"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

Sattva

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This is a mish-mash post, so be prepared for rambling.

Firstly I just wanted to thank you all again for your support and purchases during last week's Earth Day Sale. With all your tweeting, Facebooking, Redditting and buying, I was able to donate £100 to International Wildlife Rescue, which is just awesome, so thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

Secondly, you might have noticed that I've put the shop in vacation mode today to catch up on orders. Some of these are orders placed last Tuesday, and the reason they are late going out is that I had a package of 5ml bottles stolen from outside my house last week :/ The delivery company and supplier have been great in helping me fix this problem, and I will have a new supply by tomorrow so I can catch up on these outstanding orders. I hate sending perfumes out late, but I'd rather have the shop closed for a few days to stop orders piling up that I can't send out on time. So that's why I'm currently closed! I'll be back on top by this Saturday and the shop will reopen asap. I'm sorry if you are waiting; please do get in touch with me if you have any questions.

So, with that straight, I thought it might be fun to chat a bit about what's coming up for Common Brimstone.

It's already been an amazing year and I'm really excited about what the rest of 2014 might hold. One thing I know it definitely holds is the next full moon fragrance - May's Flower Moon. I'm not giving away the notes, but if you're a fan of deep, velvety greens, you'll want to keep an eye out for this one.

I'm also nearly ready to start working on the next Raw Brimstone line (just waiting for one last essential oil to be delivered!), and if you're curious as to the theme for this one, take a look here. I've been brainstorming this for months and I can't wait to get started with the experimentation! My aim is to have the line ready to launch by August/September, and I'll be blogging more extensively about the theme and inspirations in the near future.

The other thing I'm going to be working on for the shop (time allowing!) is tidying up the photography. My phone camera isn't bad for a phone camera, but it is still just a phone camera, and some of my older photos are pretty awful. Hopefully I can give them a bit of a makeover over the coming months.

And outside of the shop, I just purchased myself a bottle of Di-Propylene Glycol. What's that, you ask? Well, it's a colourless, nearly odorless liquid used as a solvent in the beauty industry. Its solvent properties make it ideal for working with heavy resins and absolutes, as well as some CO2 extractions that won't blend in carrier oils. I use a lot of resins and absolutes in my work and I'm intrigued to see how they work in this material. At the moment this is all personal curiosity and self-education; I'm only interested in selling natural perfumes and Di-Propylene Glycol is not a natural product. But it should be fun to play with and I'm looking forward to sharing the results with you all (whether you want it or not).

Earth Day Flash Sale!

So something pretty spectacular happened in the shop this week. I had my 600th sale! Cue the fireworks:

foto76

This is ridiculous to me! Ridiculously exciting and just...ridiculous. I'm so grateful to everyone who's been along for the ride with me in the past fourteen months and has tweeted, blogged, reviewed, shared and talked about Common Brimstone and got me to this point. There is really nothing like discovering a passion and then being able to share it with people all over the world. It's inspiring and invigorating.

And I need to celebrate this somehow! So two things are happening next week that marked an ideal point for a celebration and a "thank you" to you all. April 22nd is my 31st birthday. It's also Earth Day. It's also going to be a flash sale day.

I'm offering 15% off all 5ml or 10ml oils in my regular catalogue and I'll be donating all the profits to International Wildlife Rescue. Their projects range from public education, working with other organisations to help stop animal cruelty and neglect, caring for dancing bears in India, to sterilising and vaccinating stray dogs and cats across the globe. I think it's a great cause to support and I'll be happy and proud to do so come Earth Day.

Ahead of the Earth Day Flash Sale, I'll be added five new perfumes to the shop, which will of course be included in the sale. I'm not telling you what they are, but keep an eye on Monday 21st for those!

Thanks again and here's to the next celebration!

"Here’s your sweet lavender, sixteen sprigs a penny...

franky242

...that you’ll find my ladies will smell as sweet as any." Lavender Sellers’s Cry, London England CA 1900

Welcome to another installment of my becoming-slightly-more-regular-blogs about some of the more unusual essential oils I'm using in my perfumes these days! Now, I know what you're thinking: lavender isn't weird or unusual. In fact, it's probably one of the most commonly used essential oils around. And rightly so; it's good for everything - insomnia, insect bites, minor burns, sunburn, menstrual cramps, anxiety...The list goes on. If there's one product I insist on having in the bathroom cabinet at home, it's a bottle of lavender essential oil.

So it's not unusual, right? It's not zanthoxylum or ruby gromwell (don't worry, I'll get to those). It's just lavender.

But there are so many different varieties of lavender, and when it comes to perfume-making, those variations can make a huge difference to a scent. I'm a long-time lavender lover so I've been slowly collecting different types of oil since I started this whole wacky perfume journey. So let me tell you a little about my current crop...

French Lavender

This is a Mediterranean variety with that classic herbaceous scent people tend to associate with lavender. To me, there's a briney tint to lavender and I notice that especially with this variant. I love that, because I love the sea and anything that reminds me of it makes me happy. But it makes me understand why some people don't like lavender - it's a strong, lingering scent and it's not as mellow or sweet as other floral oils. It is extremely versatile, blending well with everything from rose to clary sage (take Black Agnes as an example), and lending something different to every blend. If you visit my shop and see simply "lavender" listed in a perfume, I always mean French lavender.

