As the Scented Speakeasy – our discovery of illicit ingredients and underground perfumes – draws ever closer, prompting much twitching of nostrils in readiness of the delights ahead, it is time to find out a little more about the three ‘prohibition perfumers’ who are offering up some of their scents into the cloak of night (that does sound a little Phantom of the Opera, but I suppose that plus a dose of 1920s is the aesthetic we are going for).

Each of the perfumers is approaching the subject of illicit fragrance from a different angle.

All are nascent in terms of selling their wares and to some extent self-taught, which is additionally great, because it’s a chance to discover some fresh approaches to perfumery.

Elizabeth Moores of new outfit Papillon Perfumery is sharing some of the scents she would never sell to clients, but which she will make and circulate to friends and family, and where she can use hefty-doses of ingredients that are otherwise regulated or banned.

Elizabeth got here by way of a career in ballet, and then in remedial massage, through which she began independently studying aroma chemicals, experimenting with the essential oils she had at hand.

In 2009 she completed the Fragrance Foundation CFSS course and with further training began making perfumes independently for friends.  By 2010 Elizabeth was completing bespoke perfumes for clients and decided to launch Papillon Perfumery.

Situated near the New Forest, Elizabeth’s studio is set in the heart of the woodlands where she creates small batches of handmade perfumes, using elements of her surroundings as an inspiration within her compositions. Papillon Perfumery will be launching three perfumes by the end of this year including a leather floral, dark rose and a sea spray aquatic floral.

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Stephen Nelsen of Darasina composes out of historical curiosity, recreating compositions that wouldn’t be possible or marketable today.

A horticulturist by trade, he became fascinated with old perfume recipes by studying archives on the historic uses of raw materials; the very plants and herbs that he was using aesthetically in gardens.

Before he knew it, he was growing his own orris and patchouli to discover their fragrant qualities, and was commissioned to recreate historic pot pourris for the National Trust, including at Knole House.

Stephen makes to private commission, and his projects include pomander necklaces (don’t you wish these were readily available?), colognes, and sachets. He cultivates a glorious-sounding garden in the English countryside, which I am desperate to visit for a good old poke around.

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Sarah McCartney of 4160 Tuesdays (soon-launching) is olfactorily illicit in a few ways.

One of her speakeasy perfumes is so extravagent in its use of costly ingredients that it would be impossible to sell it (outside of Dubai), and therefore nobody is ever really going to be in a position to try it outside of the event tomorrow. Others make abandoned use of oakmoss for the joy of it, or a supply of an oud that came out of a sidestreet in the Middle East one day, and who knows if there will ever be any more of it.

Sarah started young, mixing plants together in the garden when she was little, but she didn’t want to be a perfumer, she wanted to be a witch. Her potions were intended to do magic. She still feels that way about scent. It shouldn’t just smell lovely, it should make you feel amazing too.

Sarah first started blending seriously while she was working for Lush as their writer. She had to learn all the properties that natural materials have as well as their odours. When she mentioned to Mark Constantine that she’d like to make scents, he handed her a five litre vat of denatured alcohol and had a box of essential oils delivered to her house.

Sarah is not interested in large scale production that’s dictated by fashion or bean counting. She likes “…gorgeous, voluptuous scents you call fall into. I love my oakmoss and opoponax.”

While she’s getting myself established as a perfumer, Sarah still works as a copywriter and runs creative writing workshops.

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Here be their stories, and their scents will certainly beguile tomorrow evening. We will share more about the perfumes after the event, but as a sneak preview we’ll be sampling a perfume called Death by Jasmine (bury me in black), another called Doris, and one with a very Narnian sounding title: Lion Cupboard.

‘What’s that Odette Toilette up to now’, I hear you say: ‘promoting the use of perfume as dodgy thirst-quenching drink?’

No. Too poisonous.

