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Tomorrow is 1st of May and on the day of work. Which means: we do not work. I think I will do some stuff nevertheless, Marx will forgive me. This, if everything goes right, I might end up decorating a corner in Pascal’s window. I mean the window of his shop. Featuring L’air du désert of course. Ideas so far from my side: limited.

Building a huge sand pile and placing one bottle inside (who cleans up the sandy mess afterwards?)

An oriental rug, with lots of boxes of l’air du désert marocain.

Or lots of boxes of the l’air, piled up to a gigantic mountain of air du désert boxes.

Or something different, less oriental 1001 and rugs and stuff. Just a white linen, from top to bottom, one box of the l’air du désert marocain in the middle, one copy of THE book, one sentence of the book copied and printed large, black and white.
And I will continue there where I stopped last Sunday, working on what seems to be my favorite thing these days, spicy, green berries, llily of the valley, woody ambergris stuff. You know….the stuff that men love. I was testing the green berries last Sunday, to prepare the ground for a natural ingredient that I never used yet. And - when getting ready this morning, mentally addressing the things to come of today, including an endless flow of mails- I thought to include a touch , just a hint of the rose oil, steam distilled, which brings in this cinnamon spicy silver flower.
wood, black and white, seen March 2008 in Zurich

I asked for a quotation in order to get the vetiver fragrance mixed and matured and diluted and matured again and filtered and delivered to my house. This translates into several messages.

First: The vetiver will come. It will be last quarter 2008, though. I need time in autumn to get things ready.

Second: It is time to do the next step: Outsourcing.  This in turn means: Loosing part of the control. Being a control freak when it comes to my fragrances: Well…a few sleepless nights I guess.

Then: Relieve for  my back as I do not have to worry about carrying 20 kg cans around the house.  But it means also disconnecting myself from a part of the process. The mixing and pouring of thick liquids. Thus, I look at my vetiver formula, imagine pouring 1pointsomething kilo vetiverol , half a pound lilial, and a good portion of thick Java vetiver, dark red rose absolute and some other 20 compounds, and feel somewhat sorry for myself.
a rose, April 2008, in a Zurich house

So I was in Milano this Saturday which sounds like a longer journey than it actually is. In a sense it is just around the corner, but it is Italy. Not southern Italy but Italy enough to get a good coffee, a lot of motor bikes and nice dresses and nice people.
The reason for traveling there was somewhat business related, establishing first contacts. We will see where we get there.

Towards the end of this week, it will be the other way round and I will meet somebody from Italy in Zurich. More about this Swiss-Italian encounter next week…This week we will talk Vetiver again, the next steps. Until then: Some pictures …

the central station
street life
folks, and architecture, and mirror effects
the dome

Finally, and with 1000 thanks to the W.-factor: Here it is….my appearance on the Swiss TV of yesterday. You may watch it on-line on the Swiss TV website: Archive Schweiz Aktuell (go all the way down the page and click on video)

For those of you not familiar with German: Click here (opens a new window, and the movie as flash player movie. If you do not see it: Download the flash player plugin from Adobe here)

Or here (mp4 file format, large, 20 MB, may load slowly, downloads and opens in Quicktime)

Warning: The perfumer speaks Swiss German and you see, for the first time, how he folds boxes.

Enjoy!

Today is wet like yesterday, the sky is grey, the rain has not stopped, in the i-pod Nicola Conte, other directions, “a time for spring” followed by “You are a my Sunshine” , with a soft irony that only I get when watching out of the train window, as I am the only one riding the train with Nicola in the ears. Thus, the same story again, but the river has risen by some 10 inches. More about the artist: follow this link, please.

But heck: This Saturday, I will go south, a little bit, towards spring by train. More about this trip later. And until then, we are trying to find time to work on the Lily of the valley. Yesterday saw me taking another take on it. More on the musk and aldehyde side, sharp somewhat.
I am still miles away. And maybe I just have to wait for the real stuff growing and blooming in the wet woods. At least it looks as if the soup in the little bottle prepared yesterday contains part of the green stinginess, this sharp green, almost silver line, that goes with lily of the valley.

Yesterday was my happy e-mail day. But with e-mails it is like with cleaning up the apartment. As soon as the last one is sent, you get another one. Not that I would mind. In the contrary: The stream of mails connects me to you and the world out there. I guess a day without one mail coming in, not even spam, would worry me deeply.
Thus, I did not do a lot in the lab, except sniffing a base or two, next to typing. Unfortunately my thoughts pop up faster than I can type qwertz. But later today, I want to compensate for the rainy morning which is rainier than yesterday. This cries for orange flower, concentrated sun beams in a orange liquid. Talking wet….yesterday, it was pouring already without mercy. The night was silent, no foxes, except for the rain pouring. The river Limmat rises and turns brown. And it is a grey sky under which this wet misery happens. You get the idea. Time to look forward to May’s sun…. mark your calendar if you live in the Munich area. May 30, Friday, early afternoon, we will talk, Tauer and Vero from Vero.Profumo at Suendhaft’s. Grüezi to Munich!

