WINNER OF INES DE LA FRESSANGE GIVEAWAY

The drawing for the full bottle of Ines de la Fressange has been held, and the winner is ANNE. Please e-mail me (olympicorchids at gmail dot com) or send me a PM on Facebook. I will need your full name and shipping address.

The photo of hellebore buds celebrates the fact that it's hellebore season again! The original red-flowered plant, shown in the photo, has scattered seeds every year, and the first three babies that survived the house painters are about to burst into bloom. One is red, one is pink, and the other is green/white. It's interesting that they turn out looking so different from the parent.

Daffodils and crocuses are starting to pop up too, so spring can't be far off!

THE EXPERIENCE AND THE ARTIFACT + A GIVEAWAY

Today, as a special Monday treat, we have a post from Azar along with an unusual giveaway. 
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A few years ago, several on-line self help magazines, as well as various consumer psychology journals, were pushing the notion that the best way to be happy and enjoy life was to accumulate positive experiences (e.g. vacations) rather than possessions. Recently a number of psychologists have modified this stance to include purchases that facilitate good experiences  (experiential products). Ever the skeptic, I tend to suspect that any article referencing consumer psychology is nothing more than a sneaky way to sell me something, like a trip to Bali or another guitar. But what does this have to do with perfume?

When we buy a bottle of perfume we are obviously not just buying the bottle, however elegantly simple or gorgeously ornate it might be.  We are purchasing days and sometimes decades of fragrant experiences.  When the jus is gone we can chose to save the experience and the artifact!

Even though I don’t go out of my way to collect perfume bottles I have, over the years, accumulated a nice little stash of vintage commercial bottles as well as several hand blown originals. Just the other day I spotted three partially full, mid-20th century perfumes on e-bay for  $18 total. They appeared to be in perfect condition and the largest looked like a Lalique.  I was the only bidder and was thrilled when the bottles arrived, better than described. My three lovely treasures were in perfect condition, except that the glass stoppers were seriously frozen in place.

If I were simply a collector of artifacts I would have put my new acquisitions on display to enjoy as possessions. But, as a collector of experiences, I felt compelled to release the long imprisoned djinni from each bottle.  I knew that this could be risky business but I had to give it a try.

When a ground glass perfume stopper is stuck in a bottle it is essentially "glued" in place by old, dried residue that has been forced into the ground stopper time and again by repeated expansions of the glass.  I have had some success loosening stoppers by using a few drops of perfumer's alcohol around the edge to dissolve the "glue".  I gave this method a try but nothing moved.  Next I tried three drops of fractionated coconut oil and waited twenty minutes.  The idea was that the oil would seep down the stoppers and loosen them by lubrication.  Once again, I had no success.  It was time to risk the freezer. 

When ground glass stoppers (primed with fractionated coconut oil) and polished glass bottles are quickly cooled they seem to contract at different rates.  After thirty minutes I removed the bottles from the freezer, gave each stopper a little jiggle and heard a satisfying pop and hiss.  The 50-year-old seals were broken. The perfume djinnis quickly escaped into a new century.  Not only were the old fragrances in near perfect condition there was also no damage to the stoppers or bottles.  A most satisfying experience!

Here are a couple of questions, dear readers:  How do you remove frozen stoppers from perfume bottles?  Do you have a memorable perfume-related experience to share?  Answer either of these and be entered into a drawing for the sweet, little empty 1 oz. Evyan Golden Shadows bottle, circa 1940, pictured above. The drawing will be next Monday, February 1. 

Azar xx 

[vintage bottle photos are Azar's; Glass stopper photo from Wikimedia; ski photo grabbed from the usual webcam source]                       

TYPES OF PERFUMERY MATERIALS

Materials Wednesday: Part 1

How to start a series on perfumery raw materials? I suppose I could just dive in and consider individual materials one by one, but somehow it makes more sense to first consider materials by broad category rather than individually. I think everyone is at least vaguely aware that materials can be of different types, but may not realize the advantages and limitations of each type of raw material. So here goes with the most general classification possible.

Single Molecules. Chemically speaking, these are the simplest and most basic of all materials in that they are composed of a single type of molecule, such as phenyl ethyl acetate, amyl salicylate, or vanillin. Molecules with long, unwieldy names like (5E)-3-methylcyclopentadec-5-en-1-one are often given semi-descriptive trade names like Muscenone. Although different versions of an aroma molecule share the same chemical formula, the material itself may consist of different structural isomers (same chemical formula but different arrangement of atoms) or different stereoisomers (same formula and arrangement of atoms, but rotated in different ways). A given material may be a single isomer or a mixture of isomers, conferring different olfactory properties. The advantage of using single molecules is that the perfumer knows almost exactly what is going into the formula, common aroma chemicals are readily available in bulk, and they are usually easy to work with. For the beginning perfumer, probably the biggest down side of aroma chemicals is that there may be no real-world equivalents for their odors, so the properties of each one have to be learned from scratch.

