creating scents

golden ratio

After yesterdays very open post on pricing and blingbling in industry and more: Here’s a post on the upcoming PHI-une rose de Kandahar.

But first, you might want to quickly check this post on Elena’s perfumeshrine blog, that deals with similar questions raised yesterday. I invite you to also read some of the comments. Highly interesting stuff. And, although you might not like it, referring to what you find discussed there on perfumeshrine, bottle splits and doing decants is pretty much not good and you hurt the creator. It is actually worse than not buying  a bottle. It is destroying the kingdom that we creator build around the king, the fragrance. For me, my bottles and labels and everything that goes around the scent is part of my story that I tell. Decanting destroys this , and as Elena said “No matter whether we buy decants/samples etc, in the end the final connection and tangible bond with the product happens only when one upgrades to the bottle (and goes through it, slowly and surely). There is a reason why packaging and design are so important in the industry; it’s not a small detail, they communicate a hell of a lot! “

But now let’s talk about the upcoming fragrance PHI-a rose de Kandahar. PHI is – in a sense- a code that helps remembering, and it puts the scent into one box with ZETA- a linden blossom theme, one of the most forgotten scents in my line of scents. The coding refers to the COLLECTIBLES, a line of scents where I have no aspiration at all to always have the same fragrance always available for always the same price. Why PHI?

One simple answer: Because when designing the Collectibles label, I picked a few coding Greek letters and I had to make my choice from them: 5 to pick one from.

Yet another answer: Phi fits perfect with rose, reminds me in a rose flower on a stem: See today’s illustration how I see phi. And the fragrance is all about rose, built around a rose essential oil from Afghan fields, produced in Afghanistan, in low quantities. This, actually, ladies and gentleman, is super luxurious, and you might have to walk for a while to find similar. This rose that I created inside PHI, this rose is of course an abstraction. It is my interpretation. A fruit (apricot) goes with it, sketched using natural apricot essential oil, it sits on a stem of dark woody tobacco, patchouli, musk. It plays with cinnamon and comes with a breeze of bitter almond.

Another simple answer: PHI, because it is used to represent the Golden Ratio. (phi= a+b/a = a/b This link brings you to the Wikipedia page, and there, tata! you can learn a bit about golden ratio and pentagons which is cool because my flacon is is based ona regular pentagon form. And now here it comes: I never really though about it and just did an excel calculation and I find the result really exciting. As mentioned earlier, I used a musk as filler in this scent. You can look at it as a piece of fabric  that you lay on the floor. On this fabric you start adding blocks. The musk layer is there, but not really important for the form of what you build. This form is determined by the head notes, heart notes and the base.

Here’s the funny thing: All basenotes (amount in gram) divided by everything that I put around the rose in my formula, basically all heart and head notes, give a number close to phi, the golden ratio number of 1.62

And (a+b)/a =?

([head and heart] + basenotes)/[head and heart]=1.6.

How cool’ that?