let's play pretend

[flamingsword]

You have been hired by Company X to make their new Spring scent for next year, and to take all the time and money you need to on producing it.

What does it smell like?
What notes do you want to put in it?
Does it tell a story or paint a picture?
How complex or simple or well-blended is it?

What are your scent inspirations for this Spring season and what are you loving? Let's talk perfume.

Comments

[harpers_child]

I'm going with outside my back door right after our usual afternoon rain.

Wet ferns and rose with a little bit of basil and the occasional faint whiff of wild strawberry.

Ooh!

[flamingsword]

Okay, I have an important question for the mood and setting of this: petrichor or no petrichor? I do love the way the damp earth smell balances rose, but I’ve never smelled rose with basil, which could take the whole scent in an aromatic direction that I feel like I should explore. And rose+strawberry sounds like a winner!

Re: Ooh!

[harpers_child]

Very little petrichor. It's mostly wet greens from the volunteer ferns right outside the back door. In a few weeks the rosebush will start blooming and until about October it'll have anywhere from two to a dozen roses open at once. I've got both sweet and purple basil and the rain bruises the leaves just enough for a little bit of the smell to happen. How much strawberry happens depends on how recently we've cut the grass. Right now the whole back yard is covered in little yellow flower and tiny red strawberries.

Basil and rose works surprisingly good together, at least as it happens directly from my plants.

Re: Ooh!

[flamingsword]

I got out my essential oils, and you are correct! Rose and basil do go surprisingly well together.

[lunabee34]

Ooooooooh. What a great idea.

It smells like vetiver and lavendar and bergamot and it actually lasts and doesn't fade. LOl

[flamingsword]

Maybe you could use a CO2 extract of those ingredients, and see if the heavier molecules would stick around longer than alcohol extracts and peel pressings.

I have a cacao CO2 and it lasts forever (but also stains, so I have to wear it in a locket).

[lunabee34]

That's a cool idea. I hadn't thought of trying that. :)

[snippy]

The opening is Daphne (flowers), followed by the smell of loamy soil with a bit of charcoal, ending with that bitter smell of smashing ants.

Yeah, it's Comme des Garcons for sure.

[flamingsword]

It sounds like it!

[full_metal_ox]

The bitter smell of smashing ants probably comes from formic acid, also the active ingredient in bee stings.

[katarik]

I'm in the PNW, so Spring smells like... rain. Rain and wet softening earth, the last of the crocus, an undertone of fern, and the rising green sap that isn't quite to a blossom yet. Just-starting rosebuds that haven't yet begun to flower, very green instead of that heady floral rose.

[flamingsword]

I made a room spray like that once, for a friend who was homesick for Portland - aquatic notes, pine, and faint roses. It wasn’t spring-y smelling to my nose, but then I’ve never been to the PNW.

I hope it’s beautiful.

[full_metal_ox]

(Disclaimer: I'm severely hyposmic and synaesthetic, meaning that my perceptions may not reflect common experience.)

I’d like to express the weird mutability of spring in the Miami (Ohio) Valley, where March can vacillate between January and May; an explosive white floral with icy wintergreen, penetrating ozone, and astringent grapefruit notes, suggesting white flowering tree petals and snowflakes scattered interchangeably in a dramatic anime wind.

And I even have an associated song, although the video imagery is all wrong; there’s Vampire Prince Gackt being carried through the blazing desert, when everything about the song demands a melancholy silver-to-white aesthetic and the cusp of winter and spring; Synaesthete Problems.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1bTHhXSpd4U

[flamingsword]

Your experience of spring is still valid, even if the interpretations of others do not match it. I only get synaesthesia with a few things, and that is sometimes both cool and annoying. It must be more so when your senses are even more involved.

And that sounds like a crisp and refreshing scent that speaks to early spring or spring in the northern latitudes. I would like to sniff that, certainly.

Now that we’re further into spring...

[full_metal_ox]

...this stage of the season would offer a cue for something I’ve always wanted as a fragrance base—-although it would be niche and controversial: hawthorn blossom. And not the sweet apple blossom kind; I’m talking the nasty animalic sort, redolent of sex and carrion: perhaps supported by dragon’s blood, to heighten all the overwrought mythological baggage—-crucifixion connotations, Faerie lore, and Beltane rituals alike. This, obviously, would be a job for Black Phoenix Alchemy.

Re: Now that we’re further into spring...

[flamingsword]

That sounds like it would wind up in the Lupercalia scents for sure!

Re: Now that we’re further into spring...

[full_metal_ox]

Here’s an essay on the fraught nature of hawthorn scent that I’d had in mind, and was trying to dig up:

https://odiferess.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-scent-of-hawthorn-may-day-witches.html?m=0

Re: Now that we’re further into spring...

[flamingsword]

I figure it's like civetone, a little of it in other things smells good, where too much or on its own it is overpowering and kinda gross.

[full_metal_ox]

So what would your own spare-no-expense olfactory spring-in-a-bottle be like?

[flamingsword]

I'm in Texas, so spring smells a bit different here. Sweet pea, daffodil, the last of the clover blossoms, green tea with honey on the porch, a couple of macrocyclic musks, broken branches from the last thunderstorm, wet dirt, and fresh cut grass.