the Palace Garden, have been shortlisted for best indie scent in the Fragrance Foundation’s 2016 Awards. We crowdfunded them last year. 131 people backed us, had the courage to pay up front for perfumes that didn’t even exist, to help us buy unusual materials, some expensive and some not, so I could create exactly what I wanted.

    Maxed Out was also one of LuckyScent LA’s top scents of 2015, and Dirty Honey won the EauMG award for best small niche fragrance 2015.

    crimes maxed out 100

    Thanks to all of you, these perfume not only exist, they are winning things. We’re doing it again this year, by the way. You can back the Four Mysteries here.

    So, mustn’t grumble. But it’s a start-up. It’s like pushing a log up hill. Let go for a moment and it could all go crashing down again.

    I was discovered by Odette Toilette; she invited me to bring some perfumes to her Speakeasy Scents Scratch + Sniff. Jo Fairley was in the audience and wrote about me. Claire Hawksley from Les Senteurs was there with Nick Gilbert, who kindly talked Claire into stocking six of our fragrances.

    It took 10 months before I managed to get them all legal (IFRA and EU) so we could fulfil the order. It was another two years before we worked out how to ship overseas to IndieScents and LuckyScent who also wanted to stock the range. As I’d been working for Lush (not as a perfumer though, as a writer) and they operate outside the UK perfumery establishment, I found out later that I was regarded as a maverick upstart. I probably still am. But I’m a maverick upstart with a love of regulatory compliance, with a sense of responsibility and a strong desire to get things right. (I was the kind of kid who would get very upset if I got less than 96% in a maths exam.)

    The Society of Cosmetic Chemists were marvellous though. I can’t praise them highly enough; they sent me in the direction of their members who could get my perfumes through their EU regulatory hoops.

    Anyway, off we went.

    Now, we get calls and emails every day asking if people can pick our brains for five minutes, or just ask a quick question about launching a perfume.

    I’ve had to learn how complicated it is; it’s complicated. But perhaps we don’t make it look difficult because we enjoy ourselves so much.

    Here are some of the questions we’ve been asked:

    • “I’ve made a perfume that’s 20% rose absolute so I just write ‘parfum’ on the label and it’s legal isn’t it, because it’s all natural?”
    • “I read that perfume costs about £5 a bottle, so will you make me 20 bottles for £100?”
    • “How many bottles would Harrods want to buy off me in a year?”
    • “My friends say the perfume I’ve made is the nicest thing they’ve ever smelled. Now all I need is to design a bottle and get the box printed, isn’t it?”
    • “Can I have the number of the buyer at Fortnum & Mason?”
    • “IFRA’s voluntary so I can just ignore it, can’t I?”
    • “Will you make me a perfume with no chemicals in it?”
    • “How do I ship to the US?”
    • “How do you get a thousand Twitter followers?”
    • “How do you do the EU regulations?”
    • “I’ve got a bottle designed. I need 100 of them. Where do I get it made?”

    parcels

    We want the indies to take over the world. We want to unleash the creativity and the new ideas and to have indie scents become the norm. Strength in numbers. An alternative to the mega brands.

    But we do want them to be legal, and to be safe. Just bunging a load of rose, jasmine, bergamot and oakmoss into a bottle isn’t going to cut it, not in the EU. (And if you think that not being part of the EU would help, you’re wrong. The man in charge of pushing through the last round of regs was British. Imagine the damage he could do if he didn’t have the French to argue against the next round of regulations.)

    So we're going to be running a workshop/seminar/bit of a chat about it all:

    The 4160Tuesdays Brain-Picking Event

    The first sessions will be on 30th June and 31st July 2016, with a follow up in September.

    What we'll cover:

    • Do you really want to launch a brand, or just own a fragrance?
    • DIY or use an experienced perfumer? Most indie companies don’t make their own, despite what they imply.
    • Formulating for IFRA and for EU compliance
    • Cosmetics Safety Reports, Product Information Files and the EU Portal
    • Getting what you want from a perfume company
    • Making your packaging legal
    • Distribution and shipping regulations
    • Social media, PR and marketing
    • Costings – the maths you need to know to run a perfume business
    • The reality of retail
    • Suppliers, contacts, information sources

    If this is for you, get in touch. These days, thank goodness, our brains are too busy to be picked on an individual basis, but if you’d like to come over to Acton and join in, take a look at this.

