Anjin Reviews

Anjin by Pell Wall

I’ve been a subscriber to Le Mouchoir Parfumé for some time: the incisive, informed and most importantly short, reviews are just my cup of tea.  They are by no means always positive and don’t pull any punches however, so it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I opened the email that popped into my inbox on Sunday morning titled Anjin Review: have a look for yourself though and you’ll see why finished up smiling.

An earlier review from another blogger I enjoy, I Scent You a Day, made me smile too and it’s fascinating to see how differently the two reviewers reacted to the same fragrance - both finding things in it that I hadn’t considered myself.

Many thanks to both reviewers for their thoughts and the smiles :-)

Vanilla: the universal ingredient

Prosecco upgraded with Vanilla Cognac
Pell Wall style

Vanilla is one of the most useful ingredients in cooking, cocktails and perfumery.  Its story is quite well known, so I’m only going to touch on some of the less well-known aspects here.  My main purpose is to give details of a fine drink and a tincture that are easy to make at home.

So, first up, the drink: once upon a time, when I had more money and less sense I conducted a research project into the Champagne Cocktail - a hedonist’s research project rather than an academic one - I tried variations on the Champagne cocktail in every bar I could find that served one to try out the differences.  Much was learned and more was drunk ... including me from time to time.

Vanilla Cognac

Filtering the cognac
(while drinking coffee)

One of the things I discovered was a variation called the Vanilla Classic - sadly now both the bar where I found it and the key ingredient are gone.  That ingredient was Navan - a fantastic vanilla Cognac made by the same people who produce Grand Marnier.

So why am I telling you about a drink you can’t buy? Well, it inspired me to have a go at my own and I’d like to share the process with you:

Take one bottle of good (XO ideally) supermarket cognac and put in two pods of Ugandan Vanilla - leave it where you'll remember to shake it now and then for about four months.  Take out the pods, filter the cognac but reserve the pods (you’ll see why in a bit).

Almost done

Your Cognac should now be a beautiful mahogany colour and filled with complex vanilla flavours as well as all the richness of the fine brandy itself.  You can drink it just as it is, add sugar to make something that more closely resembles Navan but I think it works fantastically used to upgrade a glass of Prosecco - which has enough sweetness of its own to sustain the extra alcohol - drink and enjoy!

Vanilla Tincture

Don’t waste the beans after you’ve
made the vanilla cognac

Now back to those pods: it seems a shame to let them go to waste and one of the lesser-known facts about vanilla is that in perfumery the absolute (see this post for a definition of absolutes and other extracts) is normally used but it isn’t easy to work with, so for the small-scale perfumer a tincture is an alternative.

Here’s my technique for a tincture that’s a bit out of the ordinary:

Let the pods from your cognac-making dry out then chop them up, along with another fresh pod or two, weigh them all together and put the whole lot into nine times the weight of perfumers alcohol (so as to create a 10% Tincture), adding a shot or two of the cognac to the blend (I used about 50g).  Just as with the cognac, wait for at least four months shaking whenever you think of it but at least every few days.

Result: vanilla cognac you can drink plus a vanilla tincture that you can use in perfume making at about 7 times the quantity you would the pure absolute.  The cognac in the tincture gives it an extra complexity and also encourages more flavour out of the pods due to the water content - unlike many materials vanilla tinctures better in a lower strength alcohol 

Resist the temptation to drink the tincture though ...

Tolu Balsam

Tolu Balsam is a very useful natural fixative as well as a lovely base-note in its own right, but it isn’t the easiest of materials to handle.  It comes from the South American tree Myroxylon balsamum.  

It is used to fix materials such as juniper, petitgrain, spices and florals of many kinds and frequently forms a key component of oriental and chypre styles of perfume.

Rock-likc pure Tolu Balsam

Arctander describes it as: "a brown, orange-brown or dark yellowish brown mass, brittle when cold, and the fracture is glasslike or flintlike. Its odor is sweet-balsamic, cinnamic in type, faintly floral and with an undertone of vanillin.” and at normal UK temperatures it’s certainly rock-hard and behaves rather like a chunk of Brighton Rock when it’s broken.

