Civet easily becomes a pet, but stay away from his bottom

Whoever smelled pure Civet for the first time has wondered how such an odor could enter into a perfume bottle. My first impression was the smell of rotten tooth.

It takes some training to be able to understand Civet perfume, one has to overcome the social olfactory programming that make us classify straight away this odor among stenches.

An infinitesimal dose of Civet can double the longevity of short lived fragrances, and although being in amount so little as to be subliminal, it also confers to fragrances a new olfactory dimension, the animal one, and our instinct recognizes it immediately.

This is the explanation why the public often prefers the scent that contains civet or other perfumery pheromones over scents who do not have them.

Human sweat can be a very interesting smell to a perfumer. The perfumer smells with an unprejudiced nose, or at least he can recognize the origin of his liking or not certain smells.

Moreover, a perfumer is always attentive to the reactions of people to smells, because his aim is to build scents that people will like (and buy).

Human sweat tells you what a person eats, his state of health and also much about his sexual life. Most of these things we perceive with our animal instinct and it is not intellectualized, but our behavior towards this person is conditioned by these information.

Making perfumes with human sweat has often been contemplated by pervert perfumers. If Civet and Castoreum have such an effect on our instinct, what could human pheromones do for a perfume?

I shall here share my experience in regard of human sweat and natural perfumes.

I always have my natural perfumes and the essential oils at hand, being a perfumer and I have discovered an interesting phenomenon.

If you happen to be in the need of washing your armpits and you are too much in a hurry to do it, you should try to spray a natural perfume. The result is unexpectedly good.

Armpit smell disappears and blends into the perfume which becomes richer and more persistent. The essential oils that compose the perfume have an antiseptic effect and cut drastically the bacterial fauna which is responsible for the smell (see inquest into human pheromones).

Poeple react very positively to such a perfume.

You have both a deodorant and a perfuming effect.

I seems that we have found the best sustainable alternative to animal scents in perfumery.

You can try: Hindu Kush, Tambour and sea wood for a perfect animalic blend with your human sweat.

Write me your feed back, they are most welcome.

Comments:

By Valeria

New essential oils are just arriving to me from Australia, Eco Sandalwood and Fire Tree.

The Fire tree (Xanthorrhoea preissil) is an aromatic wood so loaded with essential oil that the bushmen use it as matches to light their fires. I have seen the same being done in Afghanistan, where fires are lighted with the oily perfumed Himalayan cedar wood. It burns with a black smoke as if it was soaked in gasoil.

It is indeed an interesting odor and it encounters a nearly universal positive appreciation. I am curious to present it to present it to the students at the next course, just to see how unprejudiced persons work with it.

Comments

By: Andrew

Hello AbdesSalaam Attar,

I found your blog a few weeks ago now and have been reading your articles, they are very informative! I was wondering if I could ask of your help? I am a 21 year old university student studying music in Australia. I have always been interested in cologne and perfume, and about 8 months ago I started going out with my current girlfriend Jennifer, whom I have had feelings for for years. She loves cologne, and as a gesture of my affection for her, I have started trying to make her her own unique scent. I have been researching for about 2 months now, and buying some essential oils here and there. I am starting to develop something that is..well…its ok, but I want to create something trully amazing…and something that will suit her. I understand you run a business from this so please dont think I am trying to obtain your knowledge for free or anything, more just if you can offer any words of advice at all? With no real knowledge of perfumery at all other than titbits of information on each essential oil that I can glean from the internet, it really is rather difficult. To make matters worse, Im keeping it a suprise, so I cant really ask her what oils she likes, other than trying to accidentally have them on me and see if she reacts positively to them (Im still amazed she believed the smell of clary sage was from me cooking eariler that day when I tried to judge if she would like it!)

This email is a bit disjointed sorry, Im actually in a bit of a rush to go into uni, I thought I shoudl send this now though or I will keep procrastinating and never get around to it. Thankyou for any advice you can offer at all

Sincerely,
Andrew Galloway

Ciao Andrew,
you can get some recipes of traditional colognes from the book of Dussauce:
http://www.profumo.it/internet-documents/books/index_books.htm

There is a game going on at www.basenotes.net in which a journalist, Marian Bendeth, interviews a panel of modern perfumers asking them where they would go if they could travel back to the time of their choosing, to meet, chat and co-create with a perfumer of the past.

