There's no place like home for the holidays.

NPG Home for the Holidays: Mermade Magickal Arts EverGreen Incense 2013

November First, dear reader! We have reached November! First! I can now unabashedly run toward the winter holidays with open arms. FN1.

I love winter holidays. I love Thanksgiving and Solstice and Saturnalia and Christmas, and I'm sure I'd love Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, too, given the opportunity. November 1 to January 1 is always my most wonderful time of the year. Also, when I'm super lucky, there is SNOW!

My winter good mood got an early kick off this year when I received the following scentvitation from the Natural Perfumers Guild:

The holiday season means it’s cold outside and everyone is spending more time indoors, with the windows and doors closed.  It’s time to feature beautiful natural scents to highlight the festive spirit.  The Guild members are dedicated to using 100% natural aromatics, and for this season, members of the Natural Perfumers Guild created ambient fragrance for the home and office, using incense, candles, room sprays and wax melts. 

Eight Guild perfumers and associates have independently created lovely ambient scent products to celebrate “Home for the Holidays” 2012.  The natural scents work hand-in-hand with the idea of fragrant Christmas trees, boughs and wreaths fragrancing the homes and offices.

Now I ask you: who could say no to such an offer?


I received a beautiful an exceptionally generous package from Katlyn Breene of Mermade Magickal Arts, which included EverGreen Incense 2013, along with a beautiful electric incense burner, foiled paper, and a carved wooden incense server stick to use with it.  EverGreen is described as follows:

A rich Resin Incense Blend created to celebrate the Ancient Forest. The best of the woody, balsamic and green scents, it is a wonderful blend for the Winter months and seasonal celebrations. It has a base of resins and woods with notes of green fir, pine and cedar. Fresh and invigorating and filled with the scents of the wilderness, of tree resins and growing things. Burn this incense to let the forest in, and enliven your space with the spirit of the holidays.  

Contains: Hougary White Green and Black Frankincense, Copal Blanco, Pinion Pine Resin blended with Cedar tips (wild crafted), Himalyan Juniper, Grand Fir,  Fir Balsam and Western Cedar oil.

EverGreen smells like...evergreens? Ha! How succinct of me. Truly, though, it smells like the beautiful green trees I love among. The primary scent is the smell of dried pine needles and tree resin.  If someone made the floor of the forest into an incense, this would be that scent.  It has that peaty smell of layered greenery moldering and mulching and becoming the death that helps make new life. It has a gently medicinal quality with hints of good dry straw, like the smell of a pile of fresh hay piled onto a cart for a harvest hayride.

This scent is perfect for the winter holiday season because there is nothing commercially 'Christmas-y' about this scent.  It smells like the evergreen woods: dark, lovely, and deep.  I haven't had a chance to try the body incense yet, but I suspect it will be terrific.

In the electric burner provided, set at only a heat setting of 10, less than a teaspoon of EverGreen filled our entire two story house with beautiful scent in under fifteen minutes.  It's been a couple of hours now, and though the incense has been spent for about an hour and the burner has been off for almost two, the house still smells wonderful.

EverGreen is available for only $10.75, and is one of a number of fine quality incense blends available for equally reasonable prices, any of which would make an outstanding stocking stuffer.  While we 'fumies are constantly bombarded with pitches for matching perfumed candles and fragrant oils and reed diffusers, there is something to be said for a well made incense, a scent that is strong and beautiful and requires a little heat to bring it to life.

Also, I'd like to make a pitch for the electric burner. I have never had an electric burner. I have been using incense for probably about twenty years, and both the quality of scent and the method of burning is far superior to anything I've ever experienced.  If you like or use incense or resin, I really recommend getting an electric burner from Mermade Magickal Arts.  It is a beautiful, handcrafted item available for only $59.95, and would make an excellent gift for the scent lover in your life.

I am really grateful to Katlyn for introducing me to this option.