Synthetic accords or bases. These are mixtures of aroma chemicals that, together replicate a complex natural scent such as rose, gardenia, or oud, or a fantasy scent such as “ambrosia” or “clean underwear”. Many bases of this type are available commercially as convenient ready-made components to use in perfumery. They are not the same as the “fragrance oils” that are commonly sold to hobbyists as functional scents for soap, candles, and lotions. The latter are some sort of odorant mix that approximates a complete perfume, diluted in a carrier oil, whereas perfume bases are the pure aroma chemical formula meant to be used as a building block, not a finished fragrance.

Naturals. These are the essential oils, absolutes, tinctures, and other materials derived from plants (and occasionally animals or minerals) that most self-taught perfumers start experimenting with in the beginning. The advantage of natural materials is that their names generally indicate what they will smell like, and most of them have familiar, “real-world” smells. Most natural materials consist of a large number of very different molecules that, together, produce the familiar smell, so are actually complete perfumes or accords in and of themselves. The advantage of using naturals is that they can be readily understood and easily impart complexity to a blend. The down side is that the very complexity that makes them attractive can lead to unwanted interactions and “muddying” of a blend if too many are combined in the wrong proportions. 

Another disadvantage is that naturals from different sources may smell very different, and the same material from the same supplier may smell different from batch to batch, and availability depends on crop yields, international politics, and many other unpredictable factors. A lot of naturals are difficult to work with in that they are sticky, gooey, lumpy, or otherwise nasty in consistency. They have to be melted, diluted, tinctured, or otherwise processed before they are usable, and the final formula often ends up cloudy so that it requires fining and filtering before it is clear enough to sell.

Mixed accords. These are like synthetic accords except that the desired smell has been created by combining naturals and aroma chemicals.

I think the majority of perfumers work with all of the above types of materials unless they are solidly in the all-natural category.

[All photos are from Wikimedia except for the alembic still, which is mine.]

WINNER OF ROOM WITH A VIEW GIVEAWAY

The entries have been shaken up and the winner drawn. The $35 Olympic Orchids gift certificate goes to KSENIYA GATALSKAYA.

To receive an electronic copy of your certificate, send an e-mail to olympicorchids at gmail dot com or leave a message with your e-mail address on my Facebook Page. The certificate can be used on  the Olympic Orchids Perfumes Flagship Store, the Olympic Orchids Perfumes Original Boutique, or Olympic Orchids Nursery. Plants can only be shipped within the US.

[Photo is mine, taken at sunrise.]

NATURE ABHORS A RIGHT ANGLE

Having grown up in places where houses, apartment buildings, shops, and all other buildings are entered straight from the street, I never cease to be mystified by the peculiar design of entrances in suburban areas of the US. The dysfunctional design principles dictated by the use of automobiles to travel everywhere really struck me one day when I observed a local thoroughfare where old buildings had been torn down and the entire area rebuilt to look like an urban street lined with shops, complete with sidewalks, but with no visible entrances to any of the shops. Instead, the street was lined with fake facades disguising what was really a strip-mall with entrances from a big parking lot on the other side. I wrote about this abomination in another post.

The area where we live, just north of Seattle, is an odd mix of rural and suburban. However, a common theme that I’ve noticed is that the entrance to almost every house or building is not the main feature and is reached by traversing a right angle turn to get to the front door. I think this strange design comes from the practice of having a garage as a prominent part of the house, with a big driveway leading to one or more garage doors that take up most of the front façade. I think the original architectural assumption was that people would drive their car into the garage and enter the house from the inside of the garage, with the front door mostly serving as vestigial decoration.

At some point decades ago this plan went awry when people discovered that the highest and best use of the extra space provided by the garage (or garages!) was not housing for vehicles, but better served as a recreational area, workshop, extra bedroom or (in most cases) storage for junk of various sorts. This means that cars are parked in the driveway or along the street, and the occupants of the house must either traverse the awkward right angle walkway to enter the front door or forge a new path across the contractor-installed lawn.

It is the nature of every living being to take the shortest, easiest, distance between two points unless there is some compelling reason to take a detour. That is why, on campus, the more independent-minded students (and faculty) create their own paths to circumvent the designers’ attempts to make them walk awkward, right-angled routes that probably looked beautifully symmetrical on paper. In some cases the “cowpaths” that have evolved are eventually sanctioned with rough paving, and in other cases they remain dirt tracks.

If you look at nature, you hardly ever see a right angle, except where plants and trees grow vertically from flat ground. The right angle is a human invention to facilitate joining materials used in building. It’s natural to take a right-angled path around the corner of a rectangular building, but it’s something else to be expected to walk at right angles when nothing stands in the way of walking in a straight line. It also seems unfriendly to expect guests to walk down a driveway that may be clogged with vehicles and then take a right-angled turn to reach a half-hidden door, as if a door were something scandalous that needs to be concealed. Why not construct a direct path to the door?

[All photos from local real estate sites. It is interesting that these "glamour" photos are always taken in such a way that the garage is emphasized and the front door is completely or partially concealed. Of course, no cars are ever in the driveway, and the street is never shown.]