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Perfume School Updates: Fall Courses + Private Lessons + New Book Pre-Order

A wonderful week of Oriental Perfumes Studies took place this past month (May 26-30, 2014). Students from around the world participated and thoroughly enjoyed themselves!

We began by learning how to make incense - the most ancient form of perfume (we made traditional Indian-style incense cones), then proceeded to learn about the history of the spice trails, discovery of distillation methods, and how the ancient traditions of incense and attars from India, Egypt and Arabia influenced the art of French perfumery at the turn of the century. We studied vintage classics such as Shalimar, Emeraude, Tabu, Youth Dew and Opium. and learned to make our own amber bases, accords, and then build a fully-developed Ambery Oriental perfume and Spicy Oriental perfume. It was fun and another one of the week’s highlight was a trip to a Chinatown to immerse in the aesthetics of authentic classic Chinese garden and its fragrant plant, and learn how to translate a concept or an inspiration into a beautiful perfume with unique structure.
Now it’s time to plan the next term in my perfume school, coming up this fall, with two courses at the end of September and beginning of October: Chypres week (September 22-27, 2014) and Leather/Tobacco Week (September 29 - October 3, 2014). Early Bird rates (20% off) are in effect till June 22nd. If you're a new student, please apply by emailing me with a CV and a coverletter. 

Correspondence Course, Private Lessons & New Book!

If you were not able to attend in person, you can sign up for my correspondence course which includes the Foundation of Natural Perfumery Book plus 5 one hour sessions with me via phone/Skype. I also offer private sessions - either in person at my studio, or via phone/Skype for $200/hr -  perfect for students who live remotely and need to brush up on certain lab skills, techniques or want to get personal feedback for their work. The 2014 edition of the  Foundations of Natural Perfumery Book is now available for pre-order, and will be completed late summer/early fall. Pre-orders are helping me greatly in setting off some of the printing and graphic re-design costs, as this will be self published. We are printing it here in Vancouver; and also will be offering an electronic edition online later this year.

Here's what one of my private students had to say about her lesson this spring:
"Thanks for an amazing, special day and I learned so much.  I can't believe how much we covered and yet I want to meet with you tomorrow, the next day, and the next!  I love the blend and it brings back wonderful memories of the beach".
- Elizabeth Michaels
Aromatherapis & Reiki Healer
Bellevue, Washington, US

And here are a few more testimonials for your amusement - from all four students who attended the Oriental Week this past May:

"Thank you for the wonderful Oriental Perfumes Study that I attended with you in Vancouver.  The entire experience was an amazing one – falling in love with the city itself, the ambience of the workshop that we were in – making it feel like home and a cherished place, all the vital information that you lavishly shared with us and the insight that you managed to give us into the magical world of natural perfume blending…it all sums up to a remarkable experience that I hope I will repeat very soon".
- Mohammad Khalaf
EmmKay Beaute
Toronto, Ontario 
 
"Studying under Ayala far exceeded my expectations. I entered the program with no previous blending knowledge or hands-on experience with raw materials, and left with the confidence to further pursue my intrigue back home. While I'll continue to blend on my own, I'm really looking forward to next season's session."
- Kacey Ivey
Nashville, Tennessee 
 
"I learned about Ayala and her work through Twitter, and in my nascent attempts to compose fragrances for my homemade soaps, she provided helpful advice and input. Later, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend her week-long perfumery course on the fougère family of fragrances.  Although the emphasis of study was fougères, we students also learned a lot of fundamentals of perfumery, including getting to know various essences and composing perfumes. I particularly enjoyed the blind scent tests at the beginning of each class.
Ayala is a very supportive teacher, and having her immediate feedback was invaluable, since there is no substitute for a well-trained nose. One can learn a lot of things from books and the internet (including Ayala's course book), but there is currently no technology that allows us to smell things from a distance. I am very pleased with my experience attending the course, and I hope to return someday to learn about the other fragrance families".
- Schuyler Corry
Chemist / Soapmaker
Open Source Soap
Eugene, Oregon, USA

"Thanks again for an extraordinary week!"
- Elizabeth Michaels
Aromatherapis & Reiki Healer
Bellevue, Washington, US

Rosy Head Count




This is my classmate from Poland visiting the rose fields extraction plant near Grasse, France. She's sitting in this big drums, and ecstatic to be surrounded by soft, plush, freshly-picked rose-flowers.. 

