creating scents

materialization

when I meet people who do not know me, doing the small talk thing,  I usually try not to mention what I do. I always say I am self employed, hoping for no further questions. Why? Well, because the conversation goes usually in a disillusioning direction. No, I do not sit in a perfumery room all day long in dim light, figuring out the magic formulas of flowers blossoming in flacons. No, my days are not filled with letting drops fall into mixing beakers. Yes, you only need a piece of paper to write down a perfume. And I do so rarely.

The few lines on a piece of paper (or excel to be precise) define it. Provided you wrote it down specifically enough, the perfume is there in all its details and can be brought to life for decennials. The rest is “materialization” that depends on the matter, the rose extracts, the vanillin, the amber and musks. The qualities of these might change, but with some knowledge my perfume on a piece of paper can materialize in 200 years from now.

I let my ideas materialize somewhat rarely, as I tend to think a lot first. And as there is no need. The pipeline of things is too big anyhow.

My big fat Excel file sits there, waiting patiently, copied on a hard disk, and copied redundantly in a super safe cloud space, like all my important files. There, I am super super worried about losing bits and bytes.

But sometimes, I do sit there and follow the lines, mixing stuff into flint glass bottles. Like this morning. Because, when I woke up I knew that this one little formula needs to be tried out. Now.

It’s like with my paintings. They start piling up there, and here, and over there, almost none of them hangs on my walls.

Today’s picture: An unfinished rose, painted very wet.