Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

Lemongrass plantation - Malaysia I've always been a dreamer and an optimist. Time to move forward with the project I touched upon in my last blog. Backstory: I dropped the ball in September of 2008 when I was scheduling a lunch with someone from the biggest vetiver distillation company in Haiti. That week, and the week following, huge storms swept Haiti, causing horrific flooding and loss of life. I figured to just back off as she took care of business, and I just felt superfluous to the problems they/she were facing, and lost contact with her. As I wrote recently, I'm going to direct efforts into reforestation efforts in Haiti, as soon as I can connect with a local agency. They're impossible to contact this week, but I'll keep at it. I'm also going to recontact my distillation connection for several reasons. I feel terrible I just gave up when faced with the situation in 2008. I guess I suffer from PTSD from all the hurricanes we get here in Florida, and ...

  After the Haiti Quake: Heal the Earth, Heal the People photo source: http://linknzona.blogspot.com/2008/12/environmental-quality-and-natural.html The Natural Perfumer is Not an artist 100% of the time,  they're a caring person 100% of the time: For me, our art is linked with our responsibility to the environment and other people. The image above shows the stark reality of the deforestation of Haiti in contrast to its contiguous neighbor, the Dominican Republic, to the right (east). The first thing that came to my mind when the horrific quake hit was that the people of the cities of Haiti can't flee the city for refuge in the countryside, because their countryside is bare, eroded earth. When it rains, and it will soon, those hills turn into mudslicks, and mudslides follow. Haiti has been plagued by mudslides for decades due to the systematic deforestation of the countryside. Thousands of years of topsoil, created slowly by the breakdown of the underlying rock ha...

About 1.5grams of pricey, rare boronia absolute, just in from Tasmania, just spilled in my studio I posted about my Patchouli panties in 2008. This undergarment scenting occurred by accident when I put a washcloth that I had mopped up a minor patchouli essential oil spill with into the laundry with my undergarments. Due to a farktabulous spill I had about an hour ago when pouring the 2010 boronia absolute for the Natural Perfumers Guild buy, I'll now have a boronia boudoir. This was the biggest spill I've ever made, with one of the most expensive, rare aromatics in the world. We in the Guild are fortunate that the Tasmanian producer sells to us, as he had in 2009, since their supply is so low. They're just servicing their longterm corporate clients, but made an exception for the Guild, realizing that it is lovely to get some spread around amongst the artisan natural perfumers. About 25 Guild members are anxiously awaiting their boronia, and one is coming by this af...

The New Year - Two Thousand and Zen - and a Starry-Moon Full Swoon I've had my nose to the grindstone. There are so many projects, all with varied needs and timelines, I haven't had time to "keep up" with much that's going on. I do have my google alerts set to let me know when "Anya's Garden" pops up in the Internet, and I had to stop and pay attention in the past few days when one after another, alerts came in. I had no idea there was a "Best of the Best 2009" plan among perfume bloggers, but my goodness, am I the beneficiary of some lovely mentions by them! One after another they flowed: From the lovely Elena at Perfume Shrine blog: Best of Niche: Anya's Garden Starflower A gourmand with guts! Unusual combination, great lasting power for an all-naturals. Anya's Note: I was one of a number of niche perfumeries mentioned, but surely the tiniest microbusiness of all, so this knocked me out. From a devoted lover of Anya's Garden P...

This holiday my home is scented with the heady, floral, spicy beauty of white tuberoses. I just got a shipment in of several hundred flowers, and I now have trays filled with the vegetable shortening and scented beauties. I made several pomades "recharges" with this shortening last spring and summer, but I just wanted a bit more scent in the fat so this latest refreshing with flowers. I also had a tray worth left over for a student who stopped by, so she's going to get some more pomade going herself. Ah, the fragrance. It's giving me two beautiful experiences: once when I'm putting the flowers in the tray, and later on when I wash the fat with alcohol and create a usable product for my perfumery.

Distance Learning also available beginning February 2010 in addition to the two online study options at Anya's Garden Natural Perfumery Institute. Registration applications and tuition payments for the Basic Natural Perfumery Course that will launch the end of February, 2010 are now being accepted.. The website is being rebuilt with more features than before, and it will be faster and more interactive for the online student. The front pages of the course site have been posted with the new Syllabus, a Registration page, an informative Home Page, and Testimonials from former students. Started in 2007, Anya's Garden course is the first of its kind for natural perfumers. The online interactive aspect allows all the students to take part in the classes from their home base anywhere in the world. This feature allows the students to save money that might have been spent in traveling, while still enjoying the camaraderie of the other students and one-on-one contact with the instructor...

The next basic perfumery course offered by Anya's Garden Natural Perfumery Institute will commence in late February, 2010. The exact date will be announced at a later date. The revised syllabus and details on the course schedule will be available November 20, 2010. The homepage for Perfume Classes.com has been updated and the latest information for the newly-revised curriculum can be found there. There are now three options for study: Web-based: 1. An interactive, fast-paced course that is six-months long and 2. A self-paced option for those who wish to study on their own. Distance learning non-web-based: 3. Textbook and kit supplied, no website access Since the opening of the school in 2007, about one hundred students have enrolled, and dozens have received their certificate of completion. Since some students fell behind in their studies due to family, work or other issues, it was decided to open the self-paced option. Students can enroll at any time for that option, but the inte...