To read about the other NPG Home for the Holidays offerings, check out these other fine bloggers:
~ Ca Fleure Bon
~ Perfume Critic
~ Perfume Shrine
~ The Passionate Perfumista
~ That Smell

Other Natural Perfumers Guild members participating are:

Andrea Shanti of Holistic Body Therapy : Anita Casamento of Happy Herbs Soaps : Anya McCoy of Anya's Garden Perfumes : Elise Pearlstine of Belly Flowers Perfumes : JoAnne Bassett of JoAnne Bassett Perfumes

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FN1. Shut it, holiday haters. I don't want to hear a single word about how it is 'too early.' It is never too early for winter wonderland magic for me.

Brave New Scents: JoAnne Bassett's Enchant

A Natural Perfumers Guild Project

One of the two scents I am reviewing today for the Natural Perfumers Guild's Brave New Scents Project comes from JoAnne Bassett Perfumes. JoAnne wrote a lovely and reflective piece about her scent, which explained her process for creating the perfume. Enchant largely came together around the quote from Brave New World the project press release features:

I want God: holy basil, oud, champaca.
I want poetry: osmanthus.
I want danger: vetiver, patchouli.
I want freedom: orange essences, yuzu.
I want goodness: rose, jasmine.
I want sin: ambrette seed.

Other notes include: sandalwood, davana, pink pepper tree, high altitude lavender, galbanum, vanilla tincture.  The scent is "resting in organic jojoba."

So what does a combination of God, poetry, danger, freedom, goodness, and sin smell like?

Earthy and mossy, supple and strange, gentle and delicate, Enchant is a complex and beautiful scent. It is so...complicated. On me, there is an opening flood of basil, champaca, yuzu, and a sweet patchouli. The scent unfolds delightfully over time, but is difficult to pigeonhole within mainstream perfume labels. JoAnne herself wrote, "I am not sure what to classify this new perfume. Such diverse oils - from oud to incense to a floral gourmand. It is a temptress." I have to agree. It is sweet, it is green, it is warm, it is rooted, and yet it also has a fragile quality about it. It reminds me in some way of the beautiful smell of decaying fir needles, after the greenness of the fir aspect has settled behind the sweetness of transition.  What I find enchanting is that, where other scents might be these things in turn, JoAnne has made a scent that is somehow all of them at once, and simply....works.

JoAnne talks a lot about feeling the scent began with and was rooted in a kind of olfactory sacred space. I see that in this scent. When I smell Enchant, I think about the strength it takes to do yoga or Tai Chi. These kinds of movement, when done correctly, seem to flow effortlessly from one position to the next in an artful cascade of grounding and connected energy.
 However, if you're like me, you know that trying to do yoga or Tai Chi is really, really hard. It takes strength. It takes practice. It takes patience. You have to really listen to your body, understand what it is trying to tell you, and connect with a sense of inner calm and peace that on most days is elusive. It looks easy, but it is deceptive because learning to access that kind of bodily knowledge takes years of serious effort.

This scent has all the strength and sense of purpose that kind of movement. When  it is done correctly, it seems effortlessly in its execution. So does Enchant.  At first sniff, you might find yourself impressed by the tender quality of the rose, the smoothness of the vetiver, the airiness of the orange essences. Sniff again, and you see the strength, the focus, the energy hidden beneath the surface, guiding the endeavor with purpose and intention.

A beautiful scent, and not like anything else I've tried. A parfum oil, it lasts for hours.  At one point, I went to sleep with it on and found it still lingering eight hours later.  If you're feeling bored with the things you've been smelling, I'd suggest trying Enchant.    

And speaking of trying, JoAnne has graciously offered up a 1/4 oz French flacon of Enchant Parfum to one lucky reader! Winner will also get a specially made mixed Cd based on the theme of  Huxley's Brave New World. Please post here by 12:01 AM Friday, October 7, 2011 PST and tell me what scents you associate with the sacred or divine? 