Did you know that to make 600gr of rose absolute, 400kg of flowers need to be picked? That is exactly 200,000 roses - all handpicked within 2 hrs every morning in the short 2-week season of rose harvest!


In case you were wondering why natural perfumes cost as much as they do, this should give you some idea. And to put it into smaller scale that you will be able to understand: A single drop of rose oil costs. In Roses et Chocolat, one of my top-selling rosy perfumes, there is 0.3gr of rose absolutes, which means at least 100 roses were picked in order for me to be able to make each 15ml bottle of Roses et Chocolat.


P.s. If financial value speaks to you more clearly: please know that in this formula, the roses alone accounts for about $7 per 15ml aka 0.25oz bottle on account of roses alone.
In most perfumes you'll find in the market come in a 50ml aka 1.7oz bottle - they don't even spend as much on the jus (the most that is spent on any jus is about $5 - the rest of what you're paying for is marketing, distribution and many other things that don't contribute at all to your perfume enjoyment.
If I were to sell this size (1.7oz), it will cost me 8 times (aka $40 or more) then what they are paying for (and not including bottle, label, packaging or labour). And of course I wouldn't be making any profit whatsoever if I were to sell it for the average $50 or so which is the going price for 50ml fragrances.

Seven Fragrant White Flowers for Shavuot



Shavuot is beginning this evening, and to celebrate, I've put together a bouquet of 7 white flowers that are currently in bloom. Wearing white is a Shavuot tradition, and so is wearing wreaths of flowers on the head. When I was a little girl, this was the time of the year when fragrant roses will be in full bloom, and the children lucky enough to grow them in their garden will have a flower or two of deep, wine-coloured burgundy rose in their baskets of first fruit - alongside apricots and green almonds. I am grown up enough now to own up to it and say I was deeply jealous of their baskets, and couldn't keep my nose away from it. This collection of seven flowers will not include white rose (or jasmine, for that matter) because I would like to make room for less known white flowers and hope that you find this post inspiring and alluring.

1. White Peony:

I find the white variety to be more well-rounded. White peonies smell a little more heady  than the pink and a tad jasmine-y but still also peppery and fresh. There is a strong resemblance to lily of the valley, and also there's a hint of hyacinth's heady floral and sharp green-onion-y notes. The flowers fills the room with their beautiful scent for a full week after being brought home from the florist. The pink ones are a bit of a hit-and-miss. Some smell rosy and with a hint of spicy carnation note; others are more green and dewy; and some smell funky, like rotten vegetables...

There is no shortage of peony-themed fragrances, but non has captured my nose as of yet. If you have any recommendations, I'll be happy to try them!

2. Choisya "Aztec Pearl" (aka Mexican Mock Orange)

Smells more like heliotropin than orange blossom to me, but is related to the same family (Rutaceae). The flowers have a powdery-sweet aroma with hints of methyl anthranilate. Very soft and alluring. I only know of one fragrance that is centred around it - Choisya candle by Dyptique.

3. Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia): 


The black locust tree is native to the Southeastern United States, but have found its way to many a gardens across the world, where it has become naturalized (and in some cases invasive) in temperate North America, Europe, South Africa, Asia. The origin of the name: Because of their similar fruit shape, Jesuit missionaries confused it with the carob tree Carob Tree (Ceratonia siliqua). 

The flowers have a havenly sweet-pea aroma mingled with the scent of intensified orange blossom. The methyl anthranilate aspect really coming through like a candy from the gods in this tree flower from Fabaceae family. The flowers are edible, having a sweet and aromatic flavour, but the fruit is not (though some say the seeds are edible too). Try using the flowers in a sugar syrup for desserts, or crystallize them in a similar way that rose and violet petals are treated. The entire flower clustered are dipped in batter and deepfried into fritters! 

I'm currently experimenting with some black locust syrup and tinctures recipes, and will report to you once they've rendered successful (which they are bound to be! The syrup is already tasting amazing halfway through the maceration process).

