Today, I finished another rose mix that will go into the molten glycerine soap, that will go into the soap pouring frame, allowing me to pour 48 soaps at once and come up with soap bars. Rose scented soap bars. The mixture is actually quite simple, consisting of 10 ingredients, rose absolute (r. damascena from Bulgaria), Bergamot essential oil and geranium (Bourbon quality) being the naturals.

This soap like all my soaps cannot be bought. It is made to exist in the moment, as a gift and a sign of appreciation, for special moments. And -to be frank- from a commercial point of view these soaps would not make sense. Too much work  goes into the preparation of them, too much expensive raw material is inside. In a sense, these soaps are the most luxurious product I have. It is so luxurious that not even an oligarch can get it, if you know what I mean.

Right now, I am still sitting at home, writing these lines, but as soon as they disappear in the e-universe and as soon as the paper to wrap the soaps later is printed (my printer is not keeping up with my speed) I will ride my bike to hit the little 2 room factory of mine and start melting and pouring. And thinking about Wednesday. Then I will be in Oldenburg (yes…where is Oldenburg? Think  Bremen and move a bit more to the West) and will try to make sense on the topic “Perfumery, manufacturing, composing and creative venture”. Sort of. It is a Duftsalon, a getting together, scheduled for Wednesday, 19.30, with perfume lovers, organized by the Duftcontor in Oldenburg. One of the few German hotspots for selective perfumes and perfumery. Actually, I am really, really looking forward to this.

I will for sure bring a rose absolute with me, to show to the perfume loving crowd.

Thus, I am sitting here with my little scent strip, dipped into the rose concentrate soap mixture and I wish I had a touch more time right now. I would love, love, love so much to play a bit with it: play on the lines of a rose fragrance with this rose at is center, aldehydic, with hints of maybe tuberose in the head, a hint of muscs and woods, a trace of sandalwood maybe….

Yesterday’s post brought up another question: are the criteria for what is a “grand parfum” changing over time? And if so: What would the changes be? I answered to Marianne’s comment but am not entirely sure about my answer. I feel, that the criteria may stay, but the weight we give each criteria might change. Thus Roudnitska’s criteria remain intact, but their mutual importance and weight might be subject to changes. What was voluminous yesterday might be weepy  today and what is character today might be over the top tomorrow.

Of course, this brings us right into the heart of many other questions, such as: In which direction are we heading these days? What do we find beautiful and grand and why? I am convinced that all creations of mankind have to be considered in their context. The context of today is: We live in a multiverse, although already close to 1 bio people are unified on facebook, we are fragmented like never before, physically very isolated,  we consume and appreciate things in a long tail and we live the longer the more without historical context as the new media flood all levels of our cultural palimpsest that might allow us reaching back into our past.

In a sense, the new media, we as contributing part of the new media, flood ourselves with pseudo news allowing us not to think about where we come from and where we are heading. As a dear friend of mine mentioned the other day: We are amusing us to death, but in a different way than anticipated.

Anyhow, while we are still amusing us:  I still wonder how to define the Roudnitska criterium “character” of a perfume today. I guess by looking back in time the question finds an answer.

Today’s picture shows you a scan of a ripe chestnut, found yesterday on the river where I had lunch. A promise for a spring with new sprouts.

Did you know that ivy actually blooms for a few days in the year and has a wonderful thick, green, honey like, sweet, dark perfume? It is an amazingly intense fragrance, in light of the little yellow flower and it attract bees in mass. Now, the ivy around the house lost its flowers and the picture today shows you an ivy twig with the little green berries that will turn into real fruits over the next weeks.

This year, the ivy around the house bloomed all at once and was intense like I do not remember it from the past. The weather these days sure helped. We have the most amazing sunny warm days.  But soon, I am afraid, this period will be over and at the latest by then I will take the Jasmine bush inside. A few weeks later it will explode in little flowers. Here again, amazing little fragrant flowers, with so much bigger scent then themselves.Yet, in all the intensity of their fragrance, there remains something delicate about it, a simplicity and clarity.

Talking delicate clarity, yesterday, when finishing the interview that I had to write, I crossed the roads with Edmond Roudnitska again.  I mentioned in the interview that I wrote years ago Edmond  Roudnitska’s criteria on piece of paper sitting always next to me on my desk. These criteria guide me and I check every fragrance with them and I am very often disappointed about my creations in this light.

These are his criteria for “les qualités fondamentales du grand parfum: caractère, vigueur, pouvoir diffusant, délicatesse, clarté, volume, persistance.”