For more wonderful scents and reviews, see the list of participating perfumers and bloggers in the Brave New Scents Project here:
_____________________________

~ Brave New Scents ~ 
 The Perfumers:
Rohanna Goodwin Smith of Ascent Natural Perfumes
Anya McCoy of  Anya's Garden
Jane Cate of Wing & a Prayer Perfumes
Elise Pearlstine of Bellyflowers Botanical Perfumes
Christi Meshell of Matriarch
JoAnne Bassett of JoAnne Bassett Perfumes
Adam Gottshalk of Lord's Jester
Liz Cook of One Seed Perfume
Ambrosia Jones of Perfume by Nature
Charna Ethier of Providence Perfume

The Bloggers:
All I Am A Redhead
Ca Fleure Bon (several writers here will be reviewing all the submissions)
Perfume Critic
Perfume Shrine
The Examiner

Yoga Image from Yoga Tours Worldwide.

Brave New Scents: Bellyflowers Botanical Perfumes ambre alchemé

A Natural Perfumers Guild Project

Remember how I was talking about trying to live by the axiom of doing one thing, everyday, that scares me? Doing these events is always a little scary. The perfumes involved work very hard on their craft, and they take their work seriously. For many of them, its not just something they are committed to as a form of expressing sometimes profound beauty in an often challenging and ugly world, but it also their livelihood.

When someone created something and puts it out on the world, that's an act of bravery. For those of you who don't know how these projects work, let me tell you now that it often involves having someone you've never met put something they have created in your care. For me, this sometimes comes from a perfumer I've never experienced before. To be asked to sit in judgment of a creative endeavor intended to reside within the marketplace, and to be one of the first of a handful of people to do so, is a real and serious responsibility. It requires a lot of things, but mostly I think it requires openness and honesty. To put it bluntly, I am always touched by their trust in my judgment, and I do my best not to frack it up.

The second scent I am reviewing today for the Natural Perfumers Guild's Brave New Scents Project comes from Elise Pearlstine's Bellyflowers Botanical Perfumes. Ambre alchemé is my first scent from Bellyflower, and Elise describes in her brief as follows:

Ambre alchemé is a sheer, golden floral with a sweet musky base. It takes its name from the old term for ambergris, ambre gris and from alchemy. Alchemy is an ancient practice harking back to distillation and early chemistry. The top notes of ambre alchemé are slightly sharp and lifting but mellow together to lift directly out of the bottle with a lovely mellow green scent. They transition to and left the heart note of golden boronia and aglaia blended with jasmine. Slight touches of black curreant absolute and wild rose keep the florals just a bit earthy and spicy. The perfume is anchored by ambergris absolute in a tincture. Ambergris is an ancient scented essence and is generally infused in oil or tinctured in alcohol. The absolute is solvent extracted using a two stage phytonic extraction which greatly concentrates the armoatic components of the raw materials. Ambergris is paired with two kinds of sandalwood, Vanuatu and Australian. The base is sweeted and extended with orris root and honey.

Top notes: Essential oils of Lime essence, Green Pepper, White Cognac, and Tagetes.
Middle notes: Absolutes of Aglaia, Boronia, Black Currant Bud, Wild Rose, and Jasmine Grandiflorum.
Base notes: Opoponax absolute, Orris Root CO2, Australian Sandalwood essential oil, Vanuatu Sandalwood essential oil, Honey absolute and Ambergris absolute tincture.

Proof that beauty can be found
in the most unexpected places...

This is a terrific scent. If  JoAnne Bassett's Enchant is a calming and peaceful scent you want to mediate with, then ambre alchemé is a scent full of vigor and pep. Immediately on application, the scent is full of green pepper but it blends quickly into the middle notes.

Jasmine is wonderful and clearly the heart of the scent, but for me, the beauty is all about the base! I am simply gaga for the ambergris in this, which let me tell you, is not something I ever thought I would say, and a big score in my book for using the natural ambergris scent instead of the synthetic substitute.

The base here is so...dirty! Really! It's one of those scents that makes me think someone will smell it on me and then give me a quirked eyebrow and a thrilled "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr." For the entire first hour of my first application, I kept sniffing at my wrist and grinning manically, as though I alone were enjoying a deliciously bawdy joke.

