THE MONDAY GIVEAWAY: SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT, AND LAST WEEK'S WINNER

The winner of last week's random drawing was

JADA E

To claim your prize, please send your correct and complete shipping address to: olympicorchids at gmail dot com, or leave a PM on the Olympic Orchids Facebook page. If not claimed by Monday, June 26, the goodies will go into the following week's jackpot.

For this week's giveaway, I've got something a little different. Earlier this spring I participated in a really fun event at Tigerlily Perfumery in San Francisco – Skunk Works Weekend. This was an assembly of perfumers from all over the place, from Switzerland (Andy Tauer, who had a meet-and greet the first evening) the Bay Area, and various points along the US West Coast. The second day there was an amazing brunch at a nearby restaurant followed by a perfumers’ general discussion, culminating in Antonia Kohl’s inimitable cocktail-fueled sniff-and-buy event in the evening. I always love visiting San Francisco and Tigerlily.

The event was back in April, but because I’m always running around like  a madwoman, I had not finished unpacking my carry-on bag until yesterday. When I finally emptied it completely, I discovered two nice cloth tote bags with the Skunk Works logo on one side and Tigerlily’s logo on the other. The idea was that the bags would be used in a giveaway, so that’s what I’m going to do, albeit belatedly.

The giveaway is as follows:

Leave a comment about whether you would like to attend a festive event at a brick-and-mortar perfume shop and if so, what features of such an event you would particularly enjoy. There will be two winners of the random drawing.

1) One Skunk Works bag filled with the usual 100 g of random samples plus some other randomly chosen fragrant goodies;

2)  One Skunk Works bag containing three Olympic Orchids 5-ml travel sprays of your choice and one Olympic Orchids soap.

Both of these giveaways are US only due to the bulky nature of the package and the ridiculous cost of international shipping. Apologies to our international readers and friends!

[All photos are mine. The orchids that are blooming today are Promenea paranensis (top) and Phalaenopsis speciosa (bottom), both first-bloom seedlings; neither one is very fragrant, although the Phalaenopsis has a very light greenish scent. The Skunk Works bag pictured is the one you will receive.] 

REVISITING PAST CREATIONS: JAVANICA

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.

I think I’ll do some sort of special promotion of Javanica this summer, but wonder if the name is off-putting since it doesn’t have much meaning apart from a Phalaenopsis species designation. What do you readers think about re-naming perfumes? Any suggestions for what to do about Javanica? 

[All photos are mine.]

PERFUME MATERIALS: TOLU BALSAM

It’s Juneuary in the Pacific Northwest. No, that's not a typo. For those not familiar with this meteorological phenomenon, June here is usually a depressing time of cloudy skies, occasional rain, and cold temperatures. The most depressing thing of all is that in a few weeks, the days will be getting shorter and we will still have had no summer. After so many years here, I’ve grown accustomed to the June unpleasantness, but still don’t like it. It’s particularly disgusting this year after all of the winter rain.

I’m dealing with the first week of my cold, wet “summer vacation” by trying to sort and clean a little in my perfume studio, taking stock of what I have and labeling containers so that I don’t order duplicates of things simply because I can’t find them in the clutter, making perfume concentrates that have been on hold for a long time, and generally clearing my mind after the spring academic quarter.

Writing blog posts is one form of Juneuary therapy that can be done inside, next to a warm fireplace, so to continue the resins series of perfume materials, I thought I’d write about one that I use a lot, tolu balsam. This resin comes from a tall-growing South American tree, Myroxylon balsamum.  It belongs to the legume family, so produces seed pods that look like big beans. It has been introduced to other tropical areas throughout the world for resin production, where it can escape cultivation and become an invasive species. The trees are also harvested for timber and fuel. You can learn more about the uses of Myroxylon here. 

Tolu balsam, named for the town of Tolu in Colombia, was introduced to Europe in the 16th century, and has become widely used in the food flavoring and perfume industry, as incense, and for medicinal purposes, especially in cough syrup. Resin is traditionally harvested by removing strips of bark from the tree and soaking up the sap in pieces of cloth that are boiled to extract the resin, or by making cuts in the tree trunk and collecting the sap in cups. It can be used in this form or allowed to harden into chunks for grinding and tincturing to extract fragrance materials or to be burned as incense.

The resin is dark brown and very sticky. It’s a pain to use, and must be diluted with alcohol to make it workable. An easier alternative is the oil (essence) distilled from the resin, which is lighter in color and liquid, but has slightly different olfactory qualities. The chemical composition of tolu balsam is high in benzoic and cinnamic acid esters. The scent of the resin is similar to benzoin, with the same resinous-vanilla notes, but it also has a unique quality that I would describe as “fluffy”. This quality is particularly evident in the oil and “essence”. I’ve used tolu balsam in a number of compositions both as a fixative and to achieve that “fluffy” feel.  It’s one of the staples on my perfume organ. 

If anyone can figure out why the font suddenly changes in the middle of the post, please let me know why, and how to fix this Blogger-bug.
[Lake and clouds photo is mine. The others are from Wikimedia or retailers' websites.]