NEW LOWS IN SAMPLE DESIGN

It seems like I’m always complaining about something. I’ve written about bad sample designs before, but recently I’ve encountered some new lows in sample packaging that I feel compelled to write about.

When I got a carded sample of Versace’s Versense, I thought the vial was cute with the little tab sticking up from the light green stopper. Little did I suspect that it would be the stimulus that prompted me to write about new lows when it comes to vial design. It turns out that the “stopper” is actually a cap that is permanently fused to the vial, and the dabber stick is fused to it by a thin layer of plastic. To get at the contents of the vial the dabber stick has to be carefully wiggled back and forth by the tab and broken away from its attachment to the cap. Once the thin plastic seal is broken, the dabber stick lifts out through a tiny hole in the cap. I needed to use a pair of pliers to remove the dabber without breaking it off from the tab, and I suspect that many people would break it off entirely, leaving the dabber stick stuck in the vial, with no way to retrieve it and no way to reseal the vial. Even though I successfully opened the sample, I suspect the liquid that remains in the vial after taking out a test drop will evaporate rapidly once the seal is broken, since the dabber just sits there on the cap without forming a seal. Does the manufacturer really think that people are going to pour the whole vial on themselves at one go? What a waste, assuming I ever wanted to try the stuff again. Fortunately, I do not.

Glass vials that can’t be resealed are not the worst things out there, though. Some manufacturers now use cardboard sheets with a little plastic bubble containing the sample. The Carven Homme pictured here has about 1 or 2 ml of liquid in a clear plastic bubble with a pull-tab on the back to open it up. Once open, that’s it. Single-use, throw away the rest. Again, what are testers to do? Dip their fingers in and dab it on? Pour the whole thing on themselves? Decant it into a real vial with a hypodermic syringe? Did it ever occur to Carven that people might want to try their fragrance more than once before deciding whether to buy it, and don’t want to have to provide their own container in order to do so? I’m not even going to try it once. Things like this deserve to go in the trash.

Right on a par with the plastic bubbles are the moist towelettes sealed up in a plastic or foil packet like the lemon-scented ones given out by eating establishments to clean your hands after eating greasy finger food. I can’t decide whether they are better or worse than the bubble packs. At least they blatantly acknowledge the fact that they are single-use, but I find the whole concept of wiping myself with perfume from a moist towelette off-putting. These go straight to the trash, too. Maybe my snobbishness causes me to miss some of the world’s most wonderful scents, but somehow I doubt it.

Maybe there are other sample packaging lows even lower than the three that I’ve mentioned, but it’s hard to imagine.

SMELL BLIND

Every fall I teach an intensive 4-week class for incoming freshmen. The building where I teach is surrounded with a planting of dozens of jasmine bushes. Over the past three years I’ve watched them grow from tiny starts to mature bushes that are now becoming vines, sprawling over the beds of landscaping chips. Every year there are more and more flowers, and this fall there was a bumper crop.

On my way to class, I could smell jasmine as soon as I was in the square next to the building. Walking up to the entrance every morning, I was surrounded by a thick, heavy cloud of jasmine fragrance. It was insistent and unmistakable. I assumed that my students would have noticed the smell, but I was wrong.

About three weeks into the class, I asked if anyone had noticed any flower fragrance outside the building, on the way to class. I got a lot of blank stares and puzzled looks. No one had noticed any flowers, and no one had noticed any scent. Not a single student had any idea what I was talking about. When we went on a field trip to the other side of campus, I pointed out the jasmine as we left the building. Without exception, the students said that they had not noticed it, either to see or to smell. It’s as if they were both blind and anosmic to their surroundings.

I’m at a loss to understand how someone could not notice a strong and pervasive flower scent. What is going on? Are people so bombarded with air fresheners, deodorizers, laundry products, department store signature scents, cleaning products, and other artificial smells that they are unable to smell things in nature? Has all this olfactory cacophony resulted in people expecting to smell something all the time, so they don’t pay attention to smells of any sort? Do people spend so much time in front of a screen that they don’t notice the things that are around them in the real world? Is smelling flowers so uncool that no one is willing to admit that they smell jasmine on the way to class? Are teenagers really that oblivious to everything?

