The other day I was in New York and talked to a few perfume lovers there. And as I learned that a lot of perfume lovers actually do not know what Lonestar means and that many lovers of my scents do not know how they are produced: There we go with a little repetition course on tauer.  Back there in NY I mentioned Lonestar Memories and that I lived in Texas once, for a while, doing a post doc in College Station, and that Lonestar Memories means bascially Texas Memories. Right now I am filtering Lonestar Memories and get it ready for a bottling party later at tauerville.

For those who are new here or think we have a marketing, sales and bottling department: No, we don’t. And yes, we bottle all our flacons ourselves. And we= me and helping hands from the W.-factor who helps from time to time.

And yes, Lonestar Memories is the scent some call  “the cowboy” scent. Back then, a while ago, when I launched it, it came with a picture, a visual referencing, tagging the scent. You see the cowboy in the post’s picture.  Initially, some perfume lovers thought it is actually me on this picture, but unfortunately, I am a bit less handsome. It is a picture I bought from an agency. Since then I get their catalog, but that’s another story.

Anyhow, I have a hat like you see it in today’s post picture and I wear jeans, all the time. Thus, I guess, a part of me is there, too.  And yes, today is Lonestar bottling day, which means: Put the juice into a dispenser (10 liters), pump 50 ml each into blue pentagonal bottles, crimp them with the manual crimping tool, put the rings around the neck, camouflaging the crimping and providing support for the top cover, polish the flacons, put the lot number label on the bottom, put the Lonestar label onto the bottle shoulder, put the black colored beech wood top cover on and put the bottles into the shelves again for later boxing into pentagonal tin boxes.

simple enough.

Today’s picture shows you where I will be in 20 minutes: the room where I pour and label and pack all that goes of to world from tauerville. Towards the window, you see a row of 200 air du désert marocain, filled, waiting to be polished and labeled. Towards the camera is the dispenser that will soon start dispensing Lonestar Memories, my smoky leather fragrance that brings back memories of cowboys, archetypal memories.

It will be a very busy day there and as soon as I have done the pouring and labeling, I need to get some customs and shipment papers done and need to work on those shipments for tomorrow. Uff. And you know what? I got so many large retailer orders these days that I will need to work on stock next week. And somewhen in between, I have a nice journalist visiting me there, too. They are doing a perfume X-mas feature and we figured: Let’s give the readers the real thing. Tell them what handmade really means.

Later, when things calm down and the sun has gone, I will see that I can work on a little soapy idea. To balance, to feel creative again and not just like the man handling boxes and bottles.

Greetings from the factory.

From time to time I work with PR professionals; our circles cross and I get to know the world of fashion and perfume from a insider’s perspective. Quite interesting as I usually take perfumes from an other side.  Thus, I was told the other day that FETISH is going to be a BIG trend in 2012 in fashion. Think leather, rubber, dark animalic rough woody things with Patchouli and logs of wood sticky with resin.

But contrary to my PdD time when I tried to explain my professor “lumberjack look” with its heavy duty style shirts, without much hope as people in science often miss the concept of fashion, FETISH in 2012 is dark and dirtier. Actually, lumberjack look seems to be a classic style that always works, at least for men. My lumberjack look will be activated when doing the floor , painting the walls and moving into the new warehouse and production office. We will start this venture next week. Heavy duty posts ahead there!

So I learned that fetish IS going to be the BIG trend. Usually, I tend not to think in trends , but this one quite in quite in time. Time for something different. Besides Lonestar Memories I do not have a perfume fitting, and I think Lonestar Memories is more on the lumberjack side. I am not so sure whether I really want to come up seriously with a fitting perfume to the fetish trend in fashion, but I like the idea of thinking in darker territory. After a few light sunny bright takes, from the cologne that sits in many versions in my excel to the ZETA linden blossom theme, it might be time for the dark side of the force.

Let’s consider it a mind and nose exercise. I do not want too much leather, but Patchouli, lots of ambreine, castoreum, some rubber, but not the burnt thing…or maybe, instead of the rubber, we take earth. Wet, and damp and heavy. …

What would your fetish notes be?

(today’s picture shows you a sunset in Namibia)

“There seems to be more magazines about gardening then there are folks actually working in a garden”, the W.-factor wondered this summer when we were both  staring at the display of a newspaper kiosk, while waiting for a train to bring us home to town from a Swiss village.

“It is about sublimation”, I replied. “These magazines allow folks to dream and change their state. It is not about what there is, but it is about the sheer potentiality of what could be.” I continued. And while we kept on staring into the display, we realized that the need for sublimation seems endless. Horses, gardens, houses, cars, decoration, dogs, cats, tress, cooking….

My mind brought me back this picture of us inspecting the kiosk display while riding the Piccadilly line from Russel Square this October. I flew in to London via city airport which is quick and easy. My way out , after a training session on Friday with the folks from Les Senteurs and a scent getting together on Saturday,organized by Ronny from Scent and Sensibility, was via Heathrow on a very busy Sunday morning. The tube was already quite full with tourists from Spain (I never figured out why so many folks from Spain are visiting London). Then the two rushed into the coach, all sweaty and  smashing their suitcases somewhere and then they sat next to me.

She on my right, he on my left. A couple in their forties. Upper lower middle class, if you know what I mean.

