The newest sniffapalooza magazine is out.
Featured this month: Neil Morris’ Takashimaya!
Please do not miss Michelyn’s Burning Down The House, and the review of Roxana Illuminated Perfume new fragrance Lyra.
Again an edition not to miss… ….read the sniffa magazine here.
And with this message we move on, off we go to LA.
More later…
This Saturday, we…the W.-factor and me, packed the last one, 21 kg of Tauer perfumes, for shipment on Sunday later in the afternoon. See picture below: Exhausted perfumer sitting on box.
The next line of perfumes I bring to the market will consist of mini’s, in ultra light packaging…something like 5 ml in 5gr plastic bottles, squeezable ;-)
Anyhow: before shipping we had to bridge the neighbor’s car battery as we promised her to use her car from time to time. Otherwise the battery would run down. Well, we forgot and so we had to do the bridging thing, but the battery’s cable where wrongly labeled and what should be red was black. We figured that one out when the battery connector started to sparkle and together with the connector plastik to produce little stinky flames. Now, burning things inside a car’s motor room….that is pretty close to the point where I start worrying.
Talking worrying… This brings me to last Thursday’s TV evening: The rock. And there was this line, after a wild car race, with a Ferrari totally crushed, a teenager passing by, says ” Oh man, you just fucked up your Ferrari”, and the driver (the hero, Nicolas Cage) says “guess what: It’s not mine!”.
A line that I liked a lot and adapted it to some of the worries we see these days.
Says the taxpayer to the CEO: “Oh man, you just fucked up your bank!”. And the CEO goes: “guess what: It is not mine!”
me sitting on box on Saturday.
When I took the train late in April 2008 I knew where it would bring me, but I had no idea what journey started there.
It brought me to Milano. To Profumo.
There, Guido Wetter and me started discussing how to bring my products to the Italian market. I knew already back then about the troubles serving my Italian clients, and I was looking for a better solution.
5 months later I am proud and happy because I can propose to my Italian friends the best place to visit there is for my line. And I am happy because I do not have to worry about any parcel being stuck at customs because the Italian customs is working so efficiently. My products are all registred with the Italian authorities, which of course meant a lot of work for Mr. Wetter and spending money for both of us.
Thank you, Guido!
Living in Italy: Please make sure you visit Milano soon and visit the Profumo Perfumery downtown.
And the drawing result using random.org’s random number generator of last week’s sample discovery set drawing is: Mikael. Please mail me your coordinates, will you?
And more I do not have to say today. Except maybe that I want to make the rose somewhat gentler in its head notes. I went to bed with it yesterday evening realizing its initial sharpness for the first 2-5 minutes. I am thinking a touch Bergamot, and / or other citrus and a touch less cyclal C.
But there is time to reconsider.
First we take care of the last days preparations for LA….
can’t wait to get there.
Before hiking on Sunday, the weekend brought me into my perfumery mystery room where I tried another version of rose, less soapy. The W.-factor said so at least…
“what is it?” , the W.-factor goes with a paper strip under the nose.
“Rose!”, I say
“aha… but less soapy! Is this good?”
Well, yes, I guess so.
Changes : Greener and a touch more aldehydic head notes and more terpene alcohols (Geraniol). Added a touch rose absolute and Bourbon geranium oil to a rosy heart. The result, together with Benzylsalicylate, brought the flowery quality out much better. I also added a twist Styrax resin to the base, to add an oriental touch to the brown golden ambrein-ambergris base.
Ah.. and yes, I added a twist spice: a touch clove and a note of cinnamon, from ethylcinnamate. Ethylcinnamate is interesting as it has a berry like flowery touch, red, very red with cinnamon-spicy-slightly woody notes. It blends wonderfully with the spicy notes of the rose oil that features lines of pepper and muscat playing with marzipan.
And yes: less soapy!
picture: A rose in green, pink and gold, uploaded by Andy
time to get out of the fog…. Yesterday, we proofed again that sometimes your journey brings you right there to the spot and time and place that you wanted to avoid. Thus, we returned from a great day in the Alps, escaping the fog only partially as the clouds were sticking on the mountain slopes like cotton candy on the cheeks of a 5-year old. We came back to a Zurich shining in the sun.
