training

It is going to be a full day today, for various reasons, which is good. In light of all the excitements going on , like the stories developing in the the blogosphere (see made by blog) , or in my shop , I post today something less exciting.... to calm down things.

Maybe some readers imagine the live of a perfumer like he's constantly creating new perfumes in a little lab, just sitting on his table and one wonderful formula after the other pours out of the lab. Well, life is -as usual- much more dull than that. Most of the time, when I work with scents, I do not really compose, but rather sit there and train myself. Sniffing one compound after the other, on paper strips, sometimes comparing how to different scents on two strips combine, and how they develop. For every new compound arriving at my place which starts to look really messy these days, I have to do that. Again and again.
There are difficult scents and easy scents. The easy ones: Once sniffed, I feel like I understand them, and feel acquainted immediately. They are like people in a sense. Sometimes it happens that you meet a stranger, but you feel so comfortable, immediately there is a relation and the whole person is like an open book, that you have already read. (well, sometimes you later have to realize that you missed some pages in this book...and you do your reading again)
Thus, I sat on my desk yesterday, once all mails were answered, windows open, paper strips in front and sniffed Okoumal again, a book with many pages, most of them unread and many with strange letters that I yet have to decipher. Another aspect of perfumery: Detective work.