Today’s picture shows you a look into the Pitti Fragranze hall from behing the decorative fabric that hung from the ceiling to cover the walls of what used to be a train coach maintenance hall of a train station. I find it always very interesting to look behind things, or from behind. Looking back to Pitti from a distance, I realize (again) how many brands there are in the world of “niche” and how many perfumes there are in this world, presented by these brands. Actually, I discussed this aspect also with Michael Edwards, the author of “Fragrances of the world”, THE perfume compendium. His book gets bigger and bigger every year. In Munich, we ended discussing the never ending flow of new launches and brands, too and in a sense I came to a conclusion.

Almost nobody, not even the professionals, can fully follow the tide of scents and concepts. The perfume lover is out there in this ocean of bottles and ideas, sort of lost sometimes. Thus, what do you do? You look for peers. Folks you trust, selecting and providing guidance. I feel this is where the blogs and communities come in. The longer the more. Of course, this role as peer comes with a responsibility.

And this is where selective perfumeries and selective online shops come in. Selective in the sense: We bring you just the best. Beyond what you get everywhere. This may have different meanings in different regions, though. I wait for the day until Amazon discovers niche perfumes.

Anyhow. Here is a little treat, in case you have not seen it yet. Me packing Miriam. And talking about why and how. It is a bit on the long side but I figured you might find it interesting.

You can watch it here, on my vimeo channel. Actually, it is a packing video, complementing some unpacking video that you find on youtube.  Enjoy, while I pack some Tauer Perfumes in the same location.

Fragrant greetings on this bright day. Two more days (or one, depending on counting) before we for the Pitti Fragranze niche perfume show in Florence. Thus, as you may imagine:  a lot of last minute preparations! But today, I will  talk about composing and not about presenting fragrances.

I cleaned up the other day, throwing away plastic pipettes that I used to mix a few trials (they are reusable in principle for a while, but I do not reuse them too often). Smelling them, after mixing was such a delight and reminded me to share with you the facts and figures of composing a fragrance.

The fact: So many times, the simple individual raw ingredients smell so much better and more intense then the mixture. Thus, what is left on the pipette tips is heaven on earth, but what you mixed with them is blunt, boring, dull, grey.

Figures: You may safely assume that a standard mixture for me consists of at least 30 ingredients., (exceptions apply) and you may safely assume that for a final fragrance I make between 2 and 100 trials. Yep: 2 is the easy way, the perfect way, the mother of all perfume creative experiments. 100 is the nightmare over 5 years. But the standard is somewhere in between.

Now, how is it possible that mixture can be dull if the individual ingredients are shining beauties?, you might ask. Actually, this is quite simple: it is an effect that you find everywhere. Annihilation. Some ingredients eat each other up and what is left is ****. Dull, flat mixtures. You can compare it to painting where mixing too many colors gives you a grayish brown.

What was I mixing a while ago: An all natural eau de toilette-eau de cologne like twitter. A fresh, all botanical, yummie further development of my cologne series, a gentleman’s water if you wish,  with green herbs, spices, neroli, and woods (incl. sandalwood from Australia) and ambra and a fine patchouli in the base.  And this time, the mixture turned out as nice as the stuff that went inside. The concentrated mixture has well matured and a  few milliliters go into dilution now.  Please do not ask me when and how I will launch this. The fragrant world in Tauerville is turning too fast right now.  But I like sharing my experiments. And I think it is important to play with scents without always having a sales and $ sign in front of the nose and inside the brain.

Actually, that’s a nice last sentence, to keep in mind when going to a sales show like Pitti: It is important to play with scents without always having a sales and $ sign in front of the nose and inside the brain.

It is a question of style and of exclusivity: Vintage perfumes are pointers and gateways into a past we seem to remember but cannot really grasp. A post that is gone. A world that is different to our world. Today’s post is , as promised, on Miriam, the first fragrance of the Tableau de Parfum series, built up together with Brian Pera, around Woman’s picture. If you are new to the concept: I invite you to visit Evelyn Avenue, as it is on Evelyn Avenue where you find all information and more. There, we are building a world of moving pictures, perfumes and words, a gateway into a past as we remember it.

I mentioned a couple of times that I constructed Miriam like a vintage fragrance. Maybe of the 40-ies. But what is a vintage fragrance like? Any ideas?

First, and I feel this is important, vintage perfumes are for us like a door opener to a time long gone. They evoke memories of aunts, or grand mas, of actors and a world of long gone celebrities, vintage perfumes bring back ads that are so different, evoking reveries of style and true passion, of a better life, maybe.