I have no good explanation for why more than two dozen students can’t (or don’t) smell jasmine. However, I do hope that the current budget crisis will put a damper on the university landscaping team’s constant digging up of one thing and replanting with something else so that the jasmine will continue to grow and perfume the fall and winter quarter classes that I teach in what I’ve come to think of as the “jasmine building”.

THE SMELLS OF INDIAN SUMMER

For the past few days we’ve been having a weather phenomenon that I first learned about in the Alps, called “Foehn”. It starts out with bizarre cloud formations like corrugated sheets with clear sky on the far side, and other isolated clouds that look like flying saucers. All of the mountains suddenly become extremely clear, with every detail standing out. The big volcano, Mount Rainier, looks like it’s in our back yard. The wind starts to blow, and it gets warm. We had the partly cloudy type of weather for two days, but today it’s perfectly clear and almost hot, with temperatures of 80+ F and strong winds.

I suppose this is what would be called Indian summer, the last hurrah before fall starts. The smell of ripe blackberries is everywhere, attracting lots of people who are picking them along the roadside. The lavender that grows in everyone’s yard is pumping out its scent, too, attracting lazy bees, spoiled by the unseasonably warm weather.

When I got home tonight after a trip to the grocery store, while still in my car I smelled something like rotting, fermented fruit. I thought something in my bags had spoiled while I parked and went to look for costume materials for our theatre group’s October show, but when I got out of the car the smell was even stronger. We have quite a few fruit trees bearing fruit this time of year, mostly figs, apples, and pears, so I suppose some of the fruit had dropped and fermented on the ground. When I go outside now that it’s evening, I smell wood smoke. Either someone is barbecuing with wood or there’s a forest fire nearby. Blackberries, lavender, overripe fruit, dry grass, and smoke truly epitomize the smells of Indian summer.

I hadn’t looked at my orchids for quite a while, but today I discovered that several of them are blooming. Dendrobium schneideri has sprays of tiny greenish-white flowers with a light anise scent. Cattleya harrisoniae is lavender with a white lip, and is strongly fragrant. It smells like indolic artificial grape and rose, along with hints of a fruity generic-Cattleya note. It’s only fragrant during the day. Brassavola nodosa, the big one with red spots in the throat, suddenly burst into bloom. I brought it inside, and tonight it’s perfuming the room with its scent of smoky cloves and ylang-ylang. During the day it has no fragrance, but as soon as it gets dark, out comes the perfume, just like clockwork. This discretely-spotted variety is one of my favorite orchids.

[Lentiform clouds and Mount Rainier photo from Wikipedia]

ON LOSS AND LIVING ON

There’s no easy way to say it, especially after such a long hiatus on here, so I’ll just say it. My mother died on the morning of September 4, after a long illness. It was not unexpected, but it was still an upheaval of my world. This remarkable woman who had always been there for me, is no longer a part of my life. I can’t visit her, listen to her reminiscences, talk to her on the phone, go for a walk with her, listen to her sing or complain about her neighbors or the broken elevator in her building, treat her to a tub of halvah, a bottle of perfume, or a music compilation on CD. I’m still grappling with the reality that I can’t just dial her number and talk to her. She’s gone. Disappeared from the face of the earth. Living only in my memory.

I took some time off from everything this summer so that my son and I could spend time with her while she was still able to appreciate it. When I wasn’t with her in person, my husband and I talked on the phone with her almost daily. My brother and I became a lot closer. I don’t regret a second of it. So what if I got behind on everything? I’ll eventually catch up on those things that are important, and the rest can just go undone forever. Sometimes it takes a death to make us realize what is truly important and what is just meaningless busy work.

