"Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is."

SweetCrisis

Elbert Hubbard

One of the things I like to do on my writerly blog is keep a to-do list. I fell out of the habit for a while, but now I've started again, I'm going to keep one here as well. It's a great way for me to keep track of everything I'm doing in my various walks of life and (hopefully) it gives you guys an insight into what's going on, what's coming up, and why some things may be taking a back seat to others. As indicated above, I'm not just a perfumier; I'm also a starving writer and full-time PA (and a cat-servant and snake-keeper). To-do lists are pretty much essential to me if I'm going to do anything other than sleep all day.

So, without further to-do (sorry), here's this week's list.

Perfume Stuff

Finalise Halloween perfumes - done! And they're available for sale too!

Finalise Autumn/Winter solid perfumes - the scents are ready; I just need to make some up and take photos. Hoping to get that done this week. I was aiming to have them in stock in September, but between family weddings, book edits, and perfume orders, I just ran out of time!

Brainstorm essential oils-only line - this is on the back-burner as I'm not planning to launch the line until 2014. But then again, 2014 isn't that far away anymore...

Brainstorm Spring/Summer solid perfumes - already started. It's not as fun as brainstorming the Autumn/Winter range was yet, but that's probably because Spring feels so far away right now.

Make-over packaging - I've sent some new sample-sized vials to willing guinea pigs to make sure they travel well/don't leak/don't smash in transit. If the feedback is good, I'll be switching from wandcaps to roll-on sample vials this month. The next thing I want to do is get 10ml rollette bottles in stock, hopefully before Christmas.

Christmas scents - now that the Halloween scents are out, it's time to start thinking about the next seasonal batch. I'm doing a ton of research into Christmas and solstice traditions from around the world and throughout history to find some really unique twists on the theme. Stay tuned!

Other Stuff

Last weekend I signed up for a distance-learning aromatherapy course. It's one of those "go at your

Praisaeng

own pace" things, which is great in light of everything else I have to do! I'm really excited about starting and getting some formal training in a subject I've been fascinated by for such a long time. I'm also keen to see how it informs my perfume-making adventures in the future. It may also pave the way for an escape from the Dreaded Day Job *crosses crossables*

So that's the state of things right now. I am planning to send out a newsletter shortly and will aim to make those a quarterly event. If you haven't signed up, you can do so here for news, events, and cute baby animal pictures!

"Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon"

Silver - Walter de la Mare

Is it too early to be thinking about 2014? I always feel that once you hit September, the rest of the year is as good as done. Autumn rolls quickly into Winter and Winter lasts forever. Sure, there's Christmas, but Christmas is more about anticipation than anything else for me, and once Christmas Day is over everything feels a little sad and worn out. So between Halloween and Spring there seems to be this vast stretch of "blargh." And you've got to fill it with something, so it may as well be something creative and fantastical, right? Right.

So, early or not, I am thinking about 2014. And one of the first things I want to do in 2014 is release a line of essential oil/absolute only perfumes. I love the scope and craziness that fragrance oils gives me (gunpowder perfume, anyone?), but the challenge of working with just essential oils and absolutes is very alluring. Not that there's any less variety, certainly. I recently acquired a butter CO2 extract, for example - completely natural and completely ridiculous. But there's no denying I have to think harder with EO-only scents. Oh, I want make something that smells like cake? Put down that red velvet fragrance and step away from the buttercream!

Phiseksit

Right now I'm gathering ideas for the new line and I'm finding my attention being drawn in a very particular direction. Namely, skywards. All my ideas so far have been inspired by cosmic phenomena and heavenly bodies. Black holes, the Northern lights, solar flares, eclipses...They're all playing on my mind. Maybe it's because when you're thinking all-natural, it makes sense to take inspiration from Nature (sadly, red velvet cake is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon).

Whatever the reason, I think my first batch of all-naturals are going to be cosmically-inclined, and that's an excuse to look at pretty pictures of Saturn's moons and think up whimsical names like Black Hole Waltz and Enceladus. And of course, there's the mythological aspect of moon and planet names to throw in the inspiration bank.