I am nobody and they would not call me, but I could not stop wondering what I would say myself if the demand was done to me. So I started to imagine where I would really like to go, as a perfumer, and in what epoch. I realized that as a perfumer as well as a person, the place, the date and the person that most of all I would love to meet coincided.
The place is the Arabic Peninsula, the date is 14 hundred years ago and the person is the Prophet of Islam himself.
Before his advent the spirituality of perfume was confined in the temples, kept as a secret by rabbis and priests, in the same way that spirituality itself was the privilege of their casts.
Muhammad (SAS) is the man who said “three things of this material world were rendered dear to my heart, the feminine gender, perfumes and prayer”. He ordered all his follower to use perfume for the Friday prayer, to perfume the dead and to use perfume (natural) as a purification for women following their monthly disturb. His numerous injunctions regarding the use of perfume promoted the culture of the spirituality of perfumes which culminated in the use of scents in the mortar used to build mosques. His well recorded teachings about the medical use of Aromatic materials have been the starting point of Islamic medicine, which is the fount from which our own modern medicine comes, even though as a simple branch and not as a natural outcome of it.

He rendered the use of perfume a religious action for all Muslims, putting directly into their hands what was previously reserved to the religious casts of priests, exactly as he called the people to call directly on their creator without the intermediary of a religious hierarchy. There is not a man in human history that made so much for bringing perfume to all than the prophet of Islam.

The demands on Basenotes are:
• If it was possible to travel back in time to any particular century and decade of your choice to meet your number one inspirational Perfumer:
• Who would you like to meet?
• What specific questions would you want to learn from them?
• If you could bring anything back with you, what would that be?
• If you could team up together in that time period, who would you like to co-create a fragrance for?
• If you could bring anything back with you, what would that be?

The person that I would go to meet, of course is the prophet himself, and for this I would renounce all the perfumes of the world.
I would bring back nothing with me, nothing material at all, the record of him would be enough to fill my life, I would have drunk from his light.
I would maybe dare to ask him to make a bespoke perfume for him, but what I would like to learn from him is not about only about perfumes and their meaning, it is justice, righteousness, truth and reality.

The mysterious and mythic instrument of the perfumer, how to build it, explained step by step and illustrated with pictures.Foldable, easily transportable for working travels, this organ totally innovative is likely to become the model to all perfumers.

http://www.profumo.it/aromaterapia/Corsi/youtube_perfume/perfumer_organ.asp

I received a request of help for a TV shows: what about cooking eggs with Ambergris?
An English cook (are the 2 words compatible for a French man) “recreates” dishes from the past and the show “culminates in a lavish feast”.
I do not like at all the “lavish feast” part. I just returned from Africa and hold god given food in too high a respect for appreciating it being made a show of waste for the rich.
I have seen in all my years of travelling before becoming a perfumer that humanity is divided in 2 parts: one part has problems for eating, and the other part has problems for losing weight.
I am convinced that if someone is hungry on earth it is only because someone else is eating his dinner.

Nevertheless, a true perfumer is always a cook as well, and this English trip tickled my French man’s curiosity. I said to my daughters: today I cook something special, the egg with ambergris.

I cooked my egg putting it in a pan with a little bit of olive oil, then I grated some ambergris on it and I covered the pan and let cook at very low fire until appears a white layer over the egg (snowy fried eggs).

We ate the egg and it was as good as usual, being happy a egg from my own happy hens, but the ambergris flavour got completely lost in that dish, and we all were fully deluded.
If that was the dish of a king, it must have been an English king (this is only the opinion of a French man though).
I was so incredulous that I started all over again, with more ambergris and taking care of cooking the ambergris even less.

Well, it is not because I am French, but this English dish is a complete flop.
A good news anyway is that Ambergris eggs seem to loosen your bowels. Was the king constipated?

Still I am opened to another English culinary experience, if someone cares to counsel me something really special.

Men usually prefer woody or spicy or “grassy” accords, while flowery ones are considered to be feminine scents.

My experience with perfume customers has shown me that there is a clear division between men and women scents, but many women prefer men’s perfumes while only a minority of men prefer flowery soft and romantic scents to wear.

The fact that these are sold as women perfumes stops them completely from buying and wearing them.

You would have to travel to middle east to find men wearing Jasmine and Rose perfumes without shame.

