Oakmoss

Last night I noodled around VERY briefly in the perfume lab, tincturing water-decaf Italian roast coffee beans for the coffee scent (Yeah, I know they make coffee EO, but this smells so amazing. Seriously.) and diluting the oakmoss absolute I have been ignoring.

Oakmoss absolute smells like, well, mushroomy, dirty moss. But if you dilute it, it has magically pretty chameleonic undertones of powder, fruity sweetness, richly earthy muskiness, cleanly sweaty human... it's beautiful. Who knew (other than everyone except me)?

I decanted my dilution into a bottle, and still had a little too much to fit. Into the few drops of dilution I sloshed a splash of perfumer's alcohol, a few drops of coffee tincture from the small test batch, and a couple drops of vetiver.

Wow. Wow. Wow. It's not a formula, there was NOTHING scientific about the mixture, as it was purely a proof-of-concept thing to see how those scents would go together and it's too strong anyway.

On me, it smelled like James Bond's perfume of choice: No. 89 by Floris. (That is, a powdery, dirty/clean sweetness that smells elegantly composed but slightly vulnerable on a man and smells like poncy fan-dancing burlesque on me.) My impromptu, all-base-notes combo smelled powdery sweet, feminine and naughty... and has potential.

On Pat, it smelled like cold, salted earth upon which one had poured musk and broken raw, pungent tendrils of vetiver. He was not fond of it.

On Robert, it smelled beautifully masculine: rich, musky and slightly floral, with a sparkling freshness of vetiver's airier aspects and an overarching tartness of coffee. He was fond of it.

On Micah, it smelled like a rather balanced men's cologne: musky, earthy, chypreed, lightened by the vetiver and with the coffee in fully articulate debate with his own cigarette-smoker's skin scent.

So, I seem to have thrown together a doppelganger that is something different with everyone. Pat says, "You should not sell this one. Who knows what people will get from it? It could be AWFUL."

I am daydreaming today of monkeying with these elements more scientifically.