Perfumer Ineke

Ineke Ruhland is born in Canada she moved to Europe in 1988 to work in the fragrance industry. In 1996 she studied perfumery at ISIPCA in Versailles France. Following three years of apprenticeship at a fragrance house in Paris, Ineke moved to San Francisco where she created her own perfumes. The perfumes Ineke makes are delicate and elegant, presented in beautiful bottles named following the alphabet.

A

After my own heart

Notes: bergamot, raspberry, lilac

sandalwood heliotrope musk


After my own heart is a fresh tender perfume it has a tiny subtle sweet note but over all it's light and playful. The dominant note is lilac but it has also a fresh citrus note and a green note is also present. The color of this juice is reflecting the fragrance very well it's soft fresh with a transparent feeling.

B
Balmy days & sundays

Notes: freesia, leafy greens grass honeysuckle rose mimosa

chypre accent musk



Balmy days & sundays is more rounder than After my own heart, it's heavier because of the honeysuckle. But still transparent with a green freesia note. It's a quiet perfume like a whisper, a bit too timide for me.

C
Chemical bonding

Notes: smooth citrus cocktail tea blackberry dewy peony

vetviver amber powdery musk


This perfume has citrus but it's fruitier it's not sparkling citrus like in a cologne this citrus is combined with heavier notes, well like Ineke describes the notes herself she say it's a smooth citrus cocktail and that's true. You can smell some sweet fruity notes through it, maybe that's the blackberry I'm smelling? I like this one the most of all four because in this perfume the base is more prominent than in the other three. The base is dry ambery maybe some Ambrox and Cashmeran is used I don't know.

D
Derring-do

Notes: fresh citrus blend rain notes cyclamen magnolia fougere accents

guaiacwood cedarwood musk


This is the masculine perfume from Ineke it's a fougere accord(lavender, patchouli, oakmoss, coumarine) mixed with citrus and magnolia. I love the scent of magnolia and was surprised to find it in a men's fragrance, it works perfectly well in this perfume. It has rain notes for sure like the air can be filled after rain with a scent of waxy green wet leaves. I say waxy because it doesn't smell crispy green but rainy green waxy with a melon note as well. The base is nice woody musky.

Ineke's website is beautiful please have a look:

http://www.ineke.com/

The photo's are from her website and from:

http://www.basenotes.net/

Perfume the movie

Yesterday I've seen the movie "Perfume the story of a murderer" and I enjoyed it very much. I read the book a couple of times because the story is intriguing. I was real curious about how they would make a film based on the novel "Das Parfum" by Patrick Suskind(see photo on your right) from Germany who wrote the novel in 1985. There are 15 million books sold until now. Only in 2001 he gave away the film rights for 10 million Euro!!! The movie was directed by the German film director Tom Tykwer.

The story is about Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who was born in the 18th Century in Paris and had an incomparable sense of smell. He had a live without love and was only interested in scents and smell, not only scents that considered to be "nice" smells but also "bad" smells. The strange thing was that he didn't own a body odor of his own and noticed that because his body didn't had a smell he was a nobody to everyone. It was as if everyone was looking right through him and didn't notice him at all. As he grew up he "fell in love" with the smell of a young woman, a virgin. He wasn't fallen in love with her person but only by her scent, her sent gave him tears in his eyes and he was deeply touched by it. He wanted to know how he could conserve her scent, and wanted to create a scent for his own so he wouldn't be no longer a nobody to everyone.

When he met the perfumer Giuseppe Baldini he proved that he could do miracles with scents and created a perfume without ever learned how to make it. The perfumer was so impressed and knew that he could use Jean-Baptiste Grenouille to make him new wonderful perfumes a thing he wasn't capable of anymore.

The perfumer learned him how to conserve scent and Jean-Baptiste finally knew how to use it for conserving the scent of the young woman. He had to kill her, shaved her had and spread her in a layer of animal fat what absorbed her scent. He distilled the fat and finally had a view drops of her scent. He killed 12 virgins to complete his divine perfume....

It must have been a difficult job to make a movie about smell without actual smelling it but the book didn't have smell as well. I think they did a wonderful job filming this novel. Some parts of the novel are different but the movie tells the whole story complete and changed only small bits, I think because it was necessary for the movie.

Some parts of the movie could be "smelled" I think that's something incredibly difficult for a movie. I especially liked the end of the movie when he's about to be executed, when he's got disgusted by humans, he thinks about the women he killed and realized there is also something else to enjoy the scent of a woman... by making love to her, he never thought about that before.

Merry Christmas

vrolijk kerstfeest

sعيد ميلاد المسيح سعيدة

Joyeux Noël

frohe Weihnachten

merry christmas

Buon Natale

christmas alegre

Feliz Navidad

glad jul

веселое рождество

즐거운 성탄

圣诞快乐

mo’adim lesimkha

The nose knows????

Fig

On the Yahoo group: Perfume Making, we're talking about how to create a fig scent. There is a fig leaf absolute but the absolute can't be used in a perfume because it's extremely phototoxic. This photoxicity is because of bergapten a component also found in bergamot and the component angelicin. I found an article about angelicin that you can read here where is told that angelicin was tested on the skin of mice and the outcome was that it produced skin cancer when administered with ultraviolet A radiation. Also Ifra(The International Fragrance Association) says that fig leaf absolute can't be used in fragrances.