I have observed for long the people and their perfume tastes and I remarked that the more macho a man the more woody the perfume he will chose.

Flowery and sweet scents are chosen by men who have a poetical sensibility, who are kind and patient, who cultivate humility and kindness towards others as a virtue.

It is generally believed that women will prefer a macho, but this is not true, many women will value highly the flowery man because he is likely to be a sweet partner in life, trustworthy, loving and faithful.

Macho man with a super ego may seduce because he is likely to conquer his share of the world, but a woman in search of true love will not chose him because she instinctively knows that his energy and ego will push him to feminine conquests as well.

A man may use perfume as a strategy exactly as he uses his dress.

A macho man wearing flowery or a poetic man wearing woody would be irresistible in the eye of many women because their personality would be completed, and they would hold the advantages of both types.

Comments

Rashunda:

Is it also correct for me to assume that one can make a perfume sort of to “balance” a personality? For example, if someone has a very passive personality, a perfume can be designed to help exude more confidence.

AbdesSalaam Attar

You could do a lot of things with perfumes, including making people feel as you wish, but in my philosophy of making perfumes, people are at the core of the process, not as accessories, which means that personalized perfumes are not made by the perfumer but by the person who wants it. He will decide what he likes and the perfume will have the properties that this person realy needs.
As a psychologist or as a medic I could err totally judging that a person needs to be balanced in a way or in an other. The nose never errs. He is your best doctor. He knows what no one else knows about medicine and psychology.
A perfume is done with the nose, a perfume for an other person is done with his nose.
Your knowledge of psychology or medecine will help you to make perfumes, if you also know Aromatherapy and olfactory psychology, but by the end, all what is necessary to make a perfume is the nose.
Personalities are what they are, they cannot be changed. The perfume can certainly help a person overcome a weakness such as lack of confidence as you mention, but only if it has been done with the nose of the person.
AbdesSalaam Attar

The business is in the hand of very few people who are ready to throw millions of dollars for really big lots. They control the prices and are very fast in travelling to the finding places with the cash payment.
It is a matter of “grab and run”, that often occurs in luxury hotel rooms.
It is certainly dangerous to go around with such big amounts of money, and the life of an Ambergris hunter is surely adventurous and romantic.

Since years I am trying to sneak into the business without much success.
The others are better equipped and the only resource I have is to offer more money than them.
Therefore one should know the price that they offer, and on the other hand it is difficult to buy it too expensive because it becomes then difficult to sell it and you risk being left without money but with plenty of ambergris.
The customers are always the same, Guerlain and some of the biggest perfume houses. The arabs, the Asians and the Japanese are also very big consumers.

I have received an offer for a lot of 1,5 kg (in photo) and this is a reasonable size for me.
The investment is at my dimension and the lot is a single lump. This is important to me because I have observed that the maturation, that lasts for years, occurs in a better way in big lumps than in small pieces.
The problem is that this lot is in Australia and that it is the only country from which the export is prohibited.

I know that the French hunters manage to export it. I called the seller in Australia and he also knows that. Probably he had already contacted the French concurrent and his offer was too low. Then he called me for a better one.
“I don’t know how they do” I confessed him
“Probably they do it quietly” he answered
“Well” I said, “let us do the same, like Crocodile Dundee, after all we are in Australia”.
In the meantime I put the photo online. If someone is interested in the Ambergris business let him call me.

�
Amman, 1990

My small daughter told me: “Papi, I want to buy a boat when I am grown up”.

“It is easy” I replied, “you just have to sell perfumes to the people, and do you know why it is easy? because everybody likes good smells”.

That was his mission. Other saints were in Dehli or Lahore, two great cities of all times, seats of power and civilization, they had thousands of disciples, and they advised kings and viziers.

He taught, fed and cured backward village folks all his life.

I spent a year or so in Pakpattan, stuck there by destiny as had been Baba Farid, and I had a lot of time for reading and studying the life of the saint.

Our marketing geniuses have turned the problem around for their clients: “make people desire what they don’t want to buy”, but for us perfumers the point to realize is that everybody wants to smell good and to live in a nice smelling environment.

The corrupt person is like the blacksmith: if he does nut burn you with his fire, at least he will suffocate you with his smoke”.