However, our April Scratch+Sniff event is set to be a bit naughty. The Scented Speakeasy is a gloriously decadent showcase of fragrances from a roster of talented new perfumers.

Alongside the quaffing of 1920s-era cocktails (well, alcohol was going to be involved somewhere, right?), we are going to be getting to know the fragrances of Elizabeth Moores from Papillon Perfumery, of Sarah McCartney, and of Stephen Nelson from Darasina. You may not have heard of them yet, but you soon will.

Where does the prohibition bit come from?  Strictly speaking, most of the perfumes to be sampled are only given by our perfumers to friends or made for their personal use, and aren’t available to buy, because they contain obsolete, restricted or banned ingredients. Ingredients that are being used in dangerously lavish quantities in the samples you will try, including natural jasmine, nitro-musks, natural civet, storax and angelica, and which simply wouldn’t be embodied in this way in commercially available fragrances.

The Scented Speakeasy is not a campaign against regulation, but it is an opportunity to try that which we usually wouldn’t be able to experience alongside discovering more about the historical use of the ingredients. We’ll be trying finished perfumes as well as the raw materials on their own, and even better, the wonderful perfumer Sarah McCartney will be there in person to talk through her creations, which have such intriguing names as Lion Cupboard and Evil Max.

So. If you want to know why Max is just so evil, the olfactory extravaganza is taking place at 7.30pm on Tuesday 17th April at The Book Club, Shoreditch, London and you can get your tickets via the events page – only £12.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll also be sharing a little more about our participating perfumers, starting with Papillon Perfumery’s Elizabeth Moores.

Image from wikimedia.

Slightly over-excited at the moment, as we announce a very special project that we’ve been hatching up with poet and poetry editor Claire Trevien.

For the last year, I’ve been wondering what would happen if you hooked up some perfumers and authors for a creative exchange to discover how you translate a perfume into creative writing and vice versa.

Strangely enough, as is often the way, I was contacted by Claire out of the blue, with the tantalising news that she had lots of poets up her sleeve who were ever so keen to do something with fragrance. And so, Penning Perfumes was born, supported by the team at Seven Scent, a UK-based fragrance company which is getting quite a reputation for embarking on artistic perfume projects.

Over the next couple of months, we are going on an odyssey to see how far we can go into this territory. What’s happening is this:

• Twelve poets, both high-profile and new voices, have each been sent a mystery vial of perfume in the post. All the perfumes are available to buy, but the poets  have no idea what it is, not even the brand. Over the coming weeks, they’re writing a new poem that is inspired by, riffing off or arguing with their fragrance. Any poetic response is good. We would love to tell you which fragrance houses are involved, and will, but we have to wait until the writing is done….

• Five of the poets are going a bit further. They are coming together to meet a perfumer for series of documented meetings. These are conversations about how the creative process differs between composing a perfume vs. a poem, but even more excitingly, are like jam-sessions: the poets are putting a phrase out there and the perfumer must find a corresponding raw material to it, and then the perfumer is handing out a scent and asking the poet to find a descriptive word.
  In our first meet-up, between perfumer Penny Williams and poet David Morley, we’ve found a scent that describes the words enchantment and caravan, and expect to go more and more abstract as the meetings continue! Still to come, Lavinia Greenlaw meets independent perfumer Ruth Mastenbroek, poet Lindsey Holland meets Kate Williams from Seven Scent, poet Amy Key meets Mike Parrot of CPL Aromas and poet Emily Hasler meets Steve Pearce of Omega Ingredients. Valerie Laws has also met with Dilton Physic Garden for a slightly different take on perfumery…

• And then for all you fragrance-fanatics out there, the fun continues. At the end of these meetings, the poet is giving the perfumer one of their existing poems, and the perfumer is developing a fragrance in response. Rather than these being constrained by commercial requirements, the perfumes might be so radical they’re hardly wearable. We REALLY can’t wait to smell them.

