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 :-)

New Standard Packaging and luxury gift option

Art Deco Boxes for Pell Wall

I’m pleased to report that, just in time for Christmas, our new standard packaging is now in use: 30ml and 100ml bottles will be shipped in these elegant Art Deco style, glossy black boxes as standard from now on.

Luxury Gift Presentation

If you’re looking for something even more luxurious for a special gift, we are also offering almost all the range in a tall 100ml bottle, with a magnificent mahogany-finish box: it comes in a protective outer box and can be further gift-boxed free of charge if you order before 20th December.

Christmas Room Sprays

Christmas Room Spray by Pell Wall

After a little consultation on the Pell Wall Facebook page I’ve decided to make some of these Christmas Room sprays for sale.  It’s a strictly limited edition: only one batch will be made this year and it’s just enough to fill the remaining bottles I have of this style (now with gold sprays and lids as all the black ones have sold out):

Each bottle contains 100ml and they are £22 each

Richly scented with frankincense, myrrh, orange, tangerine, cinnamon and spice for that classic festive effect that everyone loves.


It’s an alcohol based spray so it will keep happily until next Christmas if you don’t use it all up this year but it’s not intended for use on the skin and mustn’t be sprayed near naked flames.

Christmas Room Scent
Gift Box by Pell Wall

If you want to give it as a gift I can also package one up in a large gift box (big enough to take a wine bottle) along with some pine-cone based potpourri in a matching scent for an extra fiver:

 £27 - Gift boxed

The box is strong, with a magnetic closure on the lid and heavy cord carrying handle so it can be re-used as well.

Home Fragrances by Pell Wall

Peaches & Cream

Room Spray and Reed Diffuser

Fine, fruity and luxuriously warm

The new home fragrance from Pell Wall, available in room spray and reed diffuser forms; this is a lovely fresh, fruity and exotic fragrance.  Dominated by peach there are elements of raspberry, mango and pineapple here too all backed up with creamy, warm and slightly spicy elements that will refresh and soothe.

In reed diffuser form it will provide a gentle, clear background scent for 2 months filling a large room with steady fragrance. As a room spray you can use it to cover malodours quickly and it will still be detectable hours later.

Woodsmoke

Room Spray*

Ruggedly unusual, perfect if you can’t have an open fire

A rich, sweet, smoky scent evoking the scented smoke of aromatic woods burning outdoors and drifting in through open windows on a summer’s evening.  The woody smoke note is dominant but there is a touch of incense and a fresh-air note in the background too that makes this fragrance surprisingly versatile.

If you have a smoker in the house or a smoking area just outside, this is ideal to cover the stale tobacco odour.

*also safe to spray on skin

Grapefruit & Cedarwood

Room Spray and Reed Diffuser

Fresh, sophisticated citrus and cedar

This is bright, refreshing scent with the sharpness of the grapefruit offset by the softness of cedar and a gentle ambered background.

Very sophisticated and luxurious it is ideal for hallways and main living areas of the house.

In reed diffuser form it’s an upmarket background scent that isn’t too forward. The room spray gives it a more immediate lift and can also be used to effectively cover off-odours whenever necessary.

Minted Mornings

Room Spray

Clean bright & minty with a fresh-air background

A classy room fragrance designed to freshen up in the morning, giving you a light minty-fresh lift at the start of the day.

When you return later in the day though, the mintiness might no-longer be desirable - fear not, it will have faded away leaving a soft, warm, mellow scent to welcome you home.

The top-notes include several varieties of mint, tea-tree and juniper to give you that bright start in the morning.

Hidden beneath these, waiting for later are frankincense, sandalwood and light musk.

KitchIncense

Room Spray

Sharp lemon & lime with lasting incense

Specially designed to cut through heavy cooking smells this is the perfect freshener to keep on hand in the kitchen to freshen up after a fishy fry-up or clean the air after a curry.

It’s made extra-strong and very sharp to give you an immediate effect but with a nice sophisticated incense note that lingers long after.

Lavender Garden

Room Spray and Reed Diffuser

Clean, calm, cool and collected 

A very fresh, soothing and pervasive scent, pefectly suited to bedrooms and bathrooms.

The scent features two varieties of lavender, thyme, rose, bergamot and a hint of vanilla.

Sticky Leather Sky

The new fragrance that was developed as part of the Penning Perfumes project and unveiled at the Birmingham event last night can now be revealed.

Luckily Claire and I had similar images in mind

First I want to share with you the poem that was the inspiration for the fragrance, reproduced here with kind permission of the poet.

Listening to Charles Ives

by Claire Trévien

The street vainly imitates a theatre,

dropped pennies and reflectors footlight my walk

the rumble of a crowd gathers and storms.

Beats rain down and hide in the gutter,

rivulets form around the clutter

of the pavement’s percussion orchestra.

Hush.

Sticky leather sky.

The air vibrates still

through drum-buildings.

I think of us listening to Charles Ives.

You heard cacophony, I heard the silence

after the tempest, when the bells

had ceased, but their ripples

reached to our seats like

the promise of a tomorrow.

Listening to Charles Ives appears in the collection Low Tide Lottery by Claire Trévien.

The fragrance takes its name from that striking central line - Sticky Leather Sky - it conjures such a clear image.  The fragrance was well received by the audience at the event so I'm planning on bringing it into the range as the first leathery fragrance from Pell Wall.  It will be available soon at Big Reds House, the art gallery in Whitchurch, Shropshire that showcases most of my range as well as some one-off creations alongside lots of other fascinating art work.  There will also be some for sale at the Craft Cafe in Newport Shropshire alongside all the standard Pell Wall range.

