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The Morning Wiz

...and darn-well worth it!

24 June 2000

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CREATE YOUR OWN SIGNATURE FRAGRANCE
AND DRIVE THAT SPECIAL SOMEONE WILD!

"What are you wearing!!!?  It's so wow/grrr/delicious/wild/heavenly/yummy/ sexy/divine..."  I can't tell you how many different versions of that question and statement I've heard from women in the past ten years or so, since I became interested in fragrance.  As I reflect back over my life, I've always been intrigued by the chemistry of fragrance.  As a very young boy -- one who asked Santa for a brand new Gilbert chemistry set almost every year -- I was always concocting some kind of (usually foul-smelling) potion from whatever ingredients I could lay my hands on; not just the chemicals that came with the set, but whatever I could dig-out from under the kitchen and bathroom sinks, spice cupboard, medicine cabinet and even the forbidden Back Hall Cupboard, where my teetotaler parents kept the bottles of wine, port, sherry and the like that clients invariably gave my dad for holidays or in gratitude for legal work he had performed for them.  (Dad never had the heart to give away or to pour his gifts down the drain, even though he and Mom never touched a drop.)  As far as those early experiments went, anything was fair game for my smelly potions.  True confession: I even remember peeing in them on occasion.  Gross, right?  Hey, I was only six years old and it actually taught me a valuable lesson.  Keep reading.

In junior high, I remember being stuck for an idea for my Ninth Grade Science Fair project.  The usual frog and earthworm dissections, Tesla coils, mechanical Rube Goldbergs and nicotine-extraction experiments were all taken by other kids.  (That last one was the way one classmate got our science teacher to purchase cigarettes for him; kid must've smoked two packs for every one he used in the experiment.)  Anyway, the teach said, "Why don't you do a project on esters?"

"Who's Esther?"

"Es-ter...  It's a chemical compound that gives things like fruits and other foods their characteristic odor and flavor.  They're easy to make.  We've got a lot of the necessary chemicals right here in the lab already."

Bitchin' idea!  Finally, a chance to do my thing by putting stuff together to make more unique smells!  And I got extra credit, to boot!  I spent the next several weeks studying and experimenting.  Soon, I had a collection of fragrances with names such as "ethyl acetate," "amyl acetate" "ethyl butyrate" and "methyl salicylate," among others.  During the process, I learned the first (and, perhaps, the greatest) of many secrets of fragrance: really bad-smelling stuff, used properly, can be made to smell really, really good.  (Later, when I finally started dating, I discovered this to be a Law of Nature.)

My first introduction to this law, however, came in the form of butyric acid.  Butyric acid, in case you don't know, is what makes rancid butter smell like rancid butter.  It is absolutely foul, and a little goes a long, long way; but, when combined in the proper proportions with some ethanol (grain alcohol, i.e. Everclear) and a little sulfuric acid as a catalyst: voila!...  Pineapples!  Sadly, while my fragrances were interesting, my project was on the bland side and I did not win a prize at the science fair.  I was so disheartened that I broke an entire vial of butyric acid right at one of the main entrances to the school.  Purely an accident, of course.

After my humiliation (and revenge), I let my passion for fragrance go dormant for many years.  I got the "bug" again, briefly, in college.  Back then, I thought I wanted to be a doctor so I had to take a fair number of science courses.  For my final exam in Organic Chemistry Lab, we had to do what is called the "systematic identification of an unknown organic compound."  All of the sample "unknowns" were placed in vials in a shoebox and each classmember drew one at random.  I reached into the box, grabbed my vial, looked at the oily golden liquid, removed the lid and took a whiff.  I knew I had an instant A!  The vial contained my old friend, butyric acid.  No mistaking that smell.

More time went by: marriage, kids, career, divorce, marriage, career, divorce...  Somewhere along the way, I picked-up the atrocious habit of smoking.  By then, it was the early Nineties and I was working for a company that viewed smokers with extreme prejudice.  I needed to keep my little habit low-profile, so I used to get free cologne samples at the mall.  I was too cheap to pay a lot of money for whatever happened to be the fragrance fad of the day.  Then, one day I was shopping at a neighborhood organic grocer and I noticed a whole display of aromatherapy oils.  I'd heard of aromatherapy, of course (it was the Nineties, after all), but really didn't know much about it.  I did, however, notice that a big bottle of pure peppermint oil was only a few bucks and realized that, as a closet smoker, essential oils could keep me "deodorized" for a long time at a relatively low cost.

There was, of course, a pamphlet on aromatherapy that came with my purchase.  It described the various health benefits of aromatherapy in general, as well as underscoring the point that the sense of smell was directly connected to our limbic system, which is one big reason why different aromas can have such a profound effect upon our memories and our emotions. In fact, smell impulses take the fastest, most direct path to the brain, even faster than sight or hearing.  'Intriguing!' I thought.  'Maybe I should buy a few more essential oils just to see (smell) firsthand what they're talking about.'  So I bought some lavender and some sandalwood and some fake rose (yuck!).  Three little bottles -- after all, I didn't want to spend too much of my hard-earned cash.