• All this will then come together at the Penning Perfumes Scratch+Sniff Event in London on Tuesday 12th June, which is going to be a literary night with a difference, completely with scented poetry readings and the discovery of our new fragrances. This is just like our other events in that anyone can come get a ticket.

• And there’s more. We are to publish and sell a beautiful pamphlet of all the poems, together with a little scent sample, designed by the very talented Nick Murray of Annexe.

As there’s a lot going on here, we have set up a dedicated Penning Perfumes blog, and if on twitter, follow via hashtag #penningperfumes.  Tickets for June 12th are available via the events page. Come down to our olfactory-come-literary shindig with a difference, and to discover these intriguing new fragrances…..

Odette x

On Saturday we had a completely lovely and frothy time (I refer to the glasses of bubbly, or bubbles as I like to call them) at the latest of the Vintage Scent Sessions which I hosted in Les Senteurs’ Scent Salon in London. This time we were taking a look at the perfumes of the 1920s – all photos were taken by the lovely BekiTakesPictures.

It’s very special having the space to enjoy fragrance in a much broader context and to really go to town on an era. This time we explored everything from Fritz Lang’s silent film masterpiece, Metropolis, and the corresponding idea of perfume as a ‘machine’ impersonating a person – see this gorgeous and unsettling clip of Metropolis’ fake Maria driving a number of gentlemen into a frenzy:

We also jumped into the similarities between perfume bottles and speakeasy hipflasks, the advent of home applicances and how this growth of easy convenience could perhaps be glimpsed in the rollout of perfume vending machines (which I hope will one day be brought back, please!). We  compared a vintage bottle of Caron’s classic fragrance, Nuit de Noël, against the contemporary version, and sniffed an awful lot of other classic fragrances including Josephine Baker’s suppsed favourite, Black Tulip by E.Coudray (recently relaunched under the name Nohiba).

Next time round on March 10th we’re going into the 1930s and in May it’s the turn of the 1940s. Check out the events page for the latest on tickets.

This month’s Scratch+Sniff, The Aroma and Art attack, was all about enjoying perfume in conjunction with art.

We delved into colour, form, composition, then some more bizarre themes like whether artistic rivalry as epotomised by the energy between Picasso and Matisse is ever experienced the same way in perfume.

Then we looked at whether such a thing as a Surrealist Scent exists. And even whether there can be a fragrance equivalent of the self-portrait.

But the best part of the evening by far was handing out three perfumes (anonymously), a load of art paper and pastels, and inviting people to just create their own work of art in response to the scent. One of the scents was a beatiful composition by our wonderful guest speaker, Martin Holme, who made one bottle as an experiment and never released it. I want some!

I’ll let the results speak for themselves…. peruse at your leisure…

]]> http://www.scratchandsniffevents.com/2011/11/24/scent-as-visual-art/feed/ 0 http://www.scratchandsniffevents.com/2011/10/04/life-in-scents/ http://www.scratchandsniffevents.com/2011/10/04/life-in-scents/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:11:39 +0000 Odette Toilette http://www.scratchandsniffevents.com/?p=420

I have been meaning to post about this for a while, given we’re now on edition three and all of the podcast. Oh dear.

So to begin.

One of the most delightful aspects of Scratch+Sniff comes when guests are provoked by some fragrance or other to start sharing memories from their lives; anything from an aftershave that smells very similar to a brand of hairgel worn in the 80s when a guy was at the height of his misspent youth and remembered the chippie he’d habituate after a night on the pull, through to a perfume that is associated with first love, first interview, first job, first anything in fact.