The top is, as advertised, slightly sharp on me, and I get a strong black currant note from the middle for the first half hour or so before it softens into the background a bit. For all those foodie notes, the base takes this far away from foodie in my book and lands it delightfully in a spices and edible florals area. If you put a dish in front of me and this scent steamed up, I'd anticipate an exotic and rich taste. It's a plush scent. I mean that in the way that velvet is plush; the scent smells the way a sensual textured fabric feels pressed between your fingers. If you brought a newly discovered plant to me smelling of ambre alchemé and brushed the petals of its bloom against my lips and cheek, I'd expect it to be a lush and tingling caress.

I'm going to warn you right now -- this scent isn't going to be for everyone.  Neko Case has a line in a song off her Blacklisted album that talks of being "[s]afe from all the horrors in your stinging velvet arms." Stinging velvet arms is a good way to describe ambre alchemé.  It is not a scent that would go gently into a good night.  On me it has moderate sillage and lasts a long time (eight hours+). I would describe it as a daring scent, a bold scent.  It would work for anyone bold enough to try it -- male, female, animal, vegetable, or mineral.  It's a strange scent, though, and you may find it challenging if you pick it up thinking you're getting a traditional floral.

Luckily for me, I'm not much of a traditionalist.

Elise has also generously offered up a a 15 ml sprayer of the eau de parfum of ambre alchemé to one lucky reader, and I'm throwing in a copy my Brave New World-inspired mixed CD. Please post here by 12:01 AM Friday, October 7, 2011 PST and tell me what scents do associate  with your sense of touch? What smells to you like touching velvet or silk, linen or leather? Since this is a hard one, alternately, tell me what new tv/music/film I'm missing.

For more wonderful scents and reviews, see the list of participating perfumers and bloggers in the Brave New Scents Project here:

_____________________________

~ Brave New Scents ~
The Perfumers:
Rohanna Goodwin Smith of Ascent Natural Perfumes
Anya McCoy of  Anya's Garden
Jane Cate of Wing & a Prayer Perfumes
Elise Pearlstine of Bellyflowers Botanical Perfumes
Christi Meshell of Matriarch
JoAnne Bassett of JoAnne Bassett Perfumes
Adam Gottshalk of Lord's Jester
Liz Cook of One Seed Perfume
Ambrosia Jones of Perfume by Nature
Charna Ethier of Providence Perfume

The Bloggers:
All I Am A Redhead
Ca Fleure Bon (several writers here will be reviewing all the submissions)
Perfume Critic
Perfume Shrine
The Examiner

Photo of Ambergris from Gordon M. Grant/The New York Times.

Brave New Scents: A Natural Perfumers Guild Project

"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world!
That has such people in it!"
~ Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I 

"I want God, I want poetry,
I want danger, I want freedom,
I want goodness, I want sin."
~ Adlus Huxley's Brave New World

A few months ago I was approached by the Natural Perfumers Guild and asked if I wanted to participate in a perfume project focused on the theme of "Brave New Scents," a play on themes from Aldus Huxley's frequently banned novel, Brave New World. FN1.

Intrigued, I did what I always do when someone asks if I want to try something new and it doesn't involve (a) heights (b) drowning (c) car accidents. FN2.

I said yes.

When I got the amazing package in the mail, I read through the materials with interest. The Vision of the project, as stated in the press release, is as follows:

The new avalanche of glorious aromatics, including the ones we create ourselves, deserve acknowledgement as perfume materials as the Outlaw Perfumers create Brave New Scents. The Outlaw Perfumers of the Natural Perfumers Guild are staking out more aromatic territory, moving into the 21st Century with an attitude of conquering new frontiers. The Guild perfumers are focusing on capturing the beauty of aromatics introduced after the year 2000, or that have been made available to us via the Internet after 2000, or that we created ourselves. 

In the Brave New Scents project, the Guild perfumers are likened to the members of Huxley’s novel. Like the starring characters in the novel, these brave new perfumers go against the grain and out of bounds, thwarting the ever-expanding regulatory nanny state in order to showcase aromatic extraction feats and use 21st Century aromatics that are not necessarily condoned in mainstream perfume society.

That is some fiery language, people. The phrase "ever-explanding regulatory nanny state" has more political hot buttons in it than I can shake a tree branch at.

I will, instead, talk about Brave New World in the context of something I love though -- music. Yes, that's right, your intrepid sniffa has a mix for every theme, including this one. A song that didn't make the list, though, and I wish it had now, is Baz Luhrmann's "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)."

