French

I prefer the french language when speaking about perfumes, it is much more expressive than english. My favorite term is used when describing the "chemistry" between two raw materials:

English would say, e.g. white pepper oil and osmanthus are smelling nice together or they are matching. French are using the expression "se marie bien", i.e. that white pepper oil and osmanthus are "well married".

Creation

Some of you are asking me if creation is a pleasure or rather suffering for me. It is kind of both, really.

The moments of inspiration are of course thrilling, but when despite hundreds of trials, the scent is not perfectly expressing the feelings it was created for, composing becomes frustrating.

In most of the cases, creating is therapy. Maybe not when I am asked to compose a very powerful smelling jasmine-pink pepper for a shower gel in India for X USD per kilograms, but it really is, when I transform my experiences, feelings and memories into scents.

It is therapy, when I create from this inner urge piling up in me during many days just to burst out with elementary forces to settle down into a pile of raw materials in a brown bottle. The urge is so strong that I usually get afraid of it and try ignoring for a few days, but I get more and more nervous, more and more disturbed, the stress coming directly from my stomach, which won't ease until I "weight it out" in essential oils on a balance.

It's been a few days I am feeling melancholic and the melody of "mad world" constantly playing in my head. I came home after work, tried to postpone creation, feeling uncertain about it's outcome. I started with cleaning all the shelves. Then, I noted all the quantity of lab supplies at home, starting from pipettes to bottles and spatulas. Then, when there was nothing else to be done, I started to sharpen my pencils that I use for formulation.

I smoked the last cigarette I found in my apartment, and was enjoying feeling guilty. I still think that blowing out thick smoke from my lips is one of the best things in life. I was ready to make the juice. Inspired by the smoke of the cigarette, I added quickly vertyver to the formula I have drafted in my head already a couple of days ago.

It's been a few nights I have been dreaming with grisambrol, no question what mad world smells like.
Grasse gave me another push for creating a deviant perfume with sending dark clouds to quickly take over the arrogantly smiling sun. I would have been happy to hear a few thunders but getting an impromptu rainstorm is probably the maximum one can ask in the middle of the sunniest week of may in the French Riviera.

Grisambrol is a very animalic and ambery, dark and earthy. I put into the juice 500 over 1000. This would scare away any potent perfumer, and they are right, in theory, but I softened down the animalic part with bergamot and angelica root, which makes the perfume still dark but clean, deep but soft, earthy but fresh. The structure is very unusual, so it is more of a sillage than a typical mainstream perfume with well defined top/heart/base notes, but I prefer it this way.

Rain just stopped when I was done with my first trial. I still have a few hundreds to go and no more cigarettes.