4. White Carnation (Dianthus): 

Dianthus seems to be the flower of the season, popping up in many gardens in the West End this year more than I've ever seen it before. I finally planted my own two Dianthus "Coconut Surprise" plants in my balcony's forelorn planter. They will only go till the end of fall, and I plan to thoroughly enjoy them!

I've gone into much detail about the scent of carnation. The white variety is what's mostly used for carnation absolute production for perfumery. The flowers have a beautiful, sweet-warm and soft-powdery scent and I can't help myself but get on my knees to smell everyone I meet on my walks in the neighbourhood.

Favourite carnation perfumes: InCarnation, Bellodgia, 

5. Philadelphium:


To my nose, Philadelphium smells like fedjoia - fruity, exotic, edible and unusual.
Is is also known as Mock Orange, but is a different plant than Choisya, and smells completely different. 

6. White Magnolia (Magnolia × wieseneri):


This particular magnolia has a magical scent. According to Wikipedia: 
"Its most notable feature is the remarkable fragrance of the ivory-coloured flowers, which has been likened to pineapples and seen adjectives such as "ethereal", "spicy" and "aromatic" used". It significantly changes its scent throughout the day, smelling like a dewy jasmine-tea in the evening, and developing a more fruity-aldehydic and lactonic character during the day, reminiscent of peach (aldehyde C-14) and a fatty, oily-skin-like scent (aldehyde C-13) during the day and once the flower is "overripe".

Favourite magnolia perfumes: New Orleans, Opium Fleur de Shanghai. 


7. White Lilac:

White lilac has more indole than the purple or pink ones, giving them a more perfumey character. Additionally, lilacs have the scent of powder, hints of green fig and cucumber, and in many cases also a rather dominant styrene presence.

Favourite lilac perfumes: Ineke's After My Own Heart and Olivia Giacobetti's En Passant (for Frederic Malle Editions de Parfum). 

If you want to celebrate Shavuot with the traditional desserts, here are my recipes for the perfect blintzes and best ever cheesecake!


Gourmands: Main Course or Dessert?



The "Dessert" of the Oriental Week this past Friday was an afternoon dedicated to Gourmand perfumes - a modern sub-category of the Oriental fragrance family. This relatively recent trend turned into an established genre beginning with Thierry Mugler's Angel. This cult perfume was created for avant-garde fashion designer Thierry Mugler by nose Olivier Cresp in 1992, and closely followed by the iconic licorice, cherry and violet based Lolita Lempicka (designed by perfumer Annick Menardo in1997).

Angel, now one of the top five best-selling perfumes in the world, was not an immediate success. It took Thierry Mugler's devotion and deep conviction in the fragrance, matched by investing plenty of creative marketing effort into before the world warmed up to Angel - first through a cult of loyal customers who were completely addicted to its unique combination of patchouli, blackberry, helional, citrus and ethyl maltol (a novel scent molecule reminiscent of cotton candy) - and later, a world-wide loyalty to Angel as a brand, with a star-shaped refillable bottles and unusual spray mechanism, hi-tech urns for refilling in most retail locations, and many sequels, limited edition bottles, advertisement with unique haute-couture gown made for each model (some of which were celebrities).

Lolita Lempicka also belongs to a fashion house (of the same name), and like Angel it was cleverly marketed, yet with more earthly, whimsical fairytale-like visuals and connotations. The unique bottle, asymetrical apple-shaped with a stem that doubles as the spray nozzle - has highly imaginative posters and video clips to boot. It took the Lolita fantasy to a different level - while the name of the brand (and perfume) alone evokes that not-so-innocent child-woman from Nabokov's famous novel (the Lempicka part is named after the Polish painter, Tamara de Lempicka). there is more magic added to the mix in what feels very personable (if that's your taste), resonating on a rather deep level of self-identity, appealing to the artistic, whimsical girl-at-heart personality. And what did it smell like? Reminiscent of candy, but with hints of green freshness from ivy leaves and anise notes, Lolita Lempicka focuses its foody obsession on licorice candy, giving it a more floral treatment than Angel with the addition of violets, and the sweetness comes primarily from heliotropin (which smells like a very sweet cherry pie), coumarin and vanilla - evoking the scent of Amarena cherries. There is a lot more powderiness to it than Angel, and the contrasting earthy quality comes from a vetiver root.

