a good recipe ... includes generosity, sensuality, surprise

"Today, 60 basic ingredients constitute 80 percent of all fragrance formulas.

....Of course, I can create perfumes in the classical manner, or in the baroque, narrative, figurative, abstract, minimalist, and so forth. But above all, I believe that all fragrances should have form, distinction, imagination, generosity, sensuality, and surprise so that perfume is not simply reduced to a product, an object, or a commodity."

-Jean-Claude Ellena

with a lovely fragrance creation history, currently the exclusive in-house perfumer for Hermès, from his book Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent 2011

When I think of the number of words used in daily communication,
the number of ingredients needed to make a fine meal,
it makes sense that it's how we use ingredients
in a fragrance formula
in order to capture perceptions.


assemblage: Put the Fizz In detail Lura Astor

Love Ya Would Want to Smell Ya

Love ya

would want to smell ya

my remix of Love ya, wouldn't want to smell ya.


painting: Perfume of Desire  Lura Astor

Nature - and Another Thing

continuing from my previous post

Many Medications Affect Our Sense of Smell.

When our sense of smell is out of equilibrium so is part of our own balance.

Affecting smell? Definitely birth control, hormonal medications (search on this site). Definitely anti-depressants, anti-anxiety and weight loss medications, viagra, steroids. People who care-take see the symptoms first hand.

For years I've used performance and teaching skills to increase my ability to guide people how to smell and analyze smell more - for lay people, not for industry standards. I use art points of view. Also, I smell in color and until a few years ago assumed every body does. I've since learned that people smell in a variety of ways including: in a fog, in textures, in zones, analytically in numbers.

I look forward to more people accessing this sense in ways that enhance their life, beyond cliché.


photo: pill head, common use

Definition of Nature in Scent World - Up For Grabs

 







2 October 2012, I write:

Completing a questionnaire on Trends in Scent in North America I realize the definition of Nature is up for grabs.

Regarding regulatory increases and concern of allergens:
I am not a scientist, do not know the effects of:
human tissue in vaccines
genetically modified seeds in source material
chemical spray on materials used
and other factors. 

I am not a “use only naturals in perfumery” advocate. And, I don’t know the geo-politics of regulations in this industry.

I do know that when my country announced a war with Iraq and Afghanistan that many were returning missing limbs. I voiced that with the money in bio-technology and computer prosthetics that we will see a Bionics Olympics with huge leaps and faster race times due to longer, bouncier strides. Acrobatics will take a new twist and new sports will develop. Years later Para-Olympics comes into its own.

As a kid, I came home from elementary school and told my mother the teacher had told us that war is good for science, medical innovation, and for quickly producing doctors. Mom flipped a lid and proceeded to educate me on analytical thinking, how peace is magnificent for science, technology, medicine, and arts. She continued teaching me how to hold my own during sweeping generalizations, to use discernment and to research, read, read more, write, and analyze. She taught us to give credit to people while they are living. She thought posthumous accolades are ridiculous, and a backwards thinking money-maker.

We continue to define Nature. From centuries of "we must control Nature or it will control us" -to- analysis of Nature and Nurture -or- programming, to there remains an equilibrium within Nature and it teaches we are a part of it. 

In view of the long clock of now, nature and we evolve, slowly it seems, slowly, longly. And we define, redefine, and maybe even refine.

photo: detail from Smell Installation Lura Astor

2012

painting: brush stroke Lura Astor

A Year of Smells ...

Wishing you 
a New Year 
Full of
New Smells

photo: WindSculpture Lura Astor

Scent Categorization

... we each must figure out how we categorize smells
and even categorize
how our interpretations can fluctuate and be influenced.

- Lura Astor click here

The following is from
the long awaited book
Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent

by Jean-Claude Ellena

Perfumer at Hermès 

"In order to judge perfumes that have outlasted time I use today's nose, whereas for new perfumes I use yesterday's nose. 

