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.