What I'm most looking forward to with this range is taking some of my rarer and lesser-used oils and giving them a whirl. I have plans for a rose/mint blend that I have high hopes for. I have a few attars and absolutes that I've yet to try (not to mention a wishlist a mile long of new ones to buy...) and I'm looking forward to playing around and seeing what I can come up with. When I first started making perfumes, I only used essential oils and there are plenty of experiments (both successful and disastrous) that I'm eager to re-visit now I have more experience (I will make that patchouli-clary sage mix work, dammit).

At the moment I really am in the early stages of planning this range, but I do like the idea of themed ranges,

prozac1

exploring a variety of different subjects. If I'm happy with this first line (and if you guys are too!), you can look forward to all-natural perfumes inspired by mythical creatures, historical figures, and a whole host of other natural sources.

But for now, I'm sticking with space. Moonlight, red dwarfs, supernovas, and dark matter. Any excuse to watch Professor Brian Cox documentaries, basically *cough*

"Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not."

I love a good B-movie. The lurid Technicolour, the hammy acting, the questionable dialogue...It's perfectly silly entertainment and the perfect inspiration for Common Brimstone's first Halloween. All year long I've been wracking my brain for themes and ideas for Halloween perfumes and B-movies is It, my friends. I picked five classics and I made 'em into perfumes, and come October 1st, you'll be able to make them your own.

There's a special reason why I've wanted to do something big and fancy for Halloween. Of course there's the obvious reason - Halloween is fun and full of folklore, magic, and creativity - three of my favourite things! And since I'm apparently too old for Trick or Treating anymore, I have to get involved somewhere. The less obvious reason is a bit more personal.

Last October my dad passed away very unexpectedly of heart failure. One of the reasons I opened

Common Brimstone is February this year is because that's his birthday and I wanted to do something positive to mark the occasion, rather than dwell on what I'd lost. I'd like to do the same in October.

So here's the deal. Five limited edition B-movie scents, available between 1st-31st October. They will be a tiny bit pricier than my regular catalogue because I will be donating all the profits to the British Heart Foundation in my dad's memory.

I am always extremely reluctant to tell people where to spend their money - that's really none of my business. But if you have been considering buying perfume from me, I would love it if you made it one of my B-movie perfumes this October. Not only will you get getting a limited edition never-to-be-seen-again one of a kind scent, but you'll be contributing to a great cause that's close to my heart.

Oh, what's that? You want to hear more about these fabulous fragrances? Well, if you follow me on Tumblr (and if not, why not?!), you'll have seen the research I was doing not that long ago (and by "research" I mean "looking at pretty pictures") and might have some ideas. If not, let me give you a sneak peek...

The Raven - black as night with an edge of old feathers

The Black Cat - sultry and alluring

Zombies on Broadway - a surprisingly exotic concoction

The Wasp Woman - sweet, but not without her sting!

The Devil's Daughter - sensual and dark

Excited? I am.

"Imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering." - Brenda Ueland

Timeless Photography

So my brother got married this Saturday just gone (congratulations to them!) and on Monday I took a day off my day-job to catch up on the perfume orders that got backlogged due to wedding prep. And then I started on a project I've been excited about since I decided to open Common Brimstone in the first place.

Solid perfumes!

I've been obsessed with perfumes for well over a decade now, but the moment I moved from "I like wearing this stuff" to "I want to make this stuff!" was when I found this post on Crunchy Betty's website. It was a pretty major revelation to me that making perfume might be that easy - I'd viewed it as this arcane alchemical process that was far beyond my reach. But no. Turns out it's really as easy as beeswax and oils. So I rushed to the internet and bought a few bars of beeswax, some lip balm tins and four or five bottles of essential oil (I remember saying those four or five bottles would give me plenty of scope and variety...Now I have well over 200 bottles of fragrance and essential oils and I can't help looking back at Past Me and smiling fondly at my naivety).