And I realize that memory works in such a way that perfumes, which are not experienced with excitement and passion, which are not linked with a personal story or, in our business, with the training of the nose, are devoid of meaning and leave no trace in the memory. I thus conclude that evaluation by categories, by classification, is not enough for me. This perception of perfume is too analytical, too distanced, to move me. In order to discover a perfume, I have to enter into it and grasp it from the inside. Once it is separated from its external apparel, I can appraise, judge and decide.

I also notice that my perception, my understanding, and my judgements of perfumes have evolved with the ideas, the values, the customs, and the tastes of society, and that the mental picture I have of perfumes has constantly altered and become richer. This means that I am constantly reinventing my representation of the past - the past that builds my future creations."


Illustration: Heart of the Matter Lura Astor

Sea Smells See Smells

Breathe deeply, and you remember that smell for the rest of your life, the bold, fecund aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen, and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater.

- Pat Conroy The Prince of Tides

Growing up in New England there was a brisk, wake-you-up, salt-bite to any sea inhale. A coast away in California, the ocean scent is truly Pacific, not as stinging, more lulling.

photo: Ocean Rope Lura Astor

We Smell What We See?

 “They hear what they see.”

Bobby Darin as quoted in Dodd Darin's book, Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee by Their Son. Darin advises to always be a sharp dresser as a performer, and addresses his desire to stretch his musical range, not just be seen as Bobby Darin thus Mack the Knife et al.

I have a sense that people smell what they see.

 
Packaging, adverts, color choices, point of sale, all enter our perception field and affect how we interpret what we smell.

To get into the depths of interpreting smell, we each must figure out how we categorize smells and how our category interpretations can

fluctuate and be influenced.

Petal Fireworks Lura Astor

Death Matters Exhibit

155,000 persons die each day

Tropenmuseum Amsterdam's exhibit Death Matters
opens 3 November 2011 click here
and addresses how we relate to death throughout the world.

Do we need new rituals?

Online living memorials exist on facebook pages, web sites, wikipedia entries. Quickly receiving visual and audial information across media platforms has changed our perceptions.

Smell and scent play an important part of death rites, memorials, burials and reminiscences of those who have passed.

Spritzing certain scents can bring a person right back in the room.

See Additional Posts
The smell of pine, centuries later click here
and here

Jim Morrison's beautiful poem on connectors/rites click here

Gunther Van Hagens, creator of Body Worlds and the plastination method of preservation has intrigued people around the world. click here

photo: plastinated human body/Body Worlds/San Diego 2009 Patty Mooney

engraving: Calavera Oaxaqueña José Guadalupe Posada circa 1903

Creamsicles

Finn Earl (Anton Yelchin): Who is this?

Ogden C. Osborne (Donald Sutherland): (mild laugh) Ah, that's Creamsicle

Finn: Her name was Creamsicle?

Ogden: Yeah. Yeah, she smelled like a Creamsicle

Finn: Mr. Osborne, Creamsicles don't smell.

Ogden: Smells good doesn't it? 

King of Norway introduced me to her. She had a mole shaped like Cuba.

She and Billie Holliday

got into a cat fight

over me.

The two of 'em used to sing duets.

One in each ear.

Billie Holliday could sure sing.

Creamsicle used to hit the high notes.

Photo: the film Fierce People 2005 Lions Gate

Director: Griffin Dunne
Writer: Dirk Wittenborn

Mae West Went West

Mae never takes showers, preferring tub baths perfume with rose-scented bath salts. She has more than a dozen fluffy negligees and wears a different one every morning for breakfast, which she eats on a pink satin chaise lounge in her boudoir.

She has twenty-seven bottles of perfume on her dressing table, but the one she uses almost exclusively is of sweet pe scent … Her hair-dresser comes to her home every morning to give her a finger wave. Her hair is shampooed weekly. Mae’s fingernails are manicured three times a week and always coated with a vivid red polish. She has massages several times a week.

For the sake of her curves she eats rich, creamy foods – likes chocolate candy too.

She is left-handed, naturally, but hides the fact in public. She can’t ride a horse, but is proud of her ability to ride an elephant. She likes to motor, but cant’ drive a car, and is afraid of ocean and air travel. She is a disciple of Yogi, writes in bed, dictating to a secretary.

