Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

This is a graphic collage I created for the launch of Fairchild, the first perfume in the Anya's Garden line. The image is meant to show the wild and exuberant nature of the perfume, where citrus and powerful tropical flowers mix with seaweed and clamshells - yes, toasted clamshells. The levels of drydown are many - some joke over a dozen according to their nose. It's such a strong perfume I can only wear it at night, because if I wear it during the day I become woozy, it's that narcotic and demands that much of your attention. Imagine my surprise when I checked back into the comments section on Perfume Shrine today and saw that both Helg of PS and Maria of the BitterGrace blog are asking I create some food that contains Fairchild. The blog topic was cooking with animal essences, so I suppose the ambergris, dosed generously in Fairchild, was the jumping-off point for the request. It did get me to thinking - perhaps a drop in vodka? A drop in some honey? It would certainly ...

A student in my online perfumery course stopped me short during our live chat the other day: she had no scent memory connections with the aromatics in the study kit supplied with the course. She's from Nigeria, and rose, jasmine, lemon, etc. - many of the common scents we know and associate with people or places in our past have no reference point for her. I'm just guessing here, but I suppose they just aren't used in the home and environment as they are here. I'll have to ask if there are any lemon-based dishes or lemon-accented food in Nigeria. I have a book on perfumes made for regions of Africa based on the travels of several French perfumers. Perhaps that will assist me in helping her. There are, of course, many aromatics produced for perfumery in Africa: rose geranium, jasmine and rose, frankincense, grapefruit, clove, vanilla, etc. Since we were in the middle of class, I didn't have time to question her in depth, but I did promise to look further into how to ...