I visited the Zurich shop Medieval art&vie last Saturday to stock it up with samples. [[Commercial break: TATA!

If you live in Switzerland: Please use the Medieval shop for your orders. Ordering is as convenient as it can be. Just call, send a mail or use their on-line shop. Thank you. End commercial break]]

And like almost every Saturday we started talking about orders and next steps (the window needs to be decorated) and ended up talking about stock markets (nope, I don’t believe it is over yet), politics (China) and sports (see politics) and books (in the end, Medieval art&vie IS a bookstore).

Yes, we are still waiting here for THE book Perfumes: The guide. Having seen the preprint version in LA I would really, really like to get my hand on it. Now. Please. Post man hurry up.

And while waiting for this book, I have the next parcel for another book sitting next to me. And while preparing the stuff that went into this parcel, gathering short descriptions and classifications, I realized that so far I have never made a true floral. We are talking orientals, woods, fougère, but the most popular category “floral” is missing entirely (Le Maroc pour elle being a classical oriental). Maybe the Metro Scent might be classified as floral, though.
When done with sending stuff for books and other preparations, I might have to address this gap. But then, flowers by themselves are so boring; I just need my woods and roots and dirty earth.

Kelley asked me in his comment to the last post to “let all of us fans know “all” of the projects you are working on?” . I do so with pleasure.

But first: A comment on the high tech looking aluminum bottles. This note of Kelley made me think in the journalist whom I showed my cellar where the 25 liter aluminum cans with the diluted fragrances are stored. She was very disappointed and found it so….”technical” and “unromantic”. I asked her what she expected to see and I learned that she was looking for wooden drums (barrels) and glass beakers. Imagine the mess if you let fall a 10 liter glass bottle…. I still remember my little cistus happening in the kitchen years ago…..
Yes. Making perfume can be unromantic.

Projects these days:

First project: Trying to keep up with orders…In summer I will have help for the packaging etc. but until then I am somewhat busy.
Second project: Vetiver. Here, I think the construction of the fragrance is finished. We are talking about the version that I showed briefly at my presentation in LA with Luckyscent this March. I am seriously considering launching this fragrance towards the end this year. Because I really love this scent. It is a little bit like made for myself. But I may make the launch dependent on outsourcing part of the production (see first project).
Third project: The chypre rose. Formula stands and I got quite some mails after I have presented it in LA this march. I think the fragrance is finished, I like it, but I will not launch more than another scent this year (see first project and second project). Thus, the rose might better follow in spring 2009, if I am still alive by then.
Forth project: My lily of the valley scent. On hold these days because I do not get there where I want to be. I wait for inspiration and time (see first project). In the mean time I fool around, hopping from dandelion to dandelion, like a rabbit in spring. ( I do NOT make a dandelion fragrance ;-)
Fifth project: Think about “what to do with Hyacinth and a mechanic” and L’eau d’épices”. I do not really have an answer yet. I do not work on the fragrances, though. The issue here is more: What to do with these “experimental” fragrances? I am thinking about an “experimental line”. To be or not to be; I guess we will see. There is time and many dandelions…
Fragrant greetings and a happy weeekend to you!

Zurich Dandelion (taraxacum officinale) in April

Greetings to Vladimir who asked me lately what is in those alu cans.

Well… there we go: The orange liquid in the measuring cylinder is mandarin essential oil (red mandarin), then we see rose, jasmin absolutes in smaller bottles to front-left, coriander behind the one with the “X”, the one with the red x is lemongrass oil and then we have methylantranilate (to the right), and some 25 more ;-)

Picture: Red mandarin oil in measuring cylinder.

yes, indeed.

But first, after an endless seeming search for the spam injected malicious code on my blog, that made my blog dead a while ago: I think I found it. It became obvious that this blog was (like many many other word press blogs) a victim of a bad guy sending me some malicious code. Grummel.

Thus, if you have a wordpress blog out there: Be careful. And consider modifying some stuff…..more here on a fellow blogger’s hacked site: http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/04/15/more-on-the-blog-hacking/

I just hope I picked the last bit of this dirty piece of code up. Be it: Time to bring this blog on Joomla, I guess.
After boxing last week there are a few mixes to make. Starting with the Le Maroc pour elle that is always a pleasure to assemble. Can’t help loving the rose and jasmine that goes in there.

And then, I want to reproduce the vetiver,the last trial, on a slightly larger scale. Just to make sure that I did not make any mistake when writing down the formula. And because I am not that fond of mixing anymore, especially when the result is 20 kg, I see a representative of my preferred supplier for essential oils tomorrow to discuss my options…..

Ethylvanillin….