�
Psycho-Aromatherapy is by Robert Tisserand

A perfumer from the industry has to learn his base notes, their molecular structure, the story of their utilization, their preferred combinations with other ones, their making process and their eventual toxicity.
The Natural Perfumer also has to learn to know his base notes, his ingredients, the notes of his working instrument.
Natural essences are a lot more complex than the singular synthetic molecules used by the industry of mass perfumes.
The essential oil of plants is their vital spirit extracted through a basic process of Alchemy; distillation.

Basic knowledge of Phytotherapy, our ancestral medicine, is indispensable to the knowledge of the essences because the medicinal properties of plants are most often due from the essential oil they contain.
The traditional plant healer is able to understand their curative properties just observing them. Many are the clues; their shape, their growing, their reproducing, their preferred ground, their ideal climax, their reaction to aggressions and their perfume.
The natural perfumer should arrive to this intuitive knowledge, smelling an essence he should understand its medicinal properties. He shall be able to do this only because he will use them daily not only to compose perfumes but also to cure himself, his family and his friends.

In fact, practicing Aromatherapy is a natural conclusion for who composes perfumes with natural raw materials.
Essential oils are material substances to be used in Aromatherapy in drinks, foods or massages, but they are also smells, immaterial fumes, vibrations, and their aromas have on us surprising effects.
Who has not experienced, for instance, that the smell of lemon makes him salivate?
Or lived intense emotions provoked by the smelling odors from his past?
Does not each of us know how much bad smells can disturb us psychologically and how good ones can make us happy, like the aromas of food, of the forest or of the sea?

The natural perfumer must learn the psychological properties of his raw materials, and he can do that only wearing them purposely to observe on himself and on others the effects they produce.
This knowledge cannot be acquired except through personal experience and this could take a long time.
Fortunately a number of people are conducting research in the field of olfactory psychology, and the study their conclusions together with one’s own observations based on personal use of the essences will allow him who threads the “way of Scent” not only to grow rapidly in knowledge, but also to contribute himself with new discoveries, because the field of olfactory research is an unknown ocean still to be explored.

Olfactory research is not limited to the body mechanisms, it explores the infinite of human soul.

I just received from South Africa a new essence that is not yet available on the international market of raw material for perfumers.
The bottle had leaked a bit and the wrapping of the parcel was perfumed.
The power of this essential oil is incredible.
Since 2 days my work place and the next room have been invaded by the fragrance of this strange mix of bubble gum and cat’s pee, although I have cleaned everything and thrown out far away the empty package and the inside wrapping.
Do you have present when you enter a room and say: I can smell a mouse?
This is the smell of the pheromone that these animals leave with their urine. It is very parent to the smell of cats urine as well.
The only essence of the perfumer’s palette which has a similar note is a good and real Black current absolute, although much more fruity in body.

There is a clear parallel between music and perfumery, between olfactory and musical melodies, and we shall use this likeness in order to understand better the “why” and the “how” of olfactory education.

Just like music, perfumery is an art and even a major art, being entirely dedicated to one of our senses of perception, the sense of smell.Why is perfumery not taught at school just like music or drawing?Is perchance our sense of smell a minor sense of little importance?Do we perhaps love perfumes less than other civilizations?

School programs offer to all the basis of musical education, teaching the seven notes of our musical scale.

Olfactory education is no less important and to be able to name the scents of lavender and rose is no less important than to be able to name the blue and the red of the color spectrum.

The program that we deisigned is very simple and can be reassumed in one phrase: “how to become a perfumer in 4 moves”.

It is really surprising how often people, while smelling the absolute of coffee or the essence of lemon, smile over the bottle, recognizing only the happy memories associated with these familiar smells, without being able to give their names.

The basis and the first step of olfactory education consists in being able to name the scents that surround us. With a special diffuser, we send a sweet perfumed wind to the students and teach them to recognize the names of simple smells like lavender, pine, lemon ecc…

The didactical path of these first three steps of olfactory education is directly inspired from the Japanese Kodo, “the way of scent”, the Zen of olfaction.

Today, while the scents of nature essential to our psychological equilibrium are disappearing from our modern environment, chemical perfumes are omnipresent in our daily life, ice creams, soaps, cosmetics etc. This has created a confusion in the later generations because their olfactory models of reference are those that industrial marketing have provided for their consumption, the cheapest petrochemical mass products. Only an olfactory education can provide them with the knowledge necessary to apply criterions to the smells that surround them in order to judge their quality or to appreciate fully their beauty.