petals

Each
minute
its own
timing

You
never
know how
they'll
stretch




Illustration: Petals Lura Astor

Re-read

 












reread a favorite book lately?

Illustration: Sleepy Head Lura Astor

Copasetic or Cope Aesthetic?

How go
your days or daze? Kokopelli or Kopokelli?

dance feet drumbeat the
earth the dreams the feats
feet feats

question something







Dance of Whim Lura Astor

heart rhythms

Heart Rhythms Lura Astor

Bouquet Lura Astor

Offer the Enjoyment

 

A hybrid of Midwestern, homesteading, tea-totaling stock with inventor, Roaring Twenties, Poiret gowns, bathtub gin stock ...

In our highly stimulating home the air cleared for a new chapter each time we changed sheets. Yardley English Lavender Sachet (1873) was sprinkled the air uplifted and caught the wings of change.

Especially welcome after any sickness, a crispness of sheets crackled, no longer limp from fever sweat, now soaring with the elevation of the lavender.

W.A. Poucher, at one time Chief Perfumer of Yardley, beginning at age 35, also known for his perfume Bond Street and written contributions, wrote in the 1920's that,".... it was unfair that perfumes were only available to royalty, actresses and prostitutes".

Poucher introduced less expensive perfumes for purchase by women working in offices and shops, simultaneously developing new ways for perfuming cosmetics.

In 1923 Poucher, a pharmacist, wrote and published Perfumes and Cosmetics, emphasizing reference to Synthetics. This was a time when specialist books on cosmetics had not been printed and cosmetic chemistry was closely allied with pharmacy. In later editions Soap was added to the title.

On my wishlist today is Poucher's Perfumes, Cosmetics and Soaps, edited by Hilda Butler, ISBN 0-7514-0479-9.

According to the book, "In the 19th century perfumery was considered to be an art, totally.

.... The study of perfumes has a fascination unsurpassed by any other branch of chemistry. The researches of many distinguished scientists have gradually raised it from one of the minor arts to almost the level of a science."

The book became three volumes

Dictionary of Raw Materials and Miscellaneous Bodies

'including pigments and dyestuffs of interest to the chemist-perfumer'

Perfumes emphasizing the production of natural perfumes, his belief that one must study raw materials, and counterbalancing his interest in synthetics.

Cosmetics at a time, post World War One, before make-up was used by most women and some men, beginning popular life as theatrical products, in court and on stage, later and still, popularized by stars of the movies.

When raw materials were more scarce during World War Two Poucher's work was found to be valuable for creation of replacement formulations.

Until 1974, Poucher wrote all books and volume upgrades. Then, G.M. Howard revised volumes one and three, and Poucher revised volume two, Perfume.

Poucher:

I cannot impress on chemists too strongly the importance of simplicity of formulation in their experiments. Almost always a few well-chosen raw materials properly combined will give a more elegant and stable product than a long formulas in which one ingredient may upset another and so spoil the balance of the finished product - the unsatisfactory result not always being apparent until after packing and despatch (sic) for sale.

Jean-Claude Ellena:

I do not cultivate mystery, complication.
I prefer the clarity, the understanding.
To give to understand it is to offer of the enjoyment.

click to read a brief and lovely post on Poucher by Octavian Sever Coifan
 

Coifan:

a perfumer can be the
Magician of Multiple Meaning










Illustration: Klimtfume Lura Astor
top of post painting: Bouquet et Coquillages Rene Genis (1922-2004)

to the rescue, to the succor

People like their heroes 3D

and their history flat

(on paper, edited). 

-Lura Astor






Illustration: Pages Lura Astor

beautiful young adult's book

Warriors, Warthogs, and Wisdom: Growing up in Africa is a lovely read written for young adults. Lots of heart and some smelly facts, authored by Lyall Watson.

The young Watson befriended an orphan warthog who became part of the farm's family and gained the name Hoover. In Watson's longer book Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs he could emphasize pigs' olfactory expertise.

Hoover ran away one day to be eventually found at the site where he was originally orphaned when his family had been killed and eaten. A bush elder tracking low to the ground in search for the pet says to the boy, “Intibane, the ugly one. He has very smelly feet.”

