Winter sees the earth sleeping and our bodies seek warmth, comfort and rest. Hot drinks, red wines, hearty slow cooked dishes filled with spices and rich scents that remind us of places that nurture and offer dreams of faraway warmer places.The perfumes that hold their own in winter are the orientals and gourmandes.
Crisp air carries these heady concoctions better and allows them to project their full bodied character as a balance to the cold. When choosing perfumes we should seek balance and harmony always. Warm scents to balance the cold are found in spices, resins, sweet animalic notes, heady exotic florals, smoke, leather, incense and rich food notes like coffee and chocolate.
As I write this my nose is absorbing the latest Fleurage addition, a 'spicy plum' chord I have maturing and resting on scent strips. This is an incredibly successful botanical fruit blend reminiscent of the dried plums you buy in Chinatown. Imagine compotes and crumbles. Think warm spicy richness of stewed fruits from orchards. I also have brewing a second go at 'crisp green apple'. This is also proving to be incredibly successful and is a welcome addition to my library. These days apple is mostly only obtainable as a synthesized scent and I am pleased to be able to say it can still be done by skillful composition using botanical essential oils. Time will tell how well it holds.
Other new developments are a fabulous 'jasmine green tea' chord and a very heady 'almond blossom' I will be using in spring. Understand these are all composites and not extractions. My elusive 'cherry' note still needs adjustments to satisfy my palette but I will persist because to capture this rare and useful scent will enable some very special perfume compositions. By the end of the cold months it is my goal to have added as many working chords to my library as there are raw and single notes. Of course I will probably have to have a new desk made to hold them all and enable me free access when creating but I see that as a bonus.
Notice as a perfumer I dont use the word 'organ'. I find it both a ridiculous and inappropriate term for what is essentially a working scent reference library. I prefer more dignified terms such as palette, library, collection. I see my art as more akin to painting and less a kind of music. I especially dont see the parallels to the kind of heavy, clumsy, overbearing music produced by an actual organ.( Phantom of the opera I am not )
Winter is also time for planning( or is it plotting?) the new directions and next steps for Fleurage. Hours spent in cafes over coffee with my notebook making dreams reality, nights wrapped in fluffy rugs with pen and paper projecting my visions into the here and now. This is where I find my joy in winter and make the most of what most consider a time to be over as soon as possible.
Credit for this fabulous picture goes to the amazing artist from the art deco era - William Welsh who designed this as part of a seasonal series for a women's magazine of the time.
