callum.peatin Wearing Fragrance · Glasgow ·
Scent diary
Heater's on in the cab now the mornings are cold, and my birch scent, fine at the stop, fills the whole cab by the second run. It sits in the leather family , apparently, and in a small warm box it smells like it. Is it the heat or just me?
hamish_heather Same in the shop when the heating's up: every bottle on the shelf gets louder and you loose the wee quiet ones.
lupe.pinonin Woods, Mosses & Roots · Santa Fe ·
Discovery
It's chile roasting season here and every parking lot smells of charred green peppers. A friend let me smell a strip of galbanum this weekend and it was that same green, raw and bitter, from before the roast. Without the smoke, of course.
juniper_jules Galbanum is my favorite green, sharper then cut grass, almost like turpentine on a rag.
dario.bergamotin Citrus & Fresh · London ·
ReadingRead the club's Class on the history of perfume on my break. Eau de Cologne was first made in Cologne in 1709 by an Italian, Giovanni Maria Farina: Wikipedia's article on eau de Cologne describes it as a light citrus scent in dilute alcohol. And bergamot was…
ollie.grapefruit So cologne is just the weak stuff they sell to blokes?
dougie_newcastlein Wearing Fragrance · Newcastle upon Tyne ·
QuestionThe wife signed me up, so here's my first daft question. I've called every bottle I own 'cologne' since the shipyard days. Is cologne a strength, a men's thing, or just a word?
frankie.incense Fun fact: Wikipedia's article on eau de Cologne and where the name comes from says Giovanni Maria Farina created it in Cologne in 1709, a light…
ingrid_berlinin Learning to Smell · Berlin ·
TipNo blotters at home? Cut a paper coffee filter into strips a finger wide. It drinks the liquid fast and smells of almost nothing. Write the name on the end before you dip, or after three strips you will not know which is which. I do this since three years.…
first.sniff Didn't think of that. I've been using the edge of an envelope, which smells of glue.
jess.in.phillyin Welcome to the Club · Philadelphia ·
IntroductionHi all, I'm on the front desk of a dental office in Philadelphia, so my days smell of mint and latex gloves. Off work it's soft musk and anything close to clean laundry. My big question: why do some scents vanish from my wrist in what feels like minutes while…
harriet.hay Hello and welcome, jess.in.philly. That's the question that gets most of us started. The light, quick molecules leave first and the heavy ones stay…
Class no. 5 · 7 min read
Perfumers draw scent from plants in five main ways (steam distillation, cold pressing, enfleurage in fat, volatile solvents and supercritical CO2), and each one yields a material with its own name. You'll be able to tell an essential oil from a concrete and an absolute, see why jasmine is kept away from steam, and try three of these methods with an orange in your kitchen.
tallulah.teain Welcome to the Club · Brighton ·
Introduction
Hi from a tattoo studio in Brighton, where it smells of green soap all day. Off the clock I like black tea, fig leaves and a little smoke. I'll mostly be reading, usually with a sandwich in hand.
kasia.berlinin Welcome to the Club · Berlin ·
Introduction
Hi, I am Kasia, from Poland, and I fix bikes in Berlin. Chain oil all day, but in June the linden trees make the whole city sweet. My grandmother had lily of the valley under her window in spring and I still look for that smell everywhere. My one little…
mags.lavender Morning all, and welcome Kasia. Lily of the valley is one of my favourites too, and there's alot of us chasing it. Have a read of the lily of the…
wren.and.mossin Welcome to the Club · Asheville ·
Introduction
Gardener in Asheville, North Carolina. This time of year everything smells of wet leaves and moss, and in summer the honeysuckle at dusk nearly knocks me over. I notice all of it and can name almost none of it.
mags.lavender Welcome, wren. Noticing is the hard part and you've got that already, the names come with a lot of sniffing.
kemi.cocoain Ambers, Spices & Gourmands · London ·
Snapshot
Wet Sunday in London. Apples from the school harvest table in a crumble, cinnamon, and one clove because Mum always put one in. The whole flat smells like her kitchen.
theodora.figin History, Bottles & Houses · Bath ·
Scent diary
Found at the Sunday market, in a drizzle: a cut-glass atomiser with a gilt collar and a rubber bulb gone hard as a walnut shell, tassel half gone, no label, no name anywhere. Inside, a brown ring and a faint smell of powder and violet, nothing like whatever…
kit.clove Old rubber smells of its own age too. Hard to tell what's bottle and what's bulb.
ravi.teain Ambers, Spices & Gourmands · Brisbane ·
Scent diary
Brewing chai with the back door open, spring's properly here in Brisbane. Fresh grated ginger hits first and then vanishes, cardamom hangs around, and the black tea only comes up once the mug is nearly cold. Same order every single time.
joon.yuzu TL;DR: that's basically a fragrance pyramid in a mug. The club's page on ginger as a bright top note says it mostly works up top, among the…
Class no. 4 · 6 min read
Since the 1860s, perfumery has mixed natural materials with synthetic molecules, and neither is better or safer by default. You'll be able to date the molecules that changed perfume, from coumarin to Iso E Super, and read the word natural on a label without reading too much into it.
priya.cardamomin Wearing Fragrance · Toronto ·
ExerciseThread of the week: where does your fragrance last longest? Take one scent you know well and try this tomorrow. 1) One spray on your inner wrist. 2) One spray on a scarf or a sleeve. 3) One spray on a strip of paper (a coffee filter cut into strips works)…
joon.yuzu Scarf wins by a mile. - wrist: yuzu gone by lunch - strip: faint, basically just the woody base by evening - scarf: still there at bedtime
carys.cardiffin History, Bottles & Houses · Cardiff ·
Reading
Rain on the library windows, so I read the Osmothèque's page on its collection on my lunch break: 4,000 perfumes, 800 of them no longer found, kept in a dark cellar at 12°C under a layer of argon. And if a raw material can't be had, they don't remake the…
trudy.lilac Argon for perfume. I like that they'd rather not remake one than fake it.
theodora.figin Woods, Mosses & Roots · Bath ·
Memory
My aunt's fig tree against the south wall is dropping its leaves now. I crushed one on my way out and my hand smelled of green fig and coconut milk all the way home on the bus. She used to send me home with a bag of figs every year at the end of summer.
priya.cardamom I've moved this over from the Florals circle, since fig sits with the woods in our notes. Lovely memory, Theodora.
hana.neroliin Citrus & Fresh · Vancouver ·
Snapshot
Rain since breakfast. Window open a crack, a pot of sencha on the desk, the steam smelling of cut grass and a little seaweed. Cold air, warm cup, nothing else in the room.