We Swiss are not entirely accustomed to the concept of classes, as we only tend to think that we all belong to the wide, extra large middle class (actually, almost everybody belongs there). Thus, we have the middle class, and then the very rich that  got rich by getting heavy, undeserved bonuses (there are other rich folks but we do not talk about these in Switzerland it seems; somehow they are classless), and we have the folks with an “immigration background”, a term that fits with many as we are in the middle of Europe and quite attractive as country to our neighbors, one reason being taxes, but this is another issue.  Thus, I may miss some fine tunes there in judging my UK folks and to which class they belong.

“We should have taken the car!” , he will say angrily for the rest of the journey, at every stop.And then fall into oblivion again, watching a spot between his shoes.

“We will never make it”, she would reply, equally frequent  and equally angry. And between the stops of the tube, she would go through 3 magazines with gardens that were so photoshoped and perfect, that even the British subject’s Queen can only dream of such garden beauty.

My neighbor sitting next to me on my way to Heathrow went through the magazines, one after the other, and she sublimed between tube stops into a garden watching suburban dreamer.

I wondered how long it will take them to blame each other. They did not. I guess they were a happy couple.

Today’s picture shows you a scan from  Tatler’s magazine, featuring an article on horse and leather and a lot of recommendations for leather fragrances and some of their backgrounds, mentioning Lonestar Memories, as Brokeback Mountain fragrance. Happy sublimation ahead. Love it.

More reading for you today (tomorrow will be no post, I go for a hike):

EAU D’ÉPICES, featured and reviewed in Spanish by Una Aventura Olfative. Click here (English Translation via google possible).

Mandy Aftel and Andy Tauer: Letters to a fellow perfumer continued on Nathan Branch’s blog, with an interesting technical detail on the Linden blossom extract, directly from the producer. Enjoy!

After a great weekend with a lot of jogging and an (almost) new record time (107 minutes) for my 2o km: Back to perfumery. Today we finish putting everything into the shipment boxes and pack everything for a the truck shipments to retailers. And we will do some dilutions of perfume: 50 liters of air and  25 liters of Lonestar Memories. Since we got our heavy duty fire extinguisher I feel a little bit more comfortable doing so. If you ever feel like pouring 20 liters of ethanol: Make sure to prevent spark formation….we prevent electrical charge build up by earthing the equipment (metal funnel and alu cans) using metal wires.

Anyhow: A production day is ahead!

And sometime, somewhere, over the rainbow, we  plan to discuss in a meeting with the design gurus the fold  inlay and our plans for autumn 2011. We need to start now discussing when and if we want to launch what in autumn 2011. And how we communicate about it. well.

The picture of today shows you the inlay, not folded. If you fold it properly, it will hold the flacon neatly in place inside the box. Its color is blue with a bit bling-bling (just a bit) of silvery reflections in the paper (300 gr/m2). The design is perfect but the folding with my clumsy fingers is taking a bit too long.

Uff. It is Friday, this week’s big shipment is ready in front of the house for pick-up by Schenker, and I can worry about other things, such as my hair or creation of new perfumes. I decided that Friday afternoon will be my “creative day”, translating into at least 4 hours working on fragrances.

Otherwise, if not scheduling it like that: No chance. Too much going on….But first things first: Newsletter final texts, pictures for the shop. I will hit the essential oils in the afternoon before hitting downtown.

Today’s creative challenge: Ambreine. I get mine from Biolandes in France. It is a natural substance, isolated in a few steps from Cistus ladaniferus, to be precise: solvent extraction of  the concrète. It is not easy to work with, as it is -in all its beauty- very quickly dominating an entire composition. I want to use it in a mix where I just need its dry woody incense effect, without the ambergris part. And it has a harsh side.  Let us see how we can soften it. I guess I will bring in some green contrast. We will see.

I feel, perfumery is very much about light and darkness, about contrasts, about effects…I need to think a bit more on contrasts in perfumery.

And with this I wish you a great weekend, and here is your reading recommendation for it:
Open Letters Monthly, on “difficult pleasure”, featuring among other things Lonestar Memories. Enjoy!

(picture of today: A cut out from a larger photo taken last weekend, stones and water in sunlight)

YEEHA!

We got another coverage. In Gay Times, GT, an online and print magazine, that “supplies every gay man with the information he needs” (copy from the GT website ; click her to visit and consider registering for their twitter feed.) Unfortunately, you will not find me online there, but  I allowed myself to put a little teaser online with today’s post…. see the picture of today…Enjoy!

And we have another feature: Nathan finished the Tauer artisan series with his third article. Besides the fact that I like to read about me (…) I find his series (do not miss Mandy Aftel’s coverage there) important and worth following. Here is one sentence and a reason why you might want to visit his site:
“But it’s not like a perfumer ever stops creating, and much like the “publish or perish” mantra in the world of academia, it can be “launch or perish” in the world of the DIY perfumer. Yet continuous inspiration and creation (the hallmarks of a vibrant artist) can sometimes lead to a……”

Thanks for visiting Nathan Branch’s blog, clicking here.

And while you do your reading, I will do my packing of the pallet and some other stuff…

Jo says: “…. the world is divided into those who love smoky scents, and those who really seriously don’t…..”

I guess I go for the smoky stuff. Can’t get enough actually.

Read Jo Fairley’s review of a smoky scent (No 3 Lonestar Memories) here and follow her thoughts on how to divide the universe of perfumes. Love it!  And for those who do not really go for smoke: Here’s a non smoky treat. A little cut-out of the Lonestar Memories cowboy picture. One day, one day… I need to make T-shirts with that guy printed on them.

And please: do not forget to comment yesterday’s post to join in the draw.