But no reason to complain: The day in the mountains looking down on Elm was great and I brought we me a scented cognition. Fir resin tastes much woodier than you’d expect from its smell. And old, dried up spruce fir resin, hard and golden brown like a jewel, has a wonderful incense line within a soft ambergris aura, that reminded me in my ambrein that I have from Biolandes (they are located in France and produce dream stuff!)
the moment when the fog clears, seen at 2000 meter above sea level, in the mountains around Elm
a little lake in the mist
a beautiful fog kitchen, 2100 meters above sea level
and finally….back again to trees and fog
and fog again on our way back…
before we all go for a more or less relaxing weekend: More bottles and boxes and a prize draw.
With the bottles of today I will have stocked up, to be ready for the next weeks. Some more samples need to be filled maybe; for the shop in Zurich because Pascal the shop owner there is really good in giving away samples these days ;-)
Looking back at the last few weeks, I cannot help but realize: That was a lot of bottles lately. And it is time for a break, for fresh ideas and more work on more new fragrances. That’s the idea at least.
But before that: More bottles and a little draw… if you would like to be included in the draw of a sample discovery set to enjoy the moment, let me know in your comments.
Best wishes for the weekend. Enjoy!
Pictures: more bottles waiting for labels, sitting on the work bench, next to a window with a view.
Yesterday I announced on my website’s shopping section that we stop shipping to Italy altogether. This is true for regular products and for free samples I am giving out later. On average we send things twice. Or we send registred, but even then the postal service in Italy does not work. This is a sad story, as I happen to be a big Italy fan, spent some of my best days there in Rome, a city that I was visiting once a year minimally in my twenties. But now, we have seen parcel after parcel coming back, with weird remarks from customs, or parcels getting lost, or being stock stuck at customs for days, weeks.
I am working since months on a different solution anyhow. Thus, it is time now to say byebye.
ciao.
Not that we would expect a master piece coming out of the Tauer lab soon. But the first time since weeks I had time and lust to try some combinations that I thought I need to test.
The first test on Sunday was a complete failure with Sandalore (a Sandalwood replacement stuff, a nice synthetic compound, but of course never reaching the real stuff) and Coumarin (main ingredient in Tonka beans) suffocating a clean rose that was so clean and small that it disapeared. The sandalwood and the tonka bean surrogate combined into a soft, thick cover, like these fluffy carpets in motels, US motels, that are fluffier than everything else on planet earth, a comfort jungle, where you can easily hide your savings or whatever you took out of your local dying bank before its collapse.
In Switzerland, we have much less fluffy carpets, but when it comes to some banks I follow my father who did not trust them. And I just hope that none of them is going to collapse.
Thus, in light of yesterday’s historic developments, I decided that clean is ok, but that green might work better and engaged in a somewhat green test of roses. Do not ask me why rose anyhow: I just can’t get my hands off, and I love the steam distilled rose oil but it is a tough candidate to work with. Finally, after an evening of mixing and sniffing, I have successfully passed by the fluffy carpet, but landed in the bathtube, filled with more soapy foam then there was foam floating on the primeordial soup.
Frightened of Hollywood divas making an aparition in this bathtube, I looked at the W.-factor for comfort, but the soap rating we get there is triple A plus. Meaning: heavy soap. I guess it was just too green with cyclamenaldehyde and dihydromyrcenol.
But there is hope. Once the foam clears, there is a lovely line of ambra (Ambrein, Ambroxan), rose (needs a flower push-up) and iris roots (irone, irisone) that wants to be discovered further.
Picture upload by Andy: Rose, dark pink
“There is the smell of the wilderness with the onset of a different civilization encroaching.” …Please follow the third installment of Michelyn Camen’s series in the Sniffapalooza Magazin this month, and follow her in her journey into wild lands.
And please do not miss Roxana’s interview and review of her fragrances from Illuminated Perfume in this issue and while you are there: Discover the wild world of niche and artisan and indie perfumery in this edition of Sniffapalooza Magazine.
And while you do so, I make more boxes….
Enjoy your reading!