I like to eat figs they are honeysweet and I heard that figs are real healthy. I like the smell of fig leaves as well, my brother has a fig tree in his garden and the smell of the leaves are wonderful. So I tried to make a fig scent not the scent of the fresh figs but the dried figs and a fig leaves scent.

This is what I made for the dried fig scent so far, I used benzyl alcohol(light floral), linalool(floral woody, rosewood like), amyl cinnamic aldehyde(waxy jasmine), benzaldehyde(almond like), coumarine(tonka like), benzyl benzoate(balsamic), exaltolide(musky), maltol(sugary), ethyl phenyl acetate(honey like), ylang ylang oil(exotic), vanillin and indole(animalic).

The smell of it does smell like dried fig indeed but it needs more of a dark sweet scent so I think for the next batch I will use also some labdanum absolute, beeswax absolute for the honey note and some Geranyl acetate to sweeten it and maybe some amyl salicylate as well for a sweet herbal orchid like note.

I also tried to make a fig leaf scent and used stemone(fresh green), galbanum oil( green), linalool, benzyl acetate(fresh jasmine fruity), beta ionone(woody violet), leaf alcohol(smells like fresh cut grass), cis 3 hexenyl acetate(green leaf), styrallyl acetate(green gardenia rhubarb), lindenblossom base, vertelione(violet leaf like), Phenylethyl dimethyl acetate(pungent green), black pepper oil and cyclogalbanate(green galbanum pineapple).

It's a nice green leaf scent but I want to make it more green maybe a bit deeper green, so the experiments will go on.

What is it......

that made me start making perfumes? Sometimes I ask myself that question. I always loved fragrances, as a little child I always took a cloth with me to bed and my mother had to spray some perfume on it, I kept it close to my face when sucking my thumb. My mother was a consulant of Mora Shira when I was a child and I liked to sniff all those lovely fragrances.

I liked to read books about essential oils and liked gardening, so I also started to read books about all kinds of plants and flowers. I also liked to read about healing herbs, but one time my brother gave me a book from Jean M Auel it was her first book "The clan of the cave bear". I was hooked, what a beautiful book, I never read something like that before. It's a long story to tell but this book is about the prehistory it's about a "human" little girl that lost her family in an earthquake and starts to run and run for weeks until she is found by a Neanderthals clan.
She raised up between them but they don't accept her so easy, she is different. The woman that takes care of her is a medicine woman and learned her all the secrets of healing herbs. This way the little girl Ayla gets respect from the clan and she can stay. Well the story goes on but it's too long to tell it all. Jean M Auel wrote 5 novels about Ayla.

The parts in the book about healing herbs were very interesting to me, and I started to plant healing herbs in my garden and made creams for my face with them. Later on I liked to make a garden that was fragrant so when you walked trough it you could smell all kinds of different flowers and plants. I planted the fragrant flowers and plants in a way that you always could smell something also in the evening and night. It was like walking through a perfume and smell all the details of it. I think there it started, I wanted to make a perfume.....

Here you can read more about the books from Jean M Auel and read a piece of the first chapter of her first book The clan of the cave bear:
http://www.amazon.ca/Clan-Cave-Bear-Jean-Auel/dp/product-description/0553250426
Here a site about the herbs Ayla used:
http://ecfans.com/aylasherbs/AHerbs_ac.htm

Jardins de Bagatelle

A perfume what smells like you walk in a garden, a garden with all kinds of fragrant white flowers. The opening is fresh, flowery with some sharp green notes. It's filled with juicy Neroli tempered with Mimosa. It's not a fruity perfume but more a perfume made of a bouquet of white flowers with some citrus and woody notes with an animalic note in the background.

The heart of this perfume is full of white fragrant flowers, but the scent of the flower I can detect most is Gardenia soon assistant by the sensual notes of Tuberose and Jasmine. A scent often used together with Tuberose is narcissus, the smell is a bit similar to the smell of Tuberose although Tuberose smells more creamy and have a green note and Narcissus has a more fruity and more animalic scent, if the smell of Narcissus could have a color it would be yellow. The Narcissus gives a nice bite to this perfume.

To hold all these lovely fragrant flowers together there is added an Iris note, maybe with the use of Ionone a component of Iris that has a dry woody flowery fragrance. It gives a solid smell to these fragrant white flowers so their fragrance will melt with your skin and doesn't smell like you wear the scent of flowers but something that becomes a part of you and your body chemistry. The fragrance of Iris will lead you to the woody notes; a warm earthy smoky Vetiver together with Cedar and Patchouli to spice it up a bit, also an animalic note is added to prevent this perfume to become an innocent perfume.

Jardins de Bagatelle is a very well made elegant perfume, it surprise you with little unexpected notes and the notes are perfect balanced. I do love all the perfumes made by Guerlain and I do love this one as well, but it's not my favorite like Mitsouko, Shalimar or Samsara.