And I made so many solid perfumes. So many. So many I ended up giving a lot away because I ran out of storage room. I was driving my fiance mad by turning the kitchen into a wax-and-oil smeared mess every night of the week. I loved it. It was like witchcraft. Just add a few drops of rose to a few drops of lime and vetiver, and voila. Magic. And once I got the confidence to start making perfumes and found that other people liked what I was making, moving onto perfume oils was inevitable. And here we are.

So why didn't I launch the shop with solid perfumes? Mostly because I felt oils would be more popular and offered me more room to experiment with blends. My experience with solid perfumes is that you can really only use up to four different oils before you lose the clarity of the scent - any more and the fragrance gets a little muddy. So I didn't want to just offer solid versions of my perfume oils. I didn't want to start adding solid perfumes to my catalogue until I was sure I was making the best ones I possibly could.

num_skyman

And that brings me to this Monday when I finally had time to do what I wanted: create a seasonal range of solid perfumes, inspired by the autumn and winter. I talked last week about how inspiring I find this time of year: all those gorgeous colours, all that homely comfort food...It all seemed like the perfect starting point for a collection of warm, cosy, simple scents in solid form.

I've been gathering ideas for months and it was really satisfying to start working on those blends. Right now I've got ten very different blends aging away in my dark box, and this weekend I'll do some final tinkering before I make them into actual solid perfumes for testing. Fingers crossed, that means you'll be able to buy my Autumn/Winter range at Etsy and Folksy by the end of September. And then I can start thinking about the Spring/Summer range!

So what will you be getting that you can't get with my perfume oils? Well, there's no risk of leaks or broken bottles for one thing. I love the portability of solid perfumes and tend to have one tucked away everywhere for emergencies - in my bag and in my desk at work especially (that's also where I keep my emergency tea stash). I'll be using vegan-friendly soy wax, blended with creamy shea butter and the same skin-loving sweet almond oil I use in my perfume oils. And if you want some hints at the kind of scents I'll be offering, how does Caramel Macchiato sound? Or Winter Sun? Or Autumn Rose, Haunted Heart, or Fireflies?

My babies!

Yeah, I think they sound good too ^_^

"“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it...

...and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” - George Eliot

There is something about the summer's end and the beginning of the autumn that puts me in a more creative mood. I think it's because the mental image I have of autumn is so beautiful and romantic, I can't help but feel inspired. In my head, autumn looks like this:

Ebgeni Dinev

But in reality, in Cambridge at least, autumn is really like this:

Pakorn

You can see it's not really the same, but every year I keep hoping I'll miraculously get a gorgeous New England autumn and pumpkin-flavoured treats will magically appear everywhere.

Anyway. In the mean time, I'm working on some beautiful autumnal fragrances to try to evoke the mood, if not the weather, I expect at this time of year. I've already got some lush, warm perfumes in the shop that are perfect for the change of seasons, like Abhaile, Habondia, and Oshun, and once my latest batch of fragrance oils arrives you can expect to hear me rave excitedly about sticky toffee and buttered pecan scents. Nothing says "autumn" to me more than good foodie and cosy spice blends when it comes to perfume. And pumpkin, of course. There has to be pumpkin. And mulberry. And blackcurrant. Possibly all together.

Arvind Balaraman

And there will be solid perfumes too! I've been wanting to add solid perfumes to the shop since I opened, but it's taken me a while to decide exactly what I want to do and how. I'll talk more about those next week (yes, I am aiming to blog more often, so may as well set the deadline now), but my launch range will be created with autumn and winter in mind, so look out for dark, delicious, intriguing and unusual (and vegan-friendly!) solid perfumes in the very near future.

The other awesome thing about this time of year is Halloween, of course. Again, my mental image of Halloween is never quite matched by the reality - we've had no trick-or-treaters for two years! :( - but I can at least watch terrible b-movies 24-hours a day if I want to.

And I can make terrible b-movie perfumes! (Well, they won't be terrible. They'll be amazing! But they'll be inspired by terrible b-movies). Again, this is something I'll talk about a bit more closer to October. In the mean time, here's something to give you an idea of what's in store...

I'm now on Folksy too!

