timing belts and removing grime

This has absolutely nothing to do with perfume, but aromatics play into it, so I’ll forge along and just post anyway.

We’re trying to get the Buttless Wonder Car to pass smog, which in CA can be quite difficult to do unless you have a brand new vehicle, and it means having to adjust the timing belt in our case; apparently the timing was off by something like 10 points? So, I’m out there aiming a timing light at the belt and the little calibration doohickey, and BF is manually accelerating the idle with his hand, and his hands are filthy! Go figure, right.

We finally got the setting down between 5 and 6, where it belongs. We swapped out a sensor and readjusted one of the hoses on the air filter, too.

I made a sugar scrub for his thrashed hands. Rice bran oil, granulated sugar, a bit of steam-distilled sweet orange, a breath of patchouli, a drop of vanilla CO2 just for the hell of it. And it took the crap clean off. A quick follow-up with some gentle handmade soap, and his hands are cleaner than they’d be had he used soap alone, or one of those harsh orange cleaner w/ pumice products geared towards mechanics.

If you tinker with cars, or you live with someone who does, sugar scrubs are the way to go. Salt will burn like crazy on abrasions and cuts, even if you’re using a more powdery product like pickling salt.

[/public service announcement]

antiquated-book-smell, and other things

It’s been done, maybe to death; I’m not sure because I’ve not looked for others doing this for a couple years, but I’m thinking about recreating the smell of antiquated books. Down to the old leather binding.

I know to start with some antique terpeneless patchouli I managed to source a long time ago, and I have ideas on a vegetal leather, but I’m not sure if I should stop with the book itself, or if I need to create the library itself and possibly a library patron. Hm.

Yeah, make that the 50 bazillionth pot I have on the stove!

But it’s a fun something to let my mind wander to while I’m doing the other 49 bazillion things.

explorations of Pogostemon cablin

I have a 16 oz bottle of dark patchouli from India that I’ve been hoarding for about six years. Aside from it making the opening of the bottle a bit tarry over time, it has aged into something really special. Golden, fruity, contemplative, green, herbaceous, dusty, sweet freshly-turned soil. All at once.

So I’m embarking on blends with it. I’ve so far tried the following in various combinations:
vetiver w/ rose
vanuatu sandalwood
morrocan rose
rose otto
gulhina
cocoa absolute
ylang ylang
choya ral
ruh motia
cassie
tonka
peru balsam

Nary a top note in those experimental blends, either. I find that patchouli either loses itself and you get something greater than the sum of the parts, or if you add enough, it creates a monotone of sorts. Not a bad monotone either, but the character really comes through.

I’m not one who thinks of the 1960s, or how my mom smelled in the several years after I was born, when I sniff patchouli. When I contemplate my bottle, I see a universal blender, an economic one even in light of current shortages driving the cost up. And for those naysayers who say that it leaves its grubby footprints in everything it is added to, nope. I know some very studied patchouli-haters who fail to detect it in a number of my perfumes where it plays a supporting role and adds green tones to render the leaves and branches the flowers are blooming from.

I don’t agree, but it is interesting.

Your Fragrance Profile

The best calming fragrance: vanilla The best fragrance for everyday wear: orange The best fragrance to boost your sex appeal: lavender The best fragrance for energy: pine

What’s Your Fragrance Profile?

When a review is not a review?

I’ve been trying to work my way through ‘Perfumes: The Guide’ by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. This is happening in fits and starts, because the obvious glee with which the two of them render their opinions is thick enough to slice up like polenta, fry, and serve alongside a wilted spinach salad with heirloom tomatoes and kalamata olives. Don’t forget the cheap battery-acid pinot grigio, by the glass.

‘Schadenfreud, party of two? Your table is ready…’

And it’s not even that I take issue with some reviews (of course I do, I’m an opinionated nose-governed bitch that way, and I know my aromatics), it’s just that this book is not a definitive guide by any stretch of the imagination. Just like none of the self-described ‘guides’ are.

I think this book is more for the hoarders and collectors among us. And it’s not even a coffee table book with eye candy pictures, so much as a weirdly organized encyclopedia. If I had to take issue with anything beyond that, it’d be that the format is too big to slip into my purse when I take the train, but too small to warrant throwing into my messenger bag when I’m on my bicycle.

Which relegates it to bathroom reading, more than anything else.

co-distills and attars rock

I’ve been playing with attars in a very limited fashion for some years now.  There are the obvious tonalities like mitti (baked earth distilled into sandalwood), gulhina (henna into same), motia (jasmine sambac into same), et al.

But you can get attars (I think these are technically co-distills) in vetiver as well.  My current favorite is Rosa bourbonia in vetiver.  The first attraction is the vetiver is like buttah.  Ruh khus from India has a really refined nature that is generally lacking in the distillations from Madagascar, Java, and Haiti.  Product from these places tends to have a burnt note going on, beneath the sweatsocks and thick grassy butter.  And that’s not a bad thing, because even a burnt bouquet is valuable in blending.

The vetiver has a warm golden earthy glow, which is taken up and amplified by a very quiet whiff of rose otto (and rose otto tends to be a really big brassy opera diva, by itself, so this is effect is priceless).

Current blending plans with this stuff:
patchouli (a distillation that behaves more like a heart note than a base)
neroli
a single crumb of jasmine grandiflorum concrete
maybe clary sage and frankincense?

eau de cologne, again

Jiminy crickets.  This addition of water stuff really gives me fits.