  

What isn't common knowledge is that the text was written in 1997 by a Chiacgo Tribune columnist, Mary Schmich, entitled "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young."

I cannot tell you how much this advice has served me in intervening years. I think of these words all.the.time. Seriously. All the time. A few things, in fact, I thought about this week are:

• Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements. FN3. 
• The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday. FN4. 
• You are not as fat as you imagine. FN5. 
• Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. FN6. 
• Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. FN7. 
• Do one thing every day that scares you. FN8.

These are  some axioms I try to live by. On another day, this could have been a different list from the piece, but the list has turned out to be exceptionally useful for a young woman more or less making her way through the world on her own.

 I remember driving, at one point, in a rental car across the west Texas desert as the sun was setting heading for Santa Fe, New Mexico to check out a college I'd been admitted. I had the windows rolled down and this song playing loudly, nothing but the still wind, my loud voice, the broad earth and empty sky. It was one of those moments when getting the hell out of dodge seemed like something I could actually reach out and touch. It was a moment pregnant with possibility. I'd decided on a whim to go. I'd taken off after work with only the barest of notice to my roommates, and no word at all to any authority figure.

I was twenty-one. I was on my own. I was about to decide which one of the new and exotic colleges I'd been accepted to would be my new home.  I could do what I wanted, go where I wanted, be who I wanted. After years of pain and fear and loss...

...I was free.

Freedom is a scary and threatening thing. In the absence of rules, you have to learn to make your own. You draw your own lines in the sands of time around who you are and who you will be. You have to decide which lines you'll let shift, and which ones your stand firm on. You have to choose what you truly value, how you will spend this one life. Will you wear sunscreen? Will you dance, will you sing?

I reread Brave New World in anticipation of this project. It has a lot of complicated imagery, a lot of mixed messages. You could come away from it with a lot of different thoughts about what is and is not appropriate, what values are or are not necessary to a free or brave or civilized world.

For me: I choose, poetry, freedom, goodness, sin. I choose art and light and adventure. I choose love and laughter and even sometimes pain and sadness, because I don't want to be numb to the suffering of others.

I choose the fullness of life.

And with that in mind I bring you the two scents from the Brave New Scents Project.

"In spite of their sadness -- because of it, even; for their sadness was the symptom of their love for one another -- the three young men were happy." 
~ Aldus Huxley's Brave New World

____________________________________

~ Brave New Scents ~
The Perfumers:
Rohanna Goodwin Smith of Ascent Natural Perfumes
Anya McCoy of  Anya's Garden
Jane Cate of Wing & a Prayer Perfumes
Elise Pearlstine of Bellyflowers Botanical Perfumes
Christi Meshell of Matriarch
JoAnne Bassett of JoAnne Bassett Perfumes
Adam Gottshalk of Lord's Jester
Liz Cook of One Seed Perfume
Ambrosia Jones of Perfume by Nature
Charna Ethier of Providence Perfume

The Bloggers:
All I Am A Redhead
Ca Fleure Bon (several writers here will be reviewing all the submissions)
Perfume Critic
Perfume Shrine
The Examiner

_____________________________________
FN1. My three phobias. The worst way I can imagine dying? Driving off a bridge into open water. Makes road tripping with me along the PCH super fun for David, let me tell you. We can only drive north, with me in the passenger seat. I'm working on the heights issue, but it's slow going. It's not so much that I am trying to overcome it as that I'm trying to determine the exact contours of my fear. Glass bottom helicopter tour? Yes. Plane turbulence? No. Rollercoaster? Yes. Ferris Wheel? No. The experimentation continues...

FN2. Today is the last day of Banned Book week. Remember to give someone you love your favorite banned book or donate a copy to a local library.

FN3. Done.
FN4. This is one of my anti-"freak out" mantras.
FN5. Oh, body image issues, I loathe you.
FN6. I need to do more of this.
FN7. Another anti-"freak out" mantra.
FN8. I try, very hard, to do this. Next up? Sensory deprivation float. Why? Groupon.