This is going to be a short note just to let my readers know why I haven’t been posting anything here and to help me break out of the emotional paralysis that has been part of my life for the last few months. Fortunately I have supportive friends and family, but ultimately this is still a shock that I have to deal with on my own. Today is the first time I’ve felt like writing about it, so I hope it’s a trend that will lead back to doing the things I love to do, including writing, while minimizing all of the things I have to do but don’t enjoy.

BEESWAX AND HONEY

We’re finally having a few days of summer, and the bees are buzzing all around the flowers in my yard, wallowing in the warm pollen and bingeing on nectar. They’re mostly bumblebees of various sorts, not honeybees. The disappearance of honeybees is a story to save for another day - but it’s definitely a concern, considering that beeswax and honey are fairly common in perfume and cosmetics.

The bees were not the only inspiration for this post. The other day I was sampling a fragrance that was described by its manufacturer as containing “wild French honey bee extract”. Really? Did someone grind up a ton of poor little bees and make them into an “extract”? Not only that, did someone tramp around through the forests of France looking for wild bee colonies to use? I’ll give this copywriter the benefit of the doubt and assume that he or she actually meant beeswax or honey absolute or extract, not bees. I’ll also assume that the bees that manufactured the materials from which the extract was made lived in comfortable and readily accessible man-made hives, not a hollow tree somewhere on top of a remote mountain in the Massif Central. I’m going to do an entire review piece on this perfume manufacturer sometime, but for now they shall remain anonymous since what I intended to write about is bee products in perfumery.

Recently I was mixing up a new batch of Kyphi concentrate, enjoying the beeswax absolute that I use in it. I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not, but it seems like my newest batch of this absolute smells even better than the old one. I’m sure that, like honey, it depends on what flowers the bees were harvesting to make their products - assuming you buy your honey from the farmers’ market. In the supermarket, it probably depends on what artificial flavoring the manufacturers put in the high-fructose corn syrup that's the basis for their cheap “honey”.

Anyway, the beeswax absolute that I use has a wonderfully rich and sweet honey-like scent, but it’s more concentrated than honey, more floral, more resinous, and almost boozy, like a sweet liqueur. Drambuie is the one that comes to mind. It could be a stand-alone perfume. I really enjoy using it. I just wish it wasn’t so expensive, but when I think about how much labor thousands of bees must have put into it, I really don’t mind.

There are plenty of ways to produce a honey scent without any bees being involved. A whole array of aroma chemicals, many of which have phenylethyl or phenylacetate in the name, can produce the straightforward “honey” scent that’s used in soaps, candles, and probably fake honey itself. The sweet alyssum accord that I made was pretty much a basic honey and pollen scent with slight variations to give it a more floral feel. There’s a Givaudan product called “Miel Blanc” that most likely contains many of the same components. It is probably what is used in many commercial fragrances that contain a honey note. It doesn’t seem to be available any longer, at least not from the suppliers I deal with, so I guess it’s a moot point.

Anyway, here’s to the honeybees! Treat them nicely since they not only make some of your food, they make some of the materials in your perfume. Plant bee-friendly flowers wherever you can, select a variety that bloom from early spring through late autumn, and avoid spraying insecticides and herbicides if you can bring yourself to live with things in a somewhat natural state. Unfortunately, I have a grass lawn on my property, thanks to the suburban contractor who built the place. I’d eventually like to get rid of all the lawn grass. For now, though, I just let the dandelions and clover grow, and the bees come in droves to enjoy it. Even bumblebees make honey of sorts.

BLOGGER’S BLOCK: CAUSE AND CURE

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted anything here, but I must have needed an August vacation. So far the whole month of August has been kind of depressing, with cold, cloudy weather and overwhelming work in the orchid greenhouse. I’ve spent several weeks on the metaphorical mountaintop doing some soul-searching. No, the soul-searching wasn’t about perfume, it was about plants.