I managed to add a few milliliters of filtered water to one blend, minimal clouding.  The trick is to either work with one of those magnetic stirrer jobbies, or to be really thorough and swift with your stirring rod as you add drop by drop.

The second blend… well.  It looks like lemonade.  Here’s what kills me: it clarifies beautifully when you put it in a warm water bath.  Warm it up, et voila, you have ze cleeer ztuff.  Let it cool, bam, back to lemonade.  I wish I could remember why water does this, but I can’t even remember how to write out a chemical equation for what happens when you add anhydrous to water, so…

File under ‘Whinge of the Day’.

Both of them smell purty, though.

Saffron

From Lise Manniche (Sacred Luxuries), “…The well-known flower pistils of Crocus sativus relate to Egypt only as far as saffron is an ingredient in the kyphi recipe provided by Galen.  This presumably occurred because saffron was much loved in the classical world for its scent as well as its colour.  It was known in the Bible as karcom.  It has long been grown in Europe, and grew in Persia where it was cultivated in the 10th century AD.

…Pliny praises saffron from Soli in Cilicia, later superseded by saffron from Rhodes.  He quotes a recipe for saffron perfume, crocinum, which also included cinnabar (a naturally occurring mineral), wine and alkanet (a dyeing plant).  Theophrastus claims that in his day the best saffron for perfume came from the island of Aegina and from Cilicia…” (p.23)

When I read this passage, a passage from Arctander comes to mind, wherein he observes a tendency to opine that things just don’t smell the way they used to.

But is it just a ‘things just ain’t the way they used to be, grrr’ tendency, or is there some validity to it?  I have to wonder, given how the climate has changed, how the air is now full of pollutants that did not exist thousands of years ago, and how those pollutants and aromatic compounds must negatively impact our nasal receptors.

Observation for the day:
The ‘golden age’ of scent probably started in the fertile crescent several thousand years ago.

Plan for the day:
Create something with saffron as a predominant note, but something that is not foodie/gourmand.

eau de cologne

Hungary Water, Koelnische Wasser, 4711, the stuff that Napoleon Drenched Himself In By the Quart…

I did two standard recipes for this today.  Both of them have thyme as an herbaceous element.  Both of them have rosemary.  I really do not like the effect the rosemary has on the lemony elements; it turns them into a cough drop.

So far, I am preferring the formula with tinctured vetiver in the base, to the formula with tinctured benzoin in the base.  I might do another two versions, even after I’ve written up the two from today.  NO rosemary.  Just a breath of black pepper, to make the bergamot pop, and maybe some monarda to extend the lemon into the heart.

bread and baked goods

I was too beat to post last night, but it was on the tip of my brain to think a bit about foodie scents and their place in perfume.  Some folks call them ‘gourmand’.

Generally speaking, these are not odors I seek out, at all.  The idea of smelling like my aunt’s kitchen the after she’s baked apple strudel does not exactly blow my skirt up.  Likewise, the thought of smelling like a Hershey bar gives me the willies.

But… there’s the psychological effect of such smells, and I can board the train there.

Last night was baking night.  Bread for the next couple weeks, scones for the week, and I had hoped to crank out a batch of springerle, but was too tired to scrape the quikcrete-, I mean bread dough out of the Kitchen Aid bowl and off the mixing paddle.  Baking night is an occasion in my abode.  The dude either hangs out in the kitchen with the radio on, reading the newspaper, or is nearby in the living room, because the smells are too enticing and he’s a moth to my oven’s flame.  And the cats guard the oven.

Daisy Ernestine’s thing is bread with butter.  She likes the bread solo, but put a titch of butter on there and she’s a Feline Kitchen Goddess and Guardian of Breads.  Lucy Fuzzbutterson is more a scone puss.  If I make the Cheese Board Collective recipe that calls for buttermilk and cornmeal, she does a lot of pacing in the living room when she’s not waiting in the kitchen.

But what is it that draws us to these smells?  Even the cats view them as comfort.  The kitchen is warm, they can smell things being baked with butter and milk, and they like bread…  The dude is in the kitchen because he wants to burn his mouth on a scone (which he got to do, and then he promptly crashed while I waited for the bread to bake).

I’ve played a bit with foodable aromatics like butter CO2, honey and beeswax absolutes, hazelnut CO2, wheat absolute, cacao absolute and CO2, vanilla absolute and CO2, coffee, sweet spices like nutmeg and clove bud.  And then you get into a bevy of aromatics that are not foodable on their own, but when you pair them with other things they work magic.  Champaca smells of carrot cake if you blend it with rooibos absolute, for example.  Davana is like fruit punch if you mix it with citrus.

To date, only two perfumes in my repertoire are intentionally foodie, and even then they’re foodie as a stretch…  Pan Dulce and Cafe y Cacao.

I’ll be playing with edibles again, of course.  The universe of CO2 extractions makes it possible to use essences that are traditionally reserved for flavoring, for example.

If I could come up with a rust honey wheat bread perfume, it’d definitely be interesting.  I think I need to score some more wheat absolute for that, first.  And I wonder how the wearer would best utilize it.  Do you dab it behind your years in order to charm the guy who is looking for mom and a warm kitchen?  ‘How to Cook a Tart’ by Nina Kilham comes to mind about now