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
What a great post on how to take advantage of your own sweat pheromones to enhance and personalize a natural perfume. Ever since I had to write a paper on this topic during my aromatherapy certification, I’ve been trying to figure out how to leverage that information in natural perfumery and here is the answer. I also appreciated your linked-to post on human pheromones.
It’s fascinating to me that the nasal cavity is the only place in the body where the environment comes into direct contact with the central nervous system. While other sensory info comes in through the thalamus, the sense of smell comes directly to the brian via the olfactory epithelium – one of the oldest parts of the brain. Before we consciously process a smell, our bodies have already reacted to it. I appreciated your post on human pheromones because there’s not enough reference in natural perfumery to that 2007 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience which identified the chemical in male sweat – androstadienone – that when smelled alters hormone levels in women. This is, after all, a natural process. And while the mainstream perfume industry appears to be trying to capitalize on this chemical reaction via synthesis of pseudo-androstadienone, your post provides a really straightforward and imaginative path for the natural perfume industry to do even better, and without millions of dollars in R&D.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still waiting with much interest for scientists to figure out the whys of the olfactory process – especially where pheromones are concerned – so we can understand how to better leverage chemical constituents in our essential oils. But in the end it seems like the role of natural scents is something we as mammals have always understood at the cellular level. Our ancestors had far more familiarity (and less discomfort) with the relationship between bodily odors and bodily response. Mandy Aftel in her book Essence and Alchemy points out that the use of body odor as an aphrodisiac is recorded in the ancient literature of nearly all languages. Clothing scented with a suitor’s perspiration was “smuggled into the proximity of the desired sexual partner, and sweat also played an important role in the preparation of elixirs… During Shakespeare’s time, a woman in love would place a peeled apple in her armpit to saturate it with her scent and then present it to her beloved as a token of her desire.”
Again, thanks for the great post!