Sticky Leather Sky

Sticky Leather Sky opens with light, bright, familiar notes of bergamot that shade into fresh clean air heavy with damp.

There is a slightly metallic edge and a light woody background representing the orchestra while jasmine and orris recall the opulence of the Paris Opera.

The strong leather accord comes into play quickly and lasts and lasts providing a dominant, persistent theme.

The top notes and the leather base are a little uncomfortable with each other, just like the couple at the concert, who are discovering how different they are.

Can they stay together?

Penning Perfumes, Birmingham

I wrote previously about the Penning Perfumes project but now the moment of revelation is fast approaching!

The fragrance I created in response to a poem will be officially released for the first time at the Penning Perfumes event on the evening of Wednesday 6th February 2013 at Le Truc in Birmingham's Ladywell Walk.

I will be there, so will the poet Claire Trévien and we'll be talking about the experience - Claire will be experiencing the fragrance designed from her poem for the first time and giving her reactions live (gulp!) and I'll be talking about how I got from one to the other.  Everyone will get to smell the new creation and if it turns out you love it I'll even have a few bottles for sale.  If you don't already have one you can buy tickets now for this and future events.  Speaking of future events I see that my friend and mentor John Stephen will be creating a perfume live on stage on 21st Feb in Oxford - brave man!

I'm looking forward to a fascinating evening in Birmingham.  Ahead of the event I was asked some questions about the experience - these appear on the Penning Perfumes tumblr page, but I'm also repeating them below.

It looks as if I'm working on something in this picture - but what?

1. As a perfumer, is poetry something you’ve used to stimulate new fragrance ideas before?

There have been a lot of different sources of inspiration and different kinds of brief, but this is the first time I’ve had a poem to work from. More usual for me would be a cocktail, plant or individual scent note, sometimes just a name. Or there could be a more prosaic, conventional kind of perfume brief. This has been a great experience and has made me look back at the poetry I wrote in my youth (I don’t write much any more) to see if there might be a fragrance hiding in there somewhere …

2. What has been your experience of turning a poem into a scent for Penning Perfumes - anything you weren’t expecting, or that was easier/more difficult than you expected?

I suppose the thing that was most unexpected was how easy it was - I don’t mean to say that the perfume came together first go - no such luck! But I expected to struggle to find a match between poetic phrases and imagery and scent notes, but in fact I found they came together very quickly and within an hour or so of first reading the poem I knew roughly the direction I wanted to take the fragrance. I did cheat a bit by exchanging emails with the poet though and that caused a couple of course corrections and added dimensions to the work that I’d not seen before. One of the things that fascinated me was that the poem was itself inspired by a performance of music - so three forms of artistic expression are layered in my perfume only one of which is mine.

3. Which is the one commercially available perfume that you’d love to see turned into a poem and why?

I’d love to see Terre d’Hermes turned into a poem partly because it’s one of my favourite scents and designed by a perfumer I admire very much but also because it’s such an abstract, minimalist creation I’d love to see how it might manifest in verse.

Penning Perfumes

Today I've been working on my contribution to the latest Penning Perfumes project: a splendid idea pioneered by Odette Toilette and Claire Trévien to combine two art forms.  Poets are given perfumes from which to take inspiration and Perfumers are given poems.

The poem I'm responding to is by Claire Trévien herself and I've spent some time today in correspondence with her to better understand the work I'm responding to.  It's called Listening to Charles Ives, which is enough to tell you that the poem takes some of it's inspiration from music - so my perfume will be a third generation derivation of art in a third different medium: I hope I can live up to the earlier works!

A Jubilee Pageant, 1953 and the Coronation

On July 12th 2012 Her Majesty the Queen will be attending a Pageant in Shropshire in honour of her 60 years as Queen.  Pell Wall Perfumes will be there too and it seemed the perfect occasion to release a fragrance I've had in development for a while.

1953 - a limited edition fragrance by Pell Wall Perfumes

I'm calling it '1953' - after the year of the coronation - that's because among many special things involved in the ascension to the throne of a British monarch perhaps the most special is the anointing - according to Wikipedia British Monarchs are the only ones still anointed as part of the ceremony and it is done with a specially made Coronation Oil - the ingredients for which have been similar since the 12th Century and include ambergris, civet, rose, jasmine, orange flower, cinnamon, musk and benzoin.

1953 by Pell Wall Perfumes includes all those fine ingredients (though for ethical reasons I'm using synthetic substitutes for civet and musk) in the very best qualities to be found.   I've then adapted them into a very long-lasting, easy to wear and highly concentrated Parfum for the 21st Century, presented in a diamond-clear heart-shaped flask, complete with it's own crystal stand.

Newly filled bottles awaiting boxing

Just twelve of these magnificent gifts will be made for sale on the day of release, with further small releases planned including Christmas 2012, the anniversary of the coronation itself on 2nd June 2013 and finally for Christmas 2013 - after that 1953 will be available only to special order.

St George’s Day Fragrance

It’s the day after St George’s Day so I have a year to gather ideas, build a design and make it ready to release a fragrance for St George’s Day 2013.

This idea started when a friend of mine bemoaned the fact that St George’s Day isn’t much celebrated and wondered whether corporate sponsorship might change that . . . I rather flippantly asked if, failing a big corporation, a tiny one-man firm would do.

picture via Wikimedia Commons

Soon we got to wondering what a dragon might smell like at which point I thought the discussion belonged here and made this post.

Dragon Family - Varna

Ideas here please for what should go into a fragrance fit to celebrate England’s national saint?