What is the Perfume Project?

This blog is a constantly evolving forum for thoughts on perfume, perfume-making, plants (especially orchids and flora of the Pacific Northwest) and life in general. It started out chronicling the adventures of Olympic Orchids Perfumes, established in July 2010, and has expanded in other directions. A big part of the blog is thinking about the ongoing process of learning and experimentation that leads to new perfumes, the exploration of perfumery materials, the theory and practice of perfume making, the challenges of marketing perfumes and other fragrance products, and random observations on philosophy and society. Spam comments will be marked as such and deleted; any comments that go beyond the boundaries of civil discourse will also be deleted. I am grateful to all of you, the readers, who contribute to the blog by commenting and making this a truly interactive perfume project.

Saturday, June 24, 2017

HOW I’M SPENDING MY SUMMER

Finally summer has come to Seattle, with perfect blue skies that make me think about all the places in the world that are so polluted that the sky is obscured even on a “clear” day. I fear that it’s only a matter of time until this problem becomes worldwide, affecting even our little corner of the West Coast. Pollution knows no city, county, state, or national boundaries, so even if we do our part, that doesn’t guarantee that we won’t get second-hand smog from those who don’t.

I really didn’t mean to write about this issue, it just came out because it had was on my mind as I was walking outside today. What I’ve actually been doing this week is working on upgrading my websites. The old orchidscents(original boutique) website is so ugly that I hate looking at it, and the olympicorchids nursery website isn’t much better. I am in the process of switching to a new e-commerce platform that will look better and work better, but it’s a lot of work.

This week I put together a simple practice website for myjewelry-making activities. It's not finished yet, but it looks pretty good. The perfume website will be similar, or at least on the same e-commerce platform, but I need all-new photos of the bottles so that I can standardize the look of the store. Yesterday I photographed all of the 30 ml bottles, and today I sized, cropped, and Photoshopped the images. I found the perfect place to photograph bottles, a stair rail that has bright indirect side/back lighting from a big window in the stair well. It’s like being in a walk-in light tent. 

The new photos need minimal processing and look a lot better than the old ones, even though they were taken with my phone. I kind of like the two-tone background instead of the bottle floating in a sea of white. One of these days I need to go to the Apple store and get them to figure out how to download photos from my old camera, which is incompatible with the new Apple photo management software. I still have to photograph other fragrance items for the website: samples, discovery sets, soaps, oils, etc, but will probably do that on Monday. Sunday is shipping day for everything, so I’ll be busy overseeing that.


I’m really looking forward to having an attractive and functional perfume website with all of my products on it. Once that’s done, the orchid plant website is next. There goes my summer vacation! But it’s all going to be worth it in the end.

[All photos are mine]

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