She’s a home girl, and oddly her homework is writing.

- Becoming Mae West, Emily Wortis Leider, Farrar Straus Giroux 1997

Photo: She Done Him Wrong Paramount

Packaging Design: Becca Fox

Moonraker's Perfume of Fire

James Bond:   Trifle overpowering, your scent.

photo: Moonraker 1979

Ahh, burning odor of hydrocarbons

if we don't make it there

our kids or our kids' kids are

gonna make it

Where?

To outer space

And it has its unique smells and pockets of smells.

From lunar smells of firecrackers and spent gunpowder, to spaces smelling of sweet sugar or sulfur

Read the fun little article click here

"The final frontier smells a lot like a NASCAR race—a bouquet of hot metal, diesel fumes and barbecue. The source? Dying stars, mostly. 


We have a few clues as to what space smells like. First of all, there were interviews with astronauts that we were given, when they had been outside and then returned to the space station and were de-suiting and taking off their helmets - they all reported quite particular odours.
 
For them, what comes across is a smell of fried steak, hot metal and even welding a motorbike, one of them said."

- Steven Pearce Omega Ingredients

photo: Antennae Galaxies NASA/ESA

distant perfume

In the place where this memory lives is perhaps the key to open all the other places that hold the stored words and stories that slip away. I am thinking this once again, walking down the street, writing in invisible ink.


Will the thought of how to unlock the other words and live the memories for the second time (perhaps on paper this time) disappear into that other world of shadows and distant perfume? My mind seems to remember it but cannot actually smell the aroma. It is like the memory of a scent. Perhaps this memory can transport me to another state. Is that not as real?

- Deborah Winger, from her book Undiscovered

photo: NYC 6th Ave. circa 1940

Smells of Manliness

15 Manliest Smells in the World 

are listed in
Brett and Kate McKay's
Art of Manliness
23 June 2009

the list delights me with its quaintness

The original Old Spice makes it in

shoe polish

sawdust

and guess what else? 

click here


photo: Teater Kolibri 18 August 2007 FredrikBorgström

11 October 2011 Brian Pera's Woman's Picture & Andy Tauer's Miriam

See the film
hear the director, Brian Pera
who also is the director/star of The Way I See Things click here

and

several of the stars

and

Perfumer Andy Tauer visiting from Zurich, Switzerland

and
the first of the Tableau de Parfums Miriam

Host: the luminescent Ann Magnuson


Tuesday 11 October 2011
8:00 PM

The Steve Allen Theater at The Center For Inquiry
4773 Hollywood Blvd
Hollywood, CA 90027
call 323.666.4268

For ticket information click here

click here for information on the Tableau de Parfums

What I love about this film and Brian's directing is time and space change until you sit, not sit like in a chair, more sit as in yoga or a meditation or at a picnic; sit with yourself, to dawning recognitions blooming within the film.

Painting: Nana Edouard Manet 

Smell of Rain

Inspector Barnaby:  This cloth, where'd it come from?

Tailor: Ah, that's a lovely 18 ounce tweed, hand woven in Scotland before the war.

Barnaby: I swear my father had a suit in this material.

Tailor: I wouldn't be surprised.

Barnaby: I can remember how it smelled when he'd been out in the rain.

photo: Midsomer Murders The Made-to-Measure Murders May 2010

goin' bananas

green leaf

clove

candy

photo: banana Cavendish

Scent Bar 7 October 2011 Andy Tauer/Brian Pera - Los Angeles

Lucky Scent

lucky again

Perfumer Andy Tauer visits from Zurich, Switzerland

Director Brian Pera in town from Tennessee

Scent Bar

8327 Beverly Blvd

Los Angeles, CA

5-7PM

Champagne Reception






showcasing the first scent created for

Tableau de Parfums click here

an ongoing film series by Brian Pera
creator of A Woman's Picture
click here

showing in Los Angeles
Tuesday 11 October 2011
Steve Allen Theater


photo: Lucky Hand lastor 17 April 2010