Six months and some fifteen hundred dollars later, I realized I had a fragrance habit.  I was buying all kinds of essential oils, attars, resins, concretes, absolutes.  I'd blend until well after midnight and be up before dawn, blending.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  Anyone who knew me was constantly having a blotter-strip shoved under her or his nose as I asked, "So whaddaya think?"  Perfume was all I could talk about.  Sometimes I would get so "juiced" on the oils with which I was working, I had no idea what I was actually smelling anymore; just what I was feeling.  Oh, what a feeling!

Here comes the turning point: a business associate, seeing that I was well on my way to a full-blown obsession, loaned me a novel, Perfume, by foreign author Patrick Suskind.   The book is about a man with the greatest sense of smell in the history of all mankind.  He is born amidst squalor; his mother, a whore who abandons him in a pile of trash.  As he grows, he comes to realize that his special gift gives him knowledge and power with people.  Through the fragrances he creates, he finds that he can control the behavior of others.  He becomes a master manipulator.  His entire life revolves around the pursuit of the perfect ingredient for his master-scent.  Nothing is quite right until one day he catches the faintest breath of it.  This, he knows, is the ideal "note" (perfume is often described in musical terms) he has been seeking to complete his olfactory opus.  He literally follows his nose until he comes to a street and a house where a young, virginal girl resides.  The essence is coming from the girl.  He knows that, somehow, her note is related to her virginity.   He therefore proceeds to kill the girl and steal her essence.  (I won't go into the gory details.)  His fame grows.  No one else's perfumes can even come close.  Because the key essence is so delicate and fleeting, however, he is driven to kill, again and again, always a virgin, to maintain the perfect virtue of his fragrance.  He dies a horrible death.

Why do I relate this story?  Obviously, one does not go about murdering to gather "essence of virgin."  But it was at that moment in my own long pursuit of the "perfect scent" that I began to realize the literal power of the discipline I was studying and its potential for abuse.  I was already meeting with an increased amount of "success" with the opposite sex and I credited my improving perfumery skills to a great extent; both for attracting others and for increasing my own self-confidence.  How easy it was becoming to just manipulate one after another into my arms.  (Listen to and read the lyrics to my song "8-Ball.")   But power always has a downside.  Anytime we rob someone of his or her free will (let alone what the character in the book was willing to do), we are in danger of losing a piece of our own soul.

Some of you will say "Bullshit! No smell is powerful enough to really control others."  Others will say, "Great!  So what's the big secret?"  Paraphrasing, in my best Jack Nicholson voice: "You want the secret?  You can't handle the secret!"  Not yet, anyway.  You still need a bit more education in the basics.

There is no way I can give you anywhere near enough information about perfumery in an article of this size.  Some of the books which I found most informative are The Complete Book of Essential Oils & Aromatherapy by Valerie Ann Worwood and The Magical and Ritual Use of Perfumes by Richard Alan Miller and Iona Miller.  Your local library or bookstore has tons of others.  New Age booksellers are especially prone to such titles.

As I said earlier, perfumers generally speak of a fragrance in musical terms.  A perfume is actually a complex symphony of individual fragrance notes.  In general, they can be divided into top, middle and bass notes.  The top note is the first thing that catches your attention and a bass note is one that lingers long after the initial impression.  Just as certain musical notes fit together, three or four fragrance notes can be combined into a chord which can either be harmonic or dissonant.  Any combination of notes can be combined, but creating a dissonant fragrance when you really wanted an harmonic one will defeat the intent of the perfume and can sometimes spell disaster if you are attempting to create a certain mood.  Still, just as a Major Seventh in music, which has a built-in half-step dissonance, is one of the richest chords, so can two apparently dissonant notes be blended with others to create a rich and beautiful perfume.

Also as in music, however, "beautiful" is a relative term and as we all one day come to realize: "There is no accounting for taste" (or smell).  You may be partial to the "Oriental" family, while your spouse prefers the "Florals."  "Green" may remind you too much of Lysol while you feel the strong desire to devour anything "Citrus."  Other odor families are "Chypre," "Aldehydic," "Leather/Animal"  and "Fougere."One of the first steps in creating a signature scent to drive that Someone wild, is to make every effort to find out which family of fragrances they prefer.  An obvious clue is to find out what they wear and determine which classification it falls under. 

Can't find out or your Someone doesn't wear a fragrance.  Don't despair.  It's desirable but not mandatory to know.  Try and discover what others they have dated wore and whether or not they liked the fragrance.  Or, if you have the opportunity to interact with the other person on a regular basis, do a little scientific testing.  Try a perfume from each of the different families and see which yields the most positive response.  Even if there is no overt response, note how "things go" during the course of your interactions.  If one day seems particularly positive, it's a good indication you've at last hit on the right fragrance family. 