As an experiment in expanding my horizons, I've started listing at Folksy, a UK-based seller very similar to Etsy. I haven't put all my stock up there yet, but will be adding slowly and surely. Etsy is definitely my main focus, but I love the idea of a UK-based platform so I'm going to give it a try until the end of the year and see what happens.

Things To Do With Green Tea (other than the obvious thing)

Image courtesy of zirconicusso at FreeDigitalImages.net

So I'm a bit of a tea junkie, a fact that became apparent at the day job when our purchasing officer came to give me a package and found the eight million (approx) packets of loose leaf tea I keep in my desk. Discussion ensued and the next day he presented me with two giant bags of Japanese green tea. I feel it's important to state that Japanese green tea is the really, really good stuff and honestly doesn't compare to your old Twinings tea bag nonsense. It's got a great, deep, toasty flavour to it, it tastes delicious, and I now have a lot of it. I'm keeping the genmaicha at work to share with the purchasing officer, but I took the other bag of regular green tea home to add to my small (approx) collection of loose leaf tea there.

And then I realised I had a lot of green tea and decided to see what else I could do with it apart from drink it, and the internet provided many an idea. Green tea is rich in antioxidants and can (maybe) help reduce wrinkles and signs of aging, as well as helping with sun damage. As I never go out into direct sunlight on general principles, that last one isn't really a problem for me, but I assume other people do sometimes venture outdoors before dark...

1. Freeze it.

This came courtesy of the amazing Crunchy Betty. Brew a strong cup of green tea and make ice cubes from it. They're anti-inflammatory so they work great as quick spot/blemish treatments. I've taken to keeping a tray in the freezer at all times and the ice cubes really do work if you use them a couple of times a day on clean skin. You can also do this with chamomile tea apparently, but I haven't tried that yet.

2. Make toner/cleanser with it.

I found this article and figured using loose leaf tea would be just as good (if not better) than using tea bags. I don't use commercial creams or cleansers, so rather than mixing green tea with a shop-bought cream, I've been making a mixture with lemon juice and storing it in the fridge. It keeps for about a week, and I've been swiping it over my face every evening after I take my make-up off. The lemon juice acts as a mild exfoliant and can help reduce acne/scarring as it's antibacterial.

3. Make a face mask with it.

There are a ton of ideas for natural face masks all over the internet, depending what you're looking for. My current favourite ingredients are kaolin clay, cocoa powder (another anti-oxidant), lavender, and oatmeal. But I recently got a whole bunch of other dried herbs that are supposed to be great for your skin, so I've been mixing and matching a lot. I ground up a few spoonfuls of green tea leaves with some thyme, lavender and kaolin clay and have been using it once a week. In addition to smelling amazing, it leaves your skin all soft and lush. I also made up a batch with green tea, oatmeal and cocoa at Christmas for my sister-in-law, and she loves it (although my brother is less keen because apparently she blocked their sink with it somehow? Not sure I need to be involved with that debate however).

4. Make a body scrub with it.

I love making sugar scrubs with shea butter - they're exfoliating, moisturising, and you can make them smell like chocolate. Plus there's the added bonus of leaving a slippery residue all over the shower, creating an adventure for the next person to use it. Shea butter can be messy to work with though, so green tea leaves make a quick and clean alternative - simply mix them up in an oil of your choice and scrub away! I tend to use either grapeseed or fractionated coconut oil, but in an emergency olive oil is as good as anything. You could throw in a bit of coffee or sugar too for added scrubby powers.

5. Rinse your hair with it.

Another one you can also do with chamomile tea. Brew a pot, pour it into an appropriate container, wash your hair as normal, then rinse with the tea. Bonus! Add essential oils for extra care. I tend to add rosemary if I do this, and there's a good list here of oils for different hair types. This gives extra shine or, in the case of chamomile tea, extra blondeness.

If you're using green tea bags, keep 'em after you've steeped 'em - the cool bags can be rubbed over your face as a toner or under your eyes to get rid of dark circles.

And for the record, actually just drinking green tea can have health benefits, allowing you to feel extra smug about the whole thing and not at all secretly wishing it was hot chocolate.

Image courtesy of Arvind Balaraman at FreeDigitalImages.net