The author continues, "Which is true. Pigs have poor eyesight and only average hearing, but their sense of smell is fantastic. They are walking scent factories, with special glands on their faces, at the corner of the eyes, on the chin, in the mouth, under the tail, and even on the ankles. And warthogs have particularly strong glands on the pads of their feet. Everywhere they go, they leave tiny little droplets of their own personal smell behind them, which can last for days. Every warthog lives in a world filled with messages from every other warthog in the area – so that each one knows exactly where everyone else is, how they are, what they have been eating, and how long ago they passed this way. It must be like getting lots of letters every day from all your friends and family, letters filled with news and gossip, but written in ink that slowly fades away."

"He (pet warthog Hoover) had a great memory and never forgot an odor." 











 ... the imagery of smells as ink stories that slowly fade away.

Reminds me of the burnaway cypher silks in Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide.  



photo: BS Thurner Hof 
Illustration: Color Wave Lura Astor

Art from Above

Illustration: Art from Above Lura Astor

Sweet Dreams

Professor Tim Jacob, an expert in smell and taste at Cardiff University (UK), said:

"Smell is the only sense that doesn't 'sleep'. Information continues to reach the limbic system of the brain and that includes the hippocampus, or memory area and the amygdala, that is involved with emotional response.

"Other senses have to pass through the 'gate' of the thalamus, which is closed when we sleep."

When the smell of roses had been wafted under the noses of slumbering volunteers they reported experiencing pleasant emotions in their dreams.

....emotional tone of the dream did change depending on the (smell) stimulation.

BBC 22 September 2008






















Illustrations: Fan Spray/Dream Smear Lura Astor

Bottle Shock

The movie Bottle Shock, with a great cast, writing and scenery, showed the transition of American viniculture onto the world stage circa 1976, affecting the previous "tradition" of French wine as a standard. This transition, on the heels of "The Judgment of Paris" influenced not only wine culture in America and France but the world.
A similar transition has happened in perfumery. Especially post post-world-war-2, when France positioned as the premiere luxe goods exporter.
Throughout world and time there have been cultural scent traditions. People are popping up their perfume products in all kinds of places now. The transitions and migrations of scent in the current world market influence how we look at, and smell, think about, deliver, speak of, archive and create the olfactory goods.

With Rio de Janeiro winning the 2016 Summer Olympics (congratulations), my fantasized money is on continuing increase in Brazil's perfumery.

Illustration: My Bottles Lura Astor

Sniff 'n' Poof !

I love Lyall Watson's Jacobson's Organ!

Don't worry, you have one, and you and you and I ... we play them marvelously ... lovely smell music.

Published in 2000, Jacobson's Organ: and the Remarkable Nature of Smell from another interdisciplinarian, is a delight to read.

 
We think because we smelled ~ Lyall Watson

Smell is governed more by instinct than intellect, moving through our lower brain while other senses take a different freeway, transmitting via one's upper brain.

Dr. Watson passed in June of 2008 at the age of 69. He answered many of the questions I have begun to raise on this site.

First Smell
 
In his commentary on Patrick Suskind's book Perfume I found kindred perspectives. On people's surprise that the main character, orphan turned murderer, Grenouille, has powers of extreme smell receptivity, Watson says, "He produces all the evidence of what we call 'second sight' by the exercise of what we might instead call 'first smell'.

yes!

And, in my opinion, importantly Watson writes

"I believe that where Perfume ultimately fails is in its emphasis on the dangerous savagery inherent in the sense of smell Suskind lingers on the details of fragrant, hapless maidens stalked by an obsessive maniac who sniffs out his prey, instead of exploring everyone else’s untouched potential. This is a little disheartening. It really is time we stopped denigrating the power and influence of smell in all our lives. And yet, smell has been culturally suppressed for so long that one has to wonder. Perhaps heightened olfactory consciousness really would be dangerous to the established social order. Think what we could do with it!"

To that I respond, more heartening, lifely ... fun and funny things.