Tolu and TEC form a strange, alien landscape

So to make it practical to handle it needs to be diluted in a suitable solvent - it’s often sold already diluted in this way though the dilution isn’t always declared nor the solvent named - I bought a pure Kg recently and diluted it ready for use in TEC (tri-ethyl citrate) in a process that turned out to be both quite involved and to produce some fun images, so I thought I’d write it up here.

Is that a creature emerging?

The first job was to get the Kg of rock-like Tolu Balsam soft enough to pour out of its container, which I did by sitting the container in a bain-marie and boiling the water beneath it: this took a few hours before the material was fully liquid.  Meanwhile a pre-weighed out amount of TEC was heated on my heater-stirrer with a stirring bar already in the bottom of it (if you don’t heat the solvent as well the tolu will go hard again as soon as it hits the cool liquid and takes much longer to go into solution).

The next step is to pour the hot, liquid tolu into the pre-warmed solvent (insulated gloves are called for for this step of course).  At this point we realised that there was a photo opportunity as the resulting non-yet-mixture looked like an alien landscape.  The tolu settled to the bottom of the solvent and the application of glass rods was necessary to get it to start dissolving as it was much too sticky for the automatic stirrer at that stage: as those went in it started to look like one of those scenes from the Alien series where the creatures start unfolding from the cave walls . . .

  This is all being done in a three litre glass beaker and as you can see in the later pictures the manual stirring took some time before we could leave the automatic stirrer to get on with the job on its own and the balsam tended to dry on the glass very quickly too.

The cling film you can see was to minimise loss of aromatic quality as this was all being done hot, although with such a high-boiling material and high-boiling solvent that isn’t a big concern.

A stirring start

Gloopy-looking stuff

Pasta possibly?

Eventually it reached the stage where it was liquid enough for the automatic stirrer to do its stuff and with the stirrer on a low setting it was left overnight to complete the mixing, kept at a constant 60 degrees centigrade by the integral heater.  By morning it was fully mixed to form a dark brown, consistent, mobile liquid and here you can see me concentrating hard as I pour it into a (slightly pre-warmed) 3Kg glass reagent bottle. The bottle is on the scale so that I can check the amount that’s gone into it for stock control purposes.

Perfect for Perfume: Tolu Balsam at 30% in TEC

We even captured a little video of that part of the process, which gives you a clear idea of the consistency once it’s finished:

A few chips and flakes were left over from the mixing process and these were put into a plastic jar  - the picture at the top of this post is of those, a few weeks later by which time they have merged together to form a single solid but uneven lump, much like that with which the whole process started.

Special Offer Ingredients

Clearance Bargain Ingredients - only one of each!

From time to time people order perfumery ingredients from me and, either because they say they are in a hurry or just because I’m trying to keep ahead of things, I make up the order before they pay . . . then sometimes they don’t pay, either because they changed their minds, ran out of money or perhaps because it was just a wind-up or a fantasy...

Me in declamation mode ;-)

Whatever the case I put the material aside to include in a future order but one way and another the storage shelf has become rather cluttered with these orphans, so I’ve decided it’s time to shift them, so here’s your chance to snag yourself a serious bargain:

• Azarbre, 10ml, sold
• Azarbre, 25ml, sold
• Camphene at 50% in IPM, 100ml, sold
• Cedarwood Atlas Supra, 100ml, sold
• Dihydro Ionone Beta, 10ml, sold
• Fixateur 505E, 100ml, sold
• Fixateur 505E, 100ml, £99 *New*
• Geosmin at 1% in DPG, 100ml, sold
• Hedione (original Firmenich), 1Kg, sold
• Hexalon / Tropical Ionone, 10ml, sold
• Hydrocinnamaldehyde, 25ml, sold
• Ionone alpha, 100ml, sold
• Iso E Super, 200ml, sold
• Iso E Super, 100ml, sold
• Methyl Diantilis, sold
• Musk Ketone at 10% in BB/ethanol, 1Kg, sold
• Myrcene, 5ml, free with anything else
• Nectarate, 100ml, sold
• Nutty Pyrazine, at 0.1% in IPM, 4ml, free with anything else
• Olibanum Resinoid (Frankincense resin) 30% in TEC, 500g £35 *New*
• Orris Givco 204, 500g sold 
• Rose Givco 217, 25ml, sold
• Rose Otto Persian, 30ml, sold
• Rum Acetal at 50% in DPG, 25ml, sold
• Traseolide, 500g £29 *New*
• Veramoss/Evernyl, 30g, sold
• Zenolide, 100ml, sold

Note that in each case what’s on offer is the specific size indicated: if you wanted another size they are all on the list (except Rum Acetal which I no-longer stock), but then you don’t get the benefit of the special clearance price.  Note 13/3/15: Just added Musk Ketone, pre-dissolved in benzyl benzoate and ethanol - a real bargain as it’s notoriously hard to get into solution - and another one I no-longer stock having changed over to IFF’s Musk Ketone Replacer.

UK Shipping on these is, as usual for ingredient sales, at the flat rate of £9.50 however many or few you buy.  If you’re anywhere else in the world, I’ll have to quote.

If you want to combine these with an order from the main lists that’s absolutely fine, but pay for these first or you might miss them while you’re browsing through the 300 other materials on offer!

Payments by PayPal or fast Bank Transfer please to secure them: Send an email to enquiry@pellwall-perfumes.com saying what you want and where you are.  I’ll process those in the order they arrive.

Order quickly to avoid disappointment!

Perfumery Ingredients at Pell Wall

The March issue of my Ingredients List is now online and the list now features some 300 materials, both natural and synthetic, with some very exciting new additions and a spectacular price reduction on one material thanks to some help from a friend in the US.

There are two versions of the list on the website and both can be downloaded or printed for easier reading as well as browsed directly on the site itself.  The first features descriptions of the odours and uses of the materials both from their manufacturers and from me.  I’m expanding this aspect all the time and there are new write-ups included since the last release in January.



But if you just want to compare prices with other ingredient suppliers you’ll appreciate the second list more - it’s just product names, CAS numbers and prices presented in tabular form:




Among the new additions you’ll find several new naturals such as labdanum absolute, orange flower absolute and violet leaf absolute - all among my favourite ingredients to use, though not cheap I’m afraid.

Speaking of cheap, that big reduction is for Centifolether - down from £52 for 100ml to just £22.  Also very good value is a new musk I’m offering for the first time that you don’t see about much called Zenolide: it’s a great material, as good as some of it’s better known brothers yet almost as cheap as Ethylene Brassylate so you can use it freely.  £17 for 100ml.

But if you want to find out what all the other new things are, you’ll just have to take a look at the lists :-)

The Quinolines

I thought it might be useful to do another in my occasional series of disambiguation posts about perfumery ingredients with easily confused names or equivalences.  This time I’m looking at a group of similar ingredients used to create an earthy, leather note in fragrances:

No quinolines in
Sticky Leather Sky

Isobutyl quinoline (CAS number 65442-31-1), of which there are several versions on the market all using that name and a version made by Givaudan called Pyralone and one made by Symrise called Isobutyl quinoline 54.

Butyl quinoline secondary - another Givaudan product name - designates a mixture of two isomers: CAS numbers 65442-31-1 and 67634-06-4, the second of which is 8-tert-butyl quinoline, which is not present in Pyralone.

Isobutyl quinoline (CAS number 68198-80-1) is another material produced by Symrise under the same name and, despite the name, is not equivalent with either of the Givaudan products.

Just as a matter of curiosity, I didn’t use any of the above materials to create the leather notes in Sticky Leather Sky: there are lots of alternative means of creating such notes, but that’s for another post.