Monday, May 19, 2008

Commitment, at last

Hi guys, sorry I'm so infrequent a poster lately. I hope you are all well -- drop me a line in reply or via email to let me know how you are!

So, I did it, I took the plunge, I jumped in with both feet. Yesterday I spent my entire overly warm Sunday in my very hot garage/office, making hard, abstract aesthetic choices based on what I THINK I recognize and what I THINK I like.

I bought an enormous amount of fragrance ingredients: essential oils, absolutes, and CO2 extracts; bottles for experimenting, blending, and initial decants; dropper lids and cone lids, and sample vials. Even with the sticker-shock inducing quantities I purchased, I am well aware that this is my mad scientist's laboratory only. If I do manage to create a fragrance that seems fit for distribution, I will need to purchase much larger blending bottles, proper spray bottles, and much larger amounts of those fragrance ingredients that will go into the successful formula. Also, a business license & dba, a website, packaging ingredients, etc. But that is getting WAY ahead of us. I've purchased a hobby; we'll see if I can flip it into a business in due course if it still seems to be appealing and if it suddenly seems feasible.

I still need to purchase perfumers' alcohol, jojoba oil, rubbing alcohol, a bag of rags for cleanup, rubber gloves and goggles, and labels. And I need to have some form of perfumers' organ built.



(Not like the amazing perfumer's organ pictured above, found at http://picasaweb.google.com/asholk/France2007 -- mine will obviously have to be much more modest. I would LOVE it to be portable.)

Yes, I do already have a few artworks in mind. I have that scent of my beloved California wilderness haunting me, and I want to make something that evokes it. My friend Jes wants something built around black pepper, and I cannot wait to build her a black scent like a vivid vertical slash, an exclamation point, working with that beestung earthy sensuousness of pepper and digging deep under the zap of that top note. My brother has the juxtaposition of fresh lime and sandalwood notes in mind, and I want to bring it to vivid life by fleshing it out. There is a specific vanilla gourmand scent (without citrus!), which my mother has been searching for for years... can I create it for her? And of course I want to give Pat his heart's desire of a deep, warm creamy-amber-underneath perfume of his own: how to make amber masculine, unique, and personal?

Anyway, that's what I will soon be up to. Any new hobbies for you?

2 comments:

the oblitterati said...

A vertical slash of pepper sounds incredible! Best wishes with your spectacular new undertaking!

Ducks said...

Thank you! And thank you so much for stopping by! It's always nice to find out that someone new is reading the site.