So many of these anecdotes began to surface, that I started to think: ‘You know what? It would be lovely to interview people specifically about their smell memories, kind-of-like Desert Island Disks.’  I’d started having these sorts of conversations in daily life, which is especially excellent when getting a haircut. We now no longer need to talk about holiday plans but can witter on about our favourite Impulse body sprays when at school (for the record, it was the now obsolete o2)

As this idea was being mulling over in my mind, I received an email from a radio producer, Jo Barratt, who had come to the very first Scratch+Sniff event in February 2010. That night, the inimitable James Craven, fragrance archivist at Les Senteurs, had been the guest speaker. Jo thought James was (rightly) fab, and so conducted an interview with him about his memories, which inevitably involved plenty of smells. Jo wrote:

I’ve just written a three part article on the world of vintage fragrance collecting for the Financial Times’ How to Spend It online.

If you’re interested in the allure of lost scents and how to track ‘em down, do have a read. I’m unable to reproduce the article here, so follow the links:

Vintage Fragrance Part 1

Vintage Fragrance Part 2

Part 3, a buyer’s guide, will be published any day now – I’ll post the link as soon as it’s up!

This week saw the final Scratch+Sniff event of the season before a short summer break – well, we need a few weeks off in order to recover the airways.

With Les Senteurs providing the scents, and their archivist James Craven lending his huge knowledge and wit as guest speaker, our theme, Perfume and Mythology, was a scented expedition into Greco-Roman legends (with a little Norse thrown in). Before commencing our sniffing we started with the beginning of Ovid’s Metamorphosis:

“Of bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
‘Till I my long laborious work compleat…”

"Ahem, hello.... I'm wearing very little. Narcissus?....hellloooo!"

Mythological stories are of changes in form, of the exaggerated character archetypes displayed by the Gods, of going over the limit to discover excess and of being tempted away from purpose.

How does this shape-shifting quality find expression in perfumery, which so often is about amplifying an aspect of personality, about enchanting and being enchanted and (no bad thing necessarily), the lure of narcissism and of gazing onto the self – indeed coming to know ourselves – through scent?

These teasing ideas peeped out during the event – yet far from proposing an aesthetic theory of mythology and fragrance, we were content simply with enjoying the space opened up by this parallel exploration; some of the perfumes we are directly connected with or inspired by a myth, others helped amplify an aspect of the story, or simply add a gauzy layer of experience over James’ wonderful tales.

Here are the perfumes we sampled, along with their accompanying charcers or stories…

Our event concluded with our own version of The Judgement of Paris, in which we ascribed a scent to each of the three goddesses vying for Paris’ attention and golden apple: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. In a shock overruling of the original decision, our sniffers decided that they would choose Athena, as represented by Huitieme Art’s Ciel d’Airain scent and its olive, pear and ambergris. A turnout for the books, and our only challenge may be in changing the official record. One day.

Absolutely thrilled to be a visiting creative practitioner over the next two months at Threeways School in Bath, where I’m running a scent-learning programme with primary and secondary pupils as part of the final stage of Creative Partnerships.

Threeways is an amazing school for pupils with special needs. Seriously – not only do they have a specialism in sensory learning and are a School in Creativity, but they have their own interaction designer who heads up an incredible sensory studio – words cannot do this place justice, but think of a large pod with wrap-round projections, surround sound, and lighting (including gobos and spotlights) which move and change colour through an ipad controller. I’ve never seen anything like it! See this video of the studio in action from The Guardian.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been doing all sorts, from a scented version of Little Red Riding Hood, to art and collage inspired by smells, to trips out to Bath’s Botanic Gardens, its skate park and to a nearby valley to hunt down smells (some not so nice but that’s half the joy…). The work is building up to a final performance later in June, when the pupils share their work to an audience.

This project is very close to my heart.  The sense of smell gets very little space in education even though its so important – while I’m deep in the project right now, I’ll blog soon about the impact of the project and more on why sensory learning is so underused in schools.

Much fun was had at this month’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Event, which was a trip down the memory lane in which we used retro-favourite perfumes like CK1 and White Musk to think about the teen as a cultural phenomenon.

Check out these teen diaries, fictional I might add, ahem, which were penned by our lovely audience and inspired by some of the scents we tried. Some of them are almost too painful to read, they’re that evocative.