    If you'd like to learn online, then take a look at this.

     

     

  2. Down in the Smoke

    Vetivert is one of the biggest shockewhoknewwebrs when it comes to smelling individual raw materials, compared with perfumes which bear their names.

    “I love vetivert!” we’ve been told more than once, “It’s so fresh and citrusy.”

    Oh no it isn’t. It’s just that many fragrances which are named Vetivert or Vetiver or Vetyvert or similar, are made with a tiny amount of vetivert at the base, then lashings of lemon, orange, grapefruit and bergamot with woods in the middle. This gives people the impression that it's the vetivert itself which is light, herbal and green.

    Vetivert varies but it's got elements of mud and smoke (some more and some less than others); it's earthy, deep and dark. It’s made from the roots of a strong grass which was originally grown in the far east, and then farmed all around the tropics. It’s a handy crop; the strong roots help to stop soil erosion and the grass smells lovely too. Before corrugated iron took over, it was used as roof thatch for tropical huts. It protected against the rain, and then filled the air with its delightful aroma as the water evaporated in hot sun. These days it’s still used in India to make window blinds so that scented air wafts in on the breeze.

    The brain is wired to be wary of the scent of smoke; that’s one of the reasons why vetivert fragrances can appear to last longer than others. Our brains are running a little commentary between the olfactory bulb and our consciousness. “Is there a fire? I can smell smoke. I think we should run away. Where’s it coming from? There’s definitely a smell of smoke. Can you smell smoke? There might me a fire…”

    With most scents the olfactory bulb tells the brain, “Ooh, that’s lovely isn’t it?” and the consciousness says, “I smelled that 20 minutes ago, shut up and let me get on with smelling something different.” And that, dear friends, is why you’re convinced your perfume has worn off even though someone who passes you in the street can smell you from ten paces.

    Vetivert does vary in smell. There’s a lovely one named bourbon because it’s grown on the island of Reunion near Mauritius. Reunion used to be named Bourbon, but after independence they didn’t fancy being named after the French royal family, but their vetivert kept the original moniker. I heard once that was named Bourbon by the French royal family because it’s the finest quality. No. That’s like saying that Tudor Crisps were named after Henry VIII because he decided they were the best in the world.

    At our workshops we’ve a bottle of vetivert labelled “Vespas and hot tarmac” because it smells like crossing the road in summer in the centre of an Italian city. There’s a little of the Inspector Montalbano about it, which is always a good thing.

    We have a vetivert absolute here and two different essential oils. We use them for the smoky earthiness, with a hint of added living forest and as a fixative; that’s why you find it at the base of citrus scents; it gives them stability. Vetivert feels active to me, as if there’s a lot going on down there.

    There’s something about smelling natural materials which is inherently interesting. It’s like listening to a note played on a piano compared with the same note on a 90s electronic keyboard; it ought to sound the same but it doesn’t quite.

    Here's at 4160Tuesdays, we use it sparingly. It’s in Who Knew? where we blend it with green tea absolute to give a lapsang souchong note. It’s in Evil Max - who is returning soon in Evil Max 2 – because we want him dark and dirty, and it's in The Lion Cupboard as part of the Victorian aged oak note. Finally, making an appearance as the smell of melting tarmac, there’s an overdose of vetivert in Time to Draw the Raffle Numbers, our homage to Sir Bradley Wiggins risking his place on the Tour de France podium so Cav could cross the line first. Fresh and light that's not.

  3. On the suggestion of an American fragrance friend, we made a litte film on how to pronouce French perfume names while speaking English: not so badly that you feel like a numpty when you find out how it's done, but not overdoing it so you sound like a right pillock.

    Here it is.

  4. What do monsters smell like?

    Last Monday we were at the beautiful church turned concert hall St John’s Smith Square in Westminster, making the space smell of monsters - one monster in particular, Polyphemus from Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea.

    acis & galatea

     As usual, it’s a long story. Essentially, our lute playing nephew, Alex McCartney, got into a conversation with David Bates, director of La Nuova Musica about how great a Couperin piece would sound if it were scented. Alex said, “funny you should mention that,” and introduced us.

