This past week I’ve been engaged in a major operation to
restock perfume concentrates, restock packaged perfumes on the shelves, refill stock
bottles for sample-filling, and restock samples. I also just completed the IFRA
certification for Zoologist Bat, and will be doing it for my own line as well. This
effort will continue through next week, and probably well beyond that.
In the process of working with perfumes that I hadn’t
refilled for a while, I’ve had the experience of smelling them with a new nose,
as if they were someone else’s. The results have been a revelation in some
ways. One of the earliest perfumes I made was Javanica, a fragrance based on
what I thought was the scent of a Phalaenopsis orchid, but later discovered
that it was just the fragrance peculiar to that one plant, not the Phalaenopsis javanica species in
general. The plant that’s blooming as I write this has very little fragrance,
and what it has is very different, more green than floral. I hadn’t smelled
Javanica for a long time because Stacey fills the samples and retail bottles,
and we had plenty of concentrate and diluted stock on hand, at least until now,
when diluted stock was almost gone. Javanica is not one of our best-sellers, so
I was actually thinking of discontinuing it.
However, when I was diluting concentrate yesterday, I
realized that I really liked it, enough so that I could even wear it on
occasion. Funny. I thought I didn’t like it that much. Javanica is a floral
scent with a lot of incense and nutmeg, quite a “happy”-smelling fragrance,
probably nice for a sunny day in summer. Someone else once described it as “the
scent of being infatuated-in love”. I like that, and now realize that the
description sort of fits.
[All photos are mine.]
Posts
I have a deluxe sample of Javanica and I love wearing in the summer as it really blooms on my skin in the warmer weather. When I first read the name, Javanica, I thought it might be coffee related (like java). When I wear it, I get an initial burst of spice followed by tropical flowers and humid woods, Maybe another Indonesian island chain, the Spice Islands, can inspire a name. How about Maluku or Mollucas?
ReplyDeleteAnne, These are excellent suggestions for a perfume that smells like Indonesian tropical flowers! Thank you.
DeleteI haven't tried Javanica but I do like the name. It rolls off the tongue nicely. I think if you feel the name doesn't quite represent the scent right, then why not change it? I really like Anne's suggestions, especially since Javanica seems to have a happy tropical feel to it!
ReplyDeleteTarena, the name sort of represents the perfume, but probably not to the average person. I ,ike Anne's suggestions, too.
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