10 Scents’ Worth: The stories

 I never make a scent without a story, and with my crowdfunding project, they came from near and far.

 So in order of how close my inspiration was…

 XHM2 – Extraordinarily High Maintenance

The scent story

I made this one for myself originally. I had this idea about using all my favourite materials, the ones I love most – all natural ones – just to see what would happen. This is not the best way to make a scent. Imagine what it would be like if you wanted to cook a meal with masses of expensive foods and nothing to lighten it. The same kind of thing happens.

 It was dense and flat and not much fun, but I kept it to see if it would improve over time. Well, yes. But it just became dense, flat and smooth.

I decided to open it up with some airiness and lightness. To do this, you bung in some synthetic molecules that stop in sinking like a lead balloon. It’s a bit like remembering to put the sodium bicarbonate in your cupcakes. That’s baking soda, for everyone who fell asleep in chemistry. With the synthetic chemicals they taste great; without them – flat, dense and sticky. It’s the same with scent. So it became XHM2. One half posh and heavy, one half light and lovely but a little airheaded. Put them together and leave it long enough and they blend to form something halfway decent, IMHO.

The perfumery materials

It’s got cedrat, coriander, cardamom, pink peppercorn, pink grapefruit, raspberry leaf absolute, oakmoss, opoponax, vanilla, rose geranium, rose absolute, davana, hyacinth and vanilla.

To open it up, I added cedramber and bergamot plus a dash of gamma undecalactone, the peachy one.