    For the first act, before the audience came in, we wandered around the seating, wafting a pastoral idyll into the air.

    The orchestra and singers could tell that we’d make the place smell like a walk in the park. When they were rehearsing that afternoon it still smelled like the slightly damp, cold, stone, three hundred year old building that it is. The audience didn’t seem to notice the difference, although they might have got a clue from the programme or St John’s Smith Square Website.ame in, we scented the hall with our Pastorale perfume, the scent of Galatea, a lovely water nymph who visits earth dressed as a shepherdess and falls in love with the equally gorgeous Acis. We set a country scene in perfume. It was low tech; Brooke and I used the traditional atomiser and thumb method and just wandered about a bit. A lot. It only took about 80ml of perfume at 10% strength to change the whole place.

    During the interval we crept around the balcony trying to avoid being seen by the audience members who refused to leave their seats. This was when we really made a difference. Polyphemus was about to enter the action; this is a character which doesn’t score highly on the emotional intelligence scale, but spots Galatea, falls in love and is driven to mad rage by his rival Acis. He tries to rape her, and kills him with a rock.

    Our task – set by David Bates - was to create a sense that it was all about to turn nasty. It was working.

    One of the audience had despatched an usher upstairs to ask what we were spraying the hall with. Brooke answered simply, “Foreboding.”

    As the audience and orchestra returned to their seats there was a definitely a change in the atmosphere. From our perch upstairs all I could focus on was a Japanese woman who covered her face with her sleeve for most of the second act, apparently horrified, and not realising that if she just allowed her brain to get used to it, the smell would have worn off. The point wasn’t to smell lovely though. It was to smell of monsters.

    David was so excited at the end he forgot to tell the audience to look out for scent number three, Acis, the river. Galatea turns him into a stream so she can still be with him after the unfortunate fatal stone incident. It’s Greek mythology; it’s like that. While I was shuffled on stage to take a bow, Nick dashed out and scented the café, covered up the lingering broccoli and cheese bake nicely with fresh water.

    acis programme

    Handel was writing operas at a time when all perfume was natural. Churches would be a mass of well perfumed rich people, poor people smelling less lovely, bouquets of flowers and scented handkerchiefs to disguise their smell, plus lavender and rosemary on the church floor to release fragrant (and antiseptic) wafts as they were trodden underfoot.

    We weren’t attempting anything of the like.

    Someone along the way had asked if there was a danger of allergic reactions, so to avoid any possible objections, I told them I would make fragrances avoiding all of the EU stated allergens, and IFRA’d up to their eyeballs. You could swim in the stuff at 100% strength and it would be safer than water – just a lot stinkier.

    I reported that this meant severely restricting natural materials and that the fragrance would be totally synthetic. That surprised them, but I like surprises.

    To the monster then. What did he smell of?

    Veramoss – a synthetic replacement for oakmoss.

    Iso Butyl Quinoline – a sharp leathery smell that all the early leather smells were based on, from Knize 10 onwards.

    Floralozone – a weird, chilly, threateningly bright scent of iced flowers.

    I did add some natural patchouli as I wanted an earthy, muddy, sodden feeling for this lumbering creature.

    We think we’ll do more, after the reviews…

    Here’s the first, from Classical Iconoclast.

  5. nick dubai beach sunset

    The seaside. A sunset. The scent of fresh air with a hint of seaweed.

     

    Lists of notes and the traps they set

    Last week I got into two internet conversations, one about snow and one about marijuana - as you do.

    For Doe in the Snow, our icy peach chypre, I wrote "snow" in the list of notes, and often describe is as a peach sorbet chypre as as smelling like it's been stirred with an icicle. Last week I got a question through, "Do you really put snow in Doe in the Snow?"

    I list seaside and candy floss in the notes list for What I Did On My Holidays too.

    Maxed Out was launched and we listed (sightly tongue in cheek) notes of rum cocktails, marijuana cigars, high class escorts, backout and regret. Unlike Grenouille in the book and film Perfume, no humans were harmed in the making of this fragrance. Yet it smells like Max's Ferragamo leather jacket after a wild night out in New York 2003.