Niche perfumeries did not escape from this trend either, with dessert-like creations such as the artificially almondy, syrupy-sweet Rahat Loukum (Serge Lutens), and cherry-like Luctor et Emergo (The People of the Labyrinth). The sweetness in these perfumes went completely overboard, even more than the vanilla and ethyl-vanillin saturated Shalimar (which is one of the first Ambery Orientals, created in 1925). The use of all of these sweet notes, and their dosage, suggested a full-calorie dessert, making them feel deceivingly edible. And both are closely related to Hypnotic Poison (1998, also created by Annick Menardo, and smells like almond and vanilla with hints of caraway).

Gourmands' inherent comforting impact is what made this fragrance category dominate the women's fragrance market well into the new millennia, providing a rather extreme counterpoint to the scrubbed-down aquatic florals of the same era. But it was in the early new millennia that gourmands really reached traction. After 9-11, the gourmands provided to the traumatized masses exactly the kind of comfort they needed: something child-like, innocent, familiar, cozy, sweet, a little simplistic even. Like a mother handing her sobbing child a square of chocolate caramel, the perfume companies went overboard with this trend, and it bled onto the other genres - tainting anything from florals (countless celebrity scents come to mind) to chypres (Fruitchouli, anyone?) with a sugary sweet cotton candy note; or one novel fruit or another.

Savoury gourmands are less talked about, and provide an interesting and more sophisticated take on culinary inspiration. While the dessert-inspired gourmands we've discussed so far relied on novel molecules to emanate the strong association of sweetness, a different trend, which is now becoming more popular, is the new obsession with "salty". But before we digress into mineral notes - let's just mention some of the earlier "savoury" gourmands - those that were designed to smell like earlier courses in the meal.

Dinner by Bobo (2002) is the first example that springs to mind. This perfume played up the cumin presence to create a rather controversial effect at the time. While cumin is popular spice around the world, and has been used in best-selling perfumes in France (in Rochas Femme reformulation, for example). many people in North America associated cumin with "sweat" and find it unsavoury. Dinner by Bobo brings to mind a candle-lit dinner in a French-Moroccan restaurant, complete with red wine - but no dessert in sight. It plays like a complex tajin with dried apricots and prunes and warm spices - not that far in concept from the fruity Chypres of the mid-twentieth century.

Serge Lutens plays up the exotic spices in its souk-evoking perfume Arabie. The notes are a lot more realistic, but still remain in a very clear context of perfume, with the edible association perhaps more known to those familiar with the complex spices used in Arabic and North African cooking. in Santal de Mysore, a similar accord of Indian curry is used in contrast to East Indian sandalwood.

Later still, Jo Malone introduced a couple of fragrances that explored a more savoury aspect of food: the Mexican inspired Blue Agave & Cacao, bringing to the fore a dusty cacao note mingled with salt, lime and blue agave. Sweet Lime & Cedar was inspired by Thai cuisine, and at its core is kaffir lime leaf mingled with coconut water and cedarwood. Again - not a sweet interpretation (although coconut could have brought it easily all the way to the realm of celebrity scents, Malibu beach style). Last but not least: Anima Dulcis presents its cacao notes alongside cumin, cinnamon, vanilla, salted caramel and chili. It's not exactly sugar-free, but it balances all of the sweet and savoury elements so well, that it won my heart completely.

Here are some of the most famous if not influential Gourmand fragrances:
Angel (1992)
A*Men(1996)
Lolita Lempicka (1997)
Lolita Lempicka Au Masculin (2000)
Wish (Chopard)
Rochas Man
Hanae Mori Butterfly
Pink Sugar (Aqualina)
Popi Moreni
Yohji 
Yohji Homme
Rahat Loukum (Serge Lutens)
Luctor et Emergo (The People of the Labyrinth)
Rahat Loukum (Serge Lutens)
Rosewater & Vanilla (Jo Malone)
Hypnotic Poison (Dior)
Réglisse Noire (1000Flowers)

Savoury Gourmands of Interest: 
Dinner by Bobo
Arabie (Serge Lutens)
Santal de Mysore (Serge Lutens)
Blue Agave & Cacao (Jo Malone)
Sweet Lime & Cedar (Jo Malone) 
Anima Dulcis (Arquiste)
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