Lyall Watson addresses smell's effect on our hormones, which dovetails with earlier posts here addressing some precarious side effects of birth controls, especially in relation to smelling and truth in mating.

"We know that the odour of a strange male’s urine lowers the level of pituitary hormones in pregnant female mice and results in miscarriages. It has been shown that strange male urine can even shift the hormonal balance so far that female hamsters never become pregnant at all. And the same results in rodents have been produced by androgen-rich human urine. But no one seems to be looking at the possible role of smell on the fertility of women who work, perhaps as cleaners, n surroundings where they may be exposed to the urinary odours of unfamiliar men.

We should worry about such things. They represent real risks to any woman who is both pregnant and has an intact Jacobson’s Organ. An informal survey among my own friends suggests that young wives do often have difficulty conceiving for the first time when living in the home of their husband’s family, surrounded by the odours of brothers and fathers-in-law. They often fall pregnant within months of finding a home of their own."

 












 
I remain vividly aware of scent and color.

Watson, ".... I believe that there may be still other ways of olfactory knowing. These involve synesthesia, not taking away a sense and allowing others to compensate for the loss, but adding one sense to another in ways that reinforce them both."

 
A bit of the organ's historical context and lore:

"This elusive feature is the Organ of Jacobson, named after the sharp-eyed Danish anatomist who discovered it nearly two centuries ago. It is easy to miss. The external evidence consists simply of a pair of tiny pits, one on either side of the nasal septum, a centimeter or two above every human nostril. But the fact that it does exist changes everything.

Far Smell
 
1780, an obscure civil servant on Ile de France (now Mauritius) wrote to his Minister of Marine and announced that he had discovered a way of detecting ships while they were still below the horizon. He called it nauscopie, and describe it as ‘anticipating by means of smell’, the olfactory equivalent of ‘far sight’, a sort of ‘far smell’. Unfortunately we know no more details about his technique, but history records that it enabled him to win a great deal of money in wagers."

There is so much more in the rich books he has left us; mine them. 

For now, I leave you with this:




 


















"I don’t believe we have even begun to come to terms with our sense of wonder. We still have a lot to learn, particularly from those parts of the sense housed in the rhinencephalon  the old ‘smell brain’.

Mysteries abound there, and reveal themselves only when we have the courage and the imagination to ask the proper questions.


Jean Jacques Rousseau says,
The sense of smell is the sense of imagination.
It greatly disturbs the brain.

Indeed, and it still does."


Images: Circle Fumes/Woman/Wind/Under Beauty/DNA Egg Lura Astor Art

Sense of Wonder

 
I don’t believe we have even begun to come to terms with our ‘sense of wonder’.

We still have a lot to learn, particularly from those parts of the sense housed in the rhinencephalon  
– the old ‘smell brain’. 

Mysteries abound there, and reveal themselves only when we have the courage and the imagination to ask the proper questions.  - Lyall Watson

I find the cavils
of self-appointed committees
for the suppression of curiosity
very tedious

 - Lyall Watson

Illustration: Bottle from Perfume Series Lura Astor

Beautiful Triangle

Illustration: Beautiful Triangle Lura Astor

Happy Autumnal Equinox

Does Size Matter?

Smell Taller

- recent tagline Dial for Men

re new new re new new Nights Who Say New

 















Renew
pull it
into the spine

Illustration: Circle of Renewal Lura Astor

2 Animals Sniff a Dubuffet

Illustration: Two Animals Sniff a Dubuffet Lura Astor

"One needs better metaphors."

I know a huge number of disparate facts.

My gift is my quiet ability to weave them together, synthesize them, create a tale, tidy them up so as to be presentable.

Luca Turin:

"Metaphor is the
currency of knowledge.
... one needs 
better metaphors."

For interdisciplinarians, metaphors as a tool create language bridges, make cultural and sensory synapses, make knowledge more accessible to others, cross-translate languages of the senses.












 

Illustrations: Lura Astor

the opposite of love

The opposite of love is love
I do not believe the opposite of love is hate
I believe that love just is
Love is
love
love yourself free