    I also specified a notes list that included lime, coconut, rum, tobacco, cannabis, vanilla, musk, cedarwood and coffee.

    One of perfumes biggest puzzles is the notes versus materials conundrum. A professional perfumer will make the smell of a rose from its component parts; individually they don't smell like roses, but they're like a rose jigsaw puzzle; put them all together and the rose becomes clear. Which notes do you list? What does it smell of? Rose. Are there any roses in it? No. The notes? Roses.

    The smell that you put into a perfume isn't necessarily the smell you get out. 

    Perfume works like painting. You can make every colour you need from blending red, yellow and blue pigments, although paintboxes often come with them ready made. Mix red and blue and you get purple. Who'd have thought? Mix grapefruit and patchouli and you get the smell of Terry's Chocolate Orange. 

    So imagine you're in a gallery and a small child points at a still life of a fruit bowl and says, "Did they squash up real apples and oranges and stick them on the wall?" Its parents smile and say, "No, it was a very clever artist who mixes up paint an makes it looks like real apples and oranges."

    Then the small child smells a fruit perfume and asks "Did they squash up real apples and orange and stick them in the bottle?" Its parents say, "Yes they did."

    But no they didn't. It was a very clever artist who mixes up perfumery materials and makes them smell like apples and oranges. Why is the painter appreciated, when the perfumer is not?

    Notes are things that the perfume smells like. Materials are things which are used to make it. There is no point listing the things that perfumes are made of, because very few people know what they smell like. Besides some of them smell of almost nothing, and others smell godawful. They only work when they are blended to produce another note something completely new, like grapefruit and patchouli making chocolate and orange...

    In the notes, do we list grapefruit and patchouli, which are in there but which you can't smell? Or do we list chocolate and orange, which aren't in there but of which there is an olfactory illusion? The convention is to list the chocolate and the orange.

    With Doe in the Snow, I make the illusion of snow and frost by using some lightest of light materials which give the impression of coldness, like the scent of opening the front door and stepping out on an icy morning.

    With What I Did On My Holidays, I use two materials, Calone and Veramoss, to make the smell of seaside rockpools. Most people have no idea what those two smell of individually, and besides I use them together to make my seaside scent, so I list seaside in the notes, and seaside is what people smell.

    As for Maxed Out, it's the cannabis which has caused some of the bother. I've had to explain that marijuana's botanical name is cannabis sativa, and the plant has the common name of hemp - the stuff that string and rope is make from. I used cannabis essential oil which is pungent and herbal. Combined with the cumin in Maxed Out, it really smells quite intense, but it wasn't a smell that perfume fans could identify. It was the smell that dope smokers waft by when they think you haven't noticed that they've put weed in their roll-ups; it's the smell that their clothes have, that they can't smell any more because they've stopped noticing.

    We ended up calling the smell which they were expecting, the "romantic marijuana note". This is a dark, woody, oudh-like smell which usually turns up in any perfume called "noir", but it doesn't really have much to do with cannabis. 

    What we need to clear up is that notes can bear absolutely no relation whatsoever to the materials which make up the perfume.

    Sometimes the brand owners don't know that; their PR companies don't know that and their sales people have no idea. But that's not important. We buy perfumes because of the way they smell, not because of what they are made of. Sometimes lemon perfumes are made with lemons. Sea salt perfumes are never made with sea salt. (It has no smell.) Lily of the valley (muguet) perfumes are not made with lily of the valley; they never have been. Not ever. But there's no point listing Lyral or hydroxycitronellal in the notes because no one outside the industry knows what they smell of. The problem is that perfume companies have been pretending for years that they really do make their perfumes with the things they smell of: coconuts, apples, figs, ferns... all synthetic. Now with the cult of the natural, they are terrified to admit it.

    For that reason, for the last 130 years perfumers have been using their skills to paint beautiful scents in the atmosphere, using materials which were created by both nature and chemists and a combination of the two, and no one has given them the credit.

    Notes aren't the same as materials. Know that and set nose free to appreciate these works of art for what they are.