What if you don't have a Someone in mind, but want to attract the right person for you?  Now it starts to get really interesting.These days, almost everybody has heard of pheromones - those mysterious and powerful biochemical neurotransmitters that seem to play a critical role in the mating of members of a given species.  In fact, they're so critical that in humans, each of us has our own organ devoted to pheromone reception.  It's called the vomero-nasal organ (VNO) and, while it is located in our nose, it is technically not an olfactory organ.  Ever wonder why we sometimes have ambivalent feelings about a person who is extremely attractive in the physical sense while another of average-at-best looks makes our heart go pitter-pat?  Blame the VNO.  It's picking-up on something our eyes can't see: compatible pheromones.  Pheromones are one very important way that members of a species recognize others of the same species.  Pheromones are literally a means of communication.  They are so powerful among some species that just a few molecules are enough to draw the attention of potential suitors in the insect and animal kingdom for miles around.  Scientists postulate that pheromones play a key role in human coupling.

A few years ago, I produced a kids tv series on science and discovery.  Naturally, we had to do at least one episode on the five senses.  One segment took us to a fragrance research lab where our guest scientist taught our kid hosts about the sense of smell, as well as the VNO.  (We even made esters!)  This scientist was also instrumental in the creation of a new variety of perfume that combined not only a variety of fragrances, but also a synthetic form of human pheromone.  Apparently the original human pheromones were gathered from human sweat; then analyzed and recreated from their chemical constituents.

It got me to thinking: granted, in theory, a synthesized molecule may be identical to a naturally occurring one, but that just means that the synthetic human pheromone being used in the scientist's perfume would be picked up by the VNO and would cause the brain to say, "Yep, that's another human."  Big deal!But the idea of "personal markers" as contained in human sweat (and what about other bodily fluids?!) was really intriguing.  I knew from my study of perfume that civet, one key ingredient in a number of expensive perfumes, comes from a glandular secretion in the posterior of a civet cat.  By itself, civet smells worse than butyric acid.  My oldest daughter, who has had to put up with a lot of my disastrous experiments in perfumery, calls it "cat butt."  Cat butt or no, when used oh-so sparingly, it can turn a good fragrance into a great one.

Okay, here's the secret.  It's not for the squeamish, so you may want to quit reading at this point.  Ready?...  as far as I'm concerned, the way to create one's own signature scent to drive that special Someone wild is to use, as its foundation, a purified and concentrated form of your own personal markers, containing among other things, your own pheromones, blended with the essential oils which you determine to be the most appealing to your Someone.I leave it to your imagination from there, except to say that if you are considering blending some of your own fluids into a signature fragrance, I recommend you be very choosy about which fluids you utilize.  I also recommend that you don't even consider just dumping a bunch of sweat or whatever in with some essential oils.  Harvest the fluids as you will, but purify them with grain alcohol; sterilize, filter and concentrate them, over and over, before using them as an ingredient in your signature scent. Marshall MacLuhan wasn't talking about perfume when he said "The medium is the message," but the saying is even more true in this context than in the one he intended.  In other words (despite my earliest of experiments), these days I never pee in my perfume -- might send the wrong message.  Then again, I guess if you want to piss people off...And remember the caveat: be careful what you wish for.  You may find that the people you actually attract in this way are not the people you think you want to attract; but pheromones do not lie -- unless you utilize somebody else's fluids -- which may work just as effectively at attracting the Someone you want, only to prove disastrous, because that Someone isn't really right for you; and you used Mother Nature as a form of deception to attract them.  It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.  (How you'd convince someone else to contribute their fluids to your perfume, I don't even want to imagine.)

There you have it.  In case you think it all sounds too sick, better quit wearing those store-bought synthetic scents with their polysyllabic-named chemicals; and please don't delve any further into the history of perfume.  You couldn't handle some of the ingredients relatively sane people and companies have used through the centuries to create some of the rarest and most desirable fragrances.  Can you say "whale vomit?"

Whether you try the secret or not, the technique has worked phenomenally well for me over the past decade.  But the fact is, it attracted too many someones.  I have to confess that I abused its power for a time.  The last Someone it attracted, however, had a perfume of her own that she didn't even have to blend.  And it didn't come in a bottle.  Hers was such a heady, musky scent; her pheromone molecules were a perfect fit for my receptors.  I fell head-over-heels with this Someone, but she loved her lovin', not like she loves her freedom - to paraphrase the Joni Mitchell song.  In the end, I asked her to marry me; she said, "No."

I don't wear my perfume much these days.  Just don't feel like attracting anybody else - right now, at least.  Thank God I gave-up smoking! Anybody wanna buy a used perfume bottle and a little Jitterbug Perfume?

-wiz
24 June 2000