After five years I’m finally ready to acknowledge the fact that I’m just not cut out to be a farmer, even a farmer of exotic plants that don’t involve dirt. It’s hard for me to deal with the day-in-day-out grind of having several thousand plants that depend on me for water, repotting, and protection from pests. I really don’t like dealing with the combination of living things and conditions that are beyond my control, like the weather. It’s sad to see orchids freeze when it gets bitterly cold and the heating system fails, or dry up when it gets too hot and I’m not around to water adequately. There’s nothing more depressing than to walk into the greenhouse and see a huge grasshopper or slug whose greedy gut is bloated with several dozen seedlings of a rare species that I’m not likely to ever get hold of again. Grasshoppers and slugs always go for the most valuable plants.

After much thought, I’ve decided that it’s time to let go of orchids as a business so that I can concentrate on a few other things that I enjoy doing - like perfume making. Of course I’ll continue to grow some of my favorite orchids as a hobby, but that’s far different from farming them. I’ve decided to put the orchid business up for sale and hope for a good buyer to come along, someone who has more time and greenhouse space than I do and can take the plant business to the next level. There. I wrote it. It’s real. Wish me luck!

Realistically, it may take a long time to sell the nursery business to someone that I’d want to have take it over, but in the meantime getting out of the business is just as much an exciting dream as starting a business is in the first place. It’s a dream that will keep me going a while longer on the watering and bug zapping and other chores, knowing that there’s at least a theoretical end somewhere in sight.

Next post, I’ll be back to perfume, and would like to remind those who are testing the new ones to send me any comments you have before I start doing writeups on each one. Thanks to everyone who has sent comments already. They’re fascinating, and really useful.

Gotta go now, there are several dozen huge adult cymbidiums in desperate need of repotting. I should at least water them.

PERFUME AND THE ASCH PHENOMENON

A famous psychology experiment on implicit peer pressure and conformity conducted by Solomon Asch back in the 1950s not only has major implications for human social behavior, but is also relevant to perfume. In the Asch experiments, subjects were asked to judge the length of a line, a task that humans are alarmingly accurate at doing. However, a single test subject was unwittingly surrounded by other people posing as subjects, all of whom stated their answers verbally, with some or all intentionally giving wrong answers. The result was that subjects almost never gave a wrong answer when alone, but a high percentage gave wrong answers when they heard other people do so, following their lead. Presumably people fear being “wrong” in their opinions, so will follow the lead of others even when they really do not agree with the majority. The implications for political manipulation are obvious.

The implications for perfume evaluation hit home this morning when I sampled Santa Maria Novella’s Nostalgia. Every review I have read, without exception, mentions racing cars, mechanics, garages, leather, petroleum products, rubber, and all of the general grunge associated with auto mechanics and their shops, and I was looking forward to smelling all of this. However, when I sniffed my sample, I was blown away by the smell of prickly green tea and sweet, clean musks. Believe me, I was trying hard to conjure up the leather-oil-and-rubber image, but it just didn’t happen no matter how hard I tried. Yes, there are trace amounts of leather and what might be myrrh, but they’re mostly masked by the other super-strong notes.

There are two possible explanations that I can think of right away for why I didn’t smell what everyone else does. One is that many people are anosmic to the prickly green tea note (there’s some evidence for that in other reviews, by the way) and/or they’re anosmic to the sweet, fruity musks like celestolide, so what are actually minor notes come to the fore for them. The other explanation is the Asch phenomenon. If the hype put out by the manufacturer says “racing car-leather-motor oil-rubber” and at least one or two reviewers repeat this interpretation, everyone else will jump on the bandwagon for fear of deviating from the majority opinion. Now that I think of it, there’s a third explanation, which is that smells are just so ambiguous that people are intrinsically highly suggestible and can be directed in just about any way given the right pattern of guidance. If there's a picture of a car steering wheel on the bottle, that's what they'll smell. Maybe it’s a combination of all these factors.

This experience gives me new respect for those perfumers who refuse to release a list of notes, letting consumers make up their own minds about what it is they perceive.

[Nostalgia bottle photo is the stock one that appears on numerous commercial websites]