Drinking in LA

Listening to Bran Van 3000’s Drinking in LA during my commuting way to Berne. What a song: Melancholic, touching, moving. Emotionally touched I am watching out of the window, autumn is moving in with foggy clouds on the fields. Thoughts wandering back to the US where I spent one of my best years in life, to Texas…to New Orleans, oh my, how painful to see those pictures yesterday on CNN. To see how this disaster brings out the best in men but also the worst instincts. My thoughts are with those who have lost everything.
It is disturbing, how close pain and joy are together on this planet earth. My joy of yesterday was the birthday of two neighbours who invited us for a couple of drinks. We had Penhaligon’s English fern in the air (on my friend who really likes it). I was wearing Knize Ten, a toilette water which is like my neighbour in its sixties. I will write a note on that one soon and about leather scents…. Then, we had Intuition discretely moving in, there was an elegant Eau de Cologne of unknown origin and Alice was wearing my composition L’air du désert marocain which is developing very nicely on her, much softer than on my skin. My skin brings out the spicy woody character much more. This brings me to the conclusion and a disturbing fact for the perfumer: The skin chemistry affecting the scent canvas. The more complex the composition of a perfume (meaning especially the more naturals you include!) the more a perfume lives on a skin. When I create a fragrance, I will test in on paper sticks, which allows me smelling the scent palette like a surgeon working on a patient: Clinically and antiseptically clean. If pleased, I always test on my skin. But how it will develop on somebody else is hard to predict. Roudnitska was bringing the paper slips with perfume close to his hands in order to combine his body scent with the perfume without having to apply it directly. Still, there remain unknowns and it is like painting a picture whereby you do not know how much light will bring out the colours. Will it end up in a dim hut in the Swiss Alps or will the colours shine under the Californian sky, in early morning sunlight maybe, somewhere on Venice beach?