Imagine the world right after WWII. A world of winners and losers, and of great poverty. Europe in ashes and most of the money gone, and a lot of other, ideal values, too. Perfume back then was true luxury. Not the cheap bling bling pseudo luxury of LV bags and other stuff and the plastic surgery equivalent of joy you are getting when leaving your $ on the counter to buy them. We live in a world where perfume has become a commodity, and a spritz every day from the flacon of the most expensive brands cost you less than your Starbucks latte grande every morning.

Why were perfumes so expensive? They were made in lower quantities, using exclusive ingredients, in a much less integrated economy, where energy was precious, paper was precious, glass was precious. Perfumes were not sold by millions, not packed in low wage corners of the world.

But there is another difference. It is about fragrant languages or dialects of a period. Look back 30 years: Back then perfumes spoke to us in a different language. In the past perfumes were constructed differently, and in the future they will speak a different dialect, too. The further we dig into the fragrant languages of the past, the more different they get to what we are used to. Perfumes of the 40-ies and beyond feature true head, heart, base notes, often with head notes singing loud and brilliant but never offensive, an immense citrus choir that you do not get today anymore, except in natural colognes; they shine differently, partly because the artificial bright light of certain molecules was not invented yet. Perfumers constructing perfumes in the 30-ies used bases that you do not get anymore. And they were braver. Perfumes made 50 years ago or 100 years ago were braver; today perfumes are shocking by their marketing. They are labelled with names that remind you of a quote from a dirty street corner, they are said to smell of blood, semen, and other juices, they play with sexy images without sex appeal. The sexy marketing lines cannot cover, however, their nature.

Vintage perfumes are often very brave constructions; equivalent courage and style you find today if you are lucky in nicher niche.

And perfumers used raw materials that either do not exist anymore or are hard to get; or perfumers used expensive raw materials in quantities that you do not find in modern day perfumes because modern day perfumes are made to serve many more clients.

Of course, Miriam is not a vintage perfume. It points back in time. I used raw materials such as sandalwood or violet leaf absolute in quantities that you do not get on a daily basis. I composed it in a way that feels like 40-ies to me. I tried to pack it in a way that feels vintage to me. But of course, it is not a real vintage. It can never be. The 40-ies are gone.

To finish this post, here is a description of Miriam, as I see it and how I described it to Brian a couple of months ago.

—

MIRIAM:
The dream of a hug, the vivid bitter sweet memory of her perfume,
her hair shining golden in the morning sun, so fine,
the violets from the garden in her hand,
freshly picked with the dew pearls dropping one after the other,
the green May roses on the table, lasting forever.
It is a dream of days long gone, with a smile on my lips.

—

Today’s  picture: The front of the Miriam flacon, inside the cardboard inlay, sitting on a wireless keyboard.

Sometimes I read the blogs, and I am always far, far behind. The other day I was on NowSmellThis, trying to figure out how others deal with the flood of new releases. An interesting post, because I cannot handle the new releases anymore: Like many others commenting on NST, I have my list of brands that I follow. And most other releases happen without me even noticing. Usually, the more “inspired” and the more accompanied by pictures a fragrance PR is, the less I am interested. The louder PR folks or websites or blogs or magazines bang on launches, the less I am willing to put my nose on and into it. Thus, I miss most of what happens out there.

On a side note: I had to smile reading some of the comments on the Now Smell This post: There was a short discussion if and amazement that Tauer is an indie brand. Yes, Tauer is an indie line. I guess still being a one man show (with some helping hands of the W.-factor) qualifies for being indie.

Anyhow, I think we go through a phase of perfume exuberance. Too much of too little value. From all sides we are flooded with perfume, and flanking products such as candles, tea, soaps et al.  Thus, I was reading on NST, reading Linda’s comment on fruitchoulis and I wondered why I have never done a fruitchouli. You know: A gigantic peach, with a powdery patchouli, served on a sugar plate. In a sense it might be fun. I have to admit: I cannot properly remember smelling any fruitchouli out there.

I will be doing a hike or two on Friday and over the weekend. Thus, here is your opportunity to tell me which fruitchouli  is actually worth smelling. I feel like I should visit this category and maybe I should try a bit more to smell my way through industry’s exuberance in the coming weeks. Sort of preparing for Pitti Fragrance in Florence on September 9 where we will smell the best that perfumers come up with.

