Sunday, November 18, 2007

Preference


I'm reading the book: Fragrance The story of perfume from Cleopatra to Chanel written by Edwin T. Morris, for the second time now. It's a very interesting book which discusses the history of fragrance and fragrance materials. An intersesting part is where he talks about the scent of flowers. We are not the only ones who are attracted to the scent of flowers, insects are attracted to their scent as well. Some flowers mimic the insect pheromones, and some of them the scent of their food sources. The moth for example, is attracted to the white night blooming heavy indolic scented flowers such as jasmine and honeysuckle. Among the white flowers we find the greatest number of aromatic blooms. Second place for the odorous flowers are the reds and pinks. These flowers are favored by the day-flying butterflies. The bees however prefer yellow, lavender and blue flowers.

We humans have our preferences as well. Although there is no standard in our preferences. We all have our own unique scent preferences, mostly created by our scent memorie. If we have a nice memorie of the scent of vanilla, we probibly will like the scent. But if we have had a bad experience while smelling vanilla, we could have created a bad vanilla scent memorie and the scent can be associated with this experience.

That's why it's simply impossible to create a perfume that will be liked by everyone. I sent samples of my perfume Velvet Blossom to people from all over the world to get some feedback. Most people who smelled the perfume said they would leave it like it is, and don't mess with it too much, they liked it. Other people liked it too, but gave me some tips on how to improve it. The tips I received were all so different, here are some:
it would be nice if it smelled a bit greener, another told me to make it smell less greener, again another one told me to make it more spicy with cumin notes, another more ambery, yet another asked me to use more indolic jasmine notes, another to use more woody notes etc etc.

It's difficult to make a decision on what kind of advice to follow. I personally want to make the top notes a bit softer, another option to ad to the others. I decided to try some of the tips and created different batches, and will see if it makes a difference.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree very much on the aspect that you can not follow advice that is build on preferences. If you follow one person's advice you end up creating "sur messure" , if it is many advices you end up with a list of diagonally opposed advices.

On the other hand, I find input and advise always interesting when it comes to impressions, how a perfume develops on different skins and on what notes are perceived.

And in the very end: We should only listen to OUR nose when trying to come up with something new. As we have to "face the mirror" in the evening.

Jenny said...

Me too, I find it very interesting to hear the impressions of my perfume from different people. I want to find out that what I had in mind for my perfume is well perceived by others as well.

If you would give a perfume to 10 different perfumers and ask them to change it in the way they want it to smell like. You would end up with 10 different smelling perfumes.

The idea for this perfume is born in my own head, I know how I want it to smell like. The picture of it is already there. I will listen and even try some advices, but at the end I will listen to my own nose, the end result has to be what I had in mind.

chayaruchama said...

Agreed, my friends.

That book is one of my first purchases, years ago.
A nice starter-upper.

Kisses to you both !

Jenny said...

It's a very interesting book, that's why I read it for the second time already.

Big kisses back to you xxx

Anonymous said...

dear jenny!
hi!i'm a student from iran and i wanna make perfume.the problem is that i don't know how to do it!can u help me on this?if u can plz send a mail to me.my id is:mojdeh.little_princess@yahoo.com
thank u for your help!

Jenny said...

Hi, I created a wonderful group at Yahoo for everyone who likes to (learn how to) create perfumes. It's a group with almost 600 members from all over the world, where everyone helps each other. You will love it, and you are welcome to join. Here is the link
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/perfumemaking/