I realize I don't post as often anymore, I apologize for that. I have many things to say I want to do more reviews of the Guerlain perfumes and also of the perfumes by Ineke. But lately I can't always find the time. I just post when ever I have the time or whenever I feel like it, I want to enjoy to write the posts and don't want to feel like it's a must. I hope you all don't mind that I don't post on a regular bases.
We started to talk about how difficult it seems to translate smell in words, I found out that when I ask someone to describe a perfume they look at me like I asked something really strange, they say something like that it's nice or that it's sweet or that it's fresh but they find it difficult to tell more about it.
A couple of days ago I visited my brother, my friend was there as well, my sister in law and I started to talk about a perfume. She used words like, it has a high tone or this perfume smells round etc. My friend raised her eyebrows and asked where the hell we were talking about. She said it was like we were talking a different language. We explained to her what we were talking about and after the explanation she understood a bit more of this special language.
I told the lady of the shop about this and she affirmed this, she told me she did a wine tasting course once and that it was difficult to describe the taste or smell. There are some kind of words used to describe some aromas, but she told me that some descriptions were not her descriptions, everyone has their own scent memories or referents, so the description by someone else could be from a whole different scent experience than yours.
We also made the connection to music, we both like music it seemed. Music can touch you in the same way a fragrance can, but somehow it's easier to describe music then to describe a fragrance. We can even find out what kind of notes the music is made of, try that with a perfume....Maybe we have to learn how to describe what we smell it's an important part of our live, strange that we have a difficulty to find the words for such an important thing.
Blending different aromatic materials is a remarkable process, you think you know how the result will smell because you know what you just mixed but the outcome is sometimes different than you expected. Sometimes you know because of earlier experiences but you can't always predict how a mix will smell. Like when you paint and you mix colors you'll see that blue and yellow mixed together will form a whole new color; green. We all know that by now, it's the same in perfumery we know the outcome of some combinations but we can't predict them all. A couple of days before I added a tiny bit of Maltol to a creation. Maltol is an aroma chemical that smells like sugar. I added a real small bit, but the outcome wasn't sugary at all, it made the fragrance more stand out it gave the fragrance a solid base what gave the top and heart notes a lift. I like discoveries like that.
At my Perfumemaking group we are talking about tincturing. I like the idea of making tinctures of unusual materials. Zz from Parfume Moderne gave us some tips on how to make tinctures. I remember that I tried to make them a couple of years ago but that wasn't a success.
The whole week I'm blending, mixing, stirring and sniffing. I took the whole week off so I can spent all my time on making perfumes. I'm studying the musk materials right now, I have many different musks and I'm trying to find out which musk combines well with the other. The odorants of musk are really different I have sweet musks but also musks that have a dominant animal note, I have musks with a dry note a full rounded note, a green note, a musk ambery note and so on.