Here I am again, talking about fetish and perfume, following up on the post of last Wednesday (click here for the post), where I was talking trend and fetish.  In the mean time, searching  for “tauer fetish” brings my post of 48 hours ago right on top of google’s list of results. Which is sort of cool, as it tells me that Google indexes my blog sort of fast. Thank you Google, highly appreciated!

The comments that I got were great and keep me thinking “fetish” perfume. I did a quick query on thesaurus.com for synonyms and guess what pops up as first synonymous noun: OBSESSION. This tells me that fetish IS a cool name. Actually, it is such a cool name that it was used before. There existed a Fetish Perfume by Dana. It was (is) sort of a floral thing with a funny flacon.

A quick search on TESS tells me that these days “fetish” is not a protected mark for the goods and services perfume anymore.

Actually, you see: we did the first steps towards building a brand together right now. We came up with an idea for a perfume or even an entire range (dark, animalic, woody, spicy,..) and we checked whether it can be protected.

I love, love, love these brain games of inventing new fragrant worlds. And the name of the game has changed in the last few years. Actually, coming up with a new perfume has become very easy. Maybe this is one of the reasons why we see all these new perfumes appearing. Michael Edwards published a few numbers on his Twitter feeds (worth following by the way):

I copy his numbers from his twitter feed that you can find on http://twitter.com/theperfumenose

All new fragrances: 76 (1990) > 389 (2000) > 1125 (2010)

WOW!

I continue thinking “fetish”. I feel it would need to be a perfume concentration fragrance, really heavily concentrated. In a simple flacon, without spray. Avintage flacon. Like you find it at Waltersperger’s.(click here for the picture)…

Today’s picture to the left shows you rotten wood, sort of fitting. I love its smell, damp after a summer rain.

tomorrow, I shall fly to London, and visit my favorite perfumery there: Les Senteurs. The last time I was there, I was shopping for Grossmith, a flacon of Phul Nana in its lovely packaging and with this twisted (in a very positive sense) perfume that builds a beautiful bridge to a past long gone.

And I got a few soaps, to smell later. Like d’Orsay Tilleul that is quite unique. Soaps, for me, are a big love, a way of enjoying fragrance, without actually really putting anything on. And contrary to suffocating candles, room sprays and other fragrant  atrocities that not always, but often are too much and hard to cope with, fragrant soaps are fragrantly there when you need them. Now, I am talking high end soaps, perfumed to smell nice not intense, not the super perfumed cheap things you get in stores. These smell like they can actually kill you.

But I think, soaps are difficult when it comes to making money with them. That’s why you see them coming in packs of 2 or 3: Otherwise the cost-effort/margin coefficient seems not to be sufficiently high. I – for my part- have sort of put the soaps on hold. I have a formula or two that gives wonderful soaps. But these days, I work on fragrant liquid stories.

Or to be more precise: I work on packing them.  Zeta -a linden blossom theme-  is shipping like crazy. It is just wonderful.

Today’s picture: A rainbow seen yesterday on a grey sky in golden evening light.

Tomorrow, I take the train at 7 am to go to Bologna, to back the same day after 11 hours in the train. Time, to think about a speech I will give on Tuesday evening on “scents of your dreams”, and time to think about a few projects that I have running. And about how to arrange my stock in the new rooms once we can get in there. And think of a nice color for at least one wall. I figure blue would be cool on one wall, while leaving the others white.

The next steps there, to get the rental contract for the rooms: Send my application together with an official confirmation that I never went bankrupt so far. Which is sort of funny. Looking back into a bright past does not really tell anything about the future. Anyhow: Here’s a detail on how fast the Swiss authorities (sometimes) work: I sent a filled form off by snail mail to the state agency providing these official confirmations on Thursday evening at 6pm. On Saturday, 8 am I have the stamped form in my letter box.

Amazing, isn’t it?

Amazing is also the number of emails that I am getting these days. Everybody wants the ZETA collectibles. NOW!

Well.

To be honest: I  am still waiting for the last piece in my supply chain for the ZETA. Unfortunately the green wooden top covers are delayed due to “force majeur” (a broken machine). But I was promised that on Tuesday the will leave Austria and by the end of next week, I shall have this last missing item and then… then…. then… In about 10 days I will pour and label and box the ZETA -a linden blossom theme- and then I will ship it and then I will start offering it.

I am sorry that some of you need to wait another 2 weeks or so.  Thank you for your patience. I have a hard time waiting longer.

Until we are there: Let’s enjoy spring coming every day a bit closer.

Have a lovely weekend!