Elena at Perfume Shrine reviewed MoonDance and StarFlower from Anya's Garden Perfumes, and if you leave a comment, you will be entered in a drawing to win samples - click here to read and enter

With some chat going on following my blog yesterday quoting article showing the problems with government regulation in microbusinesses, especially businesses that produce items for our body, whether they be perfume, food, herbal medicine and the like, this great article Everything I Do is Illegal was sent to a busy herb list I'm on. He's a food producer - meat products, to be exact - and he's an intelligent voice calling for some common sense. Our country has turned into a corporate- and industrial- business machine, and the small businesses are being regulated out of business. Regarding the post yesterday, the most chat is going on in the herb list. Herbalists are traditionally plant gatherers and processors. They're also traditionally a bit apart from mainstream society, aside from those who have grown their businesses into huge corporations, such as the ones mentioned in the Cruel Stepmother and Good Father Who Will Not See article. Many of us are familiar with them...

The latest in the series of articles in English has been uploaded to Anya's Garden Perfumes, and in it Mr. Roudnitska shares his thoughts and philosophy on "Concerning the Circumstances Favorable to the Creation of an Original Perfume" from Perfumer and Flavorist Magazine April/May 1984. Just click the link above to view it and the four previous articles in PDF form for download. The next article is quite large at 48 pages. It will take me some time to scan it all, and I hope I figure out the way to create PDFs in bits and pieces so I can scan over time, not having to sit down for a marathon scanathon! If anyone can help me with the logistics, I'd appreciate it.

Natural Perfumers Guild President Anya McCoy is featured on The Scented Salamander website series: North American Originals:Perfumers on Fall & Winter. Anya's Garden Perfume's two new colder season scents, MoonDance and StarFlower are explained in Part Two From the Scented Salamander: American perfumery is as varied as its landscape. One of its most notable traits is the fact that in spite of the presence of giant corporations like Coty or Estée Lauder, there exists a strong breed, I am tempted to say, of independent perfumers who appear by contrast even more like the necessary missing pieces of a vast puzzle. And without them, one could argue, American perfumery would be forgetting the flip side of anonymous efficiency, large-scale organization and big business, that is, originality, primitivism, naïveté, a sense of community, intimacy, individualism and let us not forget, the can-do attitude. If we only had the big labels, we would still have rivers of perfume, but...

As many of you know, I have fought for years against the creeping corporate takeover of indie and microbusinesses. Just search on this blog for IFRA, EU, FDA Globalization Act and government. The future of our businesses is in immediate danger. I am horrified that several organizations that represent indie and microbusinesses are in lockstep with the FDA and tweeting and blogging about their 'victories" with legislators, either blinded or too blind to see the horrible demise in store for our businesses - they should be fighting the FDA, not kowtowing to it, giddy with "making progress". They're not, they're being fooled. Please everyone - don't be the frog in the pot of cool water who never feels the heat being turned up until it is too late and he's cooked. Read this following speech, given at the International Herb Symposium by Stephen Buhner and pass it around, and more importantly, ask those who are all puffed up and happy that the FDA and legisla...

This delicate and lovely bottle arrived in the mail yesterday, and yes, there is some scent in it and some grains and residue. The grains and residue coat the inside about 1.5 inches up the sides, roughly the same height as the label. The overall bottle is 6.25 inches tall. I have never seen a Fritzsche bottle with this design. The label reads: FRITZSCHE BROTHERS, Inc . Essences and Essential Oils ~ Fine Drugs and Chemical Preparations ~ Tonquin in Grains. Moisture More Than 15% . The next part really caught my attention: The bottle is clear at the top with heavy dark brown residue on the bottom. There is a little brown string around the top. Imagine my surprise when I saw this on Ebay, and further surprise I won it with a rather low bid, and there were only two other bidders. I got it for $11 and change and with shipping, it was under $20. Musk is now illegal because the collection of the pods required the killing of the musk deer. These small lovely animals were slaughtered b...

The third of six article in English by famed perfumer Edmond Roudnitska has been uploaded to Anya's Garden Perfumes website. Titled "The Novice and His Perfume Palette", it was published by Dragoco in 1982. In it you will find a methodology that I believe is still used in perfume classes at Givaudan, pioneered by Jean Carles and Roudnitska. If any perfume historian can corroborate this, I would be happy to publish the information. Both self-taught perfumers, Carles and Roudnitska pioneered a strict methodology to teach novice perfumers how to learn the scent/memory association. In the Dragodo article, Roudnitska strives to share his take on how the context of fragrance families helps the beginner learn both context and association. I have used a method like this since the beginning of my classes in natural perfumery. I devised forms to record the information gleaned from the study, and progressed on to the methodology I formulated to take the beginner step-by-step into th...