Honey Lavender Absolute

Another French-origin material, but very different to your standard French lavender. Honey lavender absolute is produced from honey taken from hives planted near lavender fields, resulting in a syrupy honey absolute with a beautiful lavender tang. It's mellow, golden, and ever-so-slightly foodie. To me it's a pure autumnal scent and works perfectly with woodsy oils. This is one of those materials I just want to shove in everyone's faces and make them smell it, but the thick viscosity of the absolute means it's a little tricky to work with, which is probably the only reason there aren't a million honey lavender-based perfumes in the shop right now...There is September Bride, however, which showcases it perfectly, mixing it with gentle notes of hay and peach, amongst others. This is definitely an oil to convince doubters that lavender isn't just for old ladies.

Bulgarian Lavender

More floral and fresh than French lavender, this just feels like a luxury oil. Bulgaria is actually the world's biggest lavender producer - the climate and soil conditions just lend themselves perfectly to good growth for the plant. Like French lavender, Bulgarian lends itself to most perfume combinations you can imagine, and I've got a couple of works-in-progress that involve chocolate, apple blossom, and water, among other things. At the moment you can find it in Vespertine.

Sweetie Dalmation Lavender

This is a new one for me and, according to some sources, not a true lavender plant but a hybrid. It grows along the Dalmation coast and, "true" or not, it's beautiful! Lavender oils can have a slightly camphorous edge, which is definitely not present here. It's all uplifting, sunny, sweet and intense. I haven't got round to trying it in a perfume yet (that's how new it is to my), but I had to snap it up when it became available and I really think it will offer a different dimension to lavender-based blends, as it leans away from herbal. I can see it going really well with citrus oils, grapefruit especially.

I'm really just scratching the surface here too - there are numerous varieties of lavender essential oil available - Kashmir, Russian, English, Stoechas, spike...Personally I can't get enough of the stuff, so you can probably expect to see all these varieties appear in my perfume catalogue at some point. So no, it's not that weird, but it's definitely interesting and I hope, if you're not already a fan, you might be tempted to try some lavender perfumes in the future.

And if not, maybe some lavender chocolate truffles instead?

Evgeni Dinev

"In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous"

Aristotle

Welcome back to my...um...very irregular series of blogs on some of the more weird and wonderful essential oils I'm using in my perfumes! Today I'm introducing you to sweet gale, mostly because it's a component of the perfume I'm road testing right now, Mellona. I'd never heard of sweet gale before my favourite UK oil supplier started stocking it, so before I took the plunge and bought some, I did some snooping around online to find out something about the plant. And it turned out I actually had heard of it already...just by another name. Bog myrtle.

Yeah. Bog myrtle. It doesn't exactly conjure up images of fragrant oils and perfumed beauties, does it? Historically, sweet gale has been used as a remedy for everything from stomach aches to liver problems, and is a key ingredient in many traditional creole folk remedies. In Scotland it's traditionally used to ward off midges, and in the Middle Ages it was used in North-Western Europe as a flavouring in beer. And it's still used to make schnaps in places like Denmark and Sweden today. All very interesting, and clearly great if I want to make moonshine or insect repellent but I don't do either of those things at the moment.

So the real question is, what's its perfume pedigree? Well, apparently sweet gale is a common component of Royal Wedding bouquets, so there's got to be more to the scent than beer and bugs, right? The most basic description I could find of the scent was "resinous and sweet," which was encouraging if not totally inspiring. But the description on my supplier's site was far more poetic and when the chance came up to buy a bottle at a discount, I decided to snap some up and see for myself.

And I fell in love instantly.

This is a bright, clean scent with a herbaceous hint here and there. There's a purity to it that reminds me of citrus, but it lacks the sugary-sweetness of orange essential oil and has a lighter body than lemon or grapefruit. It just screams out for fresh, green oils to enhance that lightness, and some sweet notes to complement its own herbaceous qualities. When I was brainstorming ideas for Spring perfumes and read up on Mellona, the Roman goddess of honey, I knew sweet gale had to be part of her perfume - the idea of sweet gale and honey together seemed perfect.

Going for a light, luscious mix, I took sweet gale and honey as my starting point and added in nectarine, sweet grass, lemon blossom, and a touch of earthy hop (which, incidentally, supplanted sweet gale as a beer ingredient in the sixteenth century). And they play off each other beautifully. Honey can be a very heavy and pervasive fragrance oil, but paired with the sweet gale and rounded off with the hop, it's less in-your-face and much lighter. The fresh grass and juicy nectarine notes are brightened by the sweet gale, and the lemon blossom is just drifting about there, adding a lovely, soft note to the proceedings. I love that this is a Spring scent that isn't floral-based, and I think it's going to make a great addition to my catalogue.

Since my supplier also recommends pairing sweet gale with a few other oils I own but haven't experimented with yet, I foresee it popping up in future perfumes too. I don't really get the resinous note others have mentioned, but I can see it working well with earthy, incensey oils like frankincense or peru balsam. In the mean time, I can't wait to share Mellona with you and see if you love bog myrtle as much as I do!

Flash Sale on now!

I was tagged to do a make-up free selfie for breast cancer awareness, but that…that just isn’t going to happen. Instead I’m having a FLASH SALE! 15% off all 5ml and 10ml perfumes in my regular catalogue, with all the proceeds going to Cancer Research UK. It’s on now! Follow the link.

Sample sets and vials - updates!

So if you've been with me since the beginning (back in those dark, long-ago days of February 2013), you might know that packaging sample vials has been the bane of my existence. My bête noire if you will. I started out with wand caps because they were highly affordable and fairly standard for perfume samples, and quickly discovered they were messy, leaky, hard to open and generally not terribly user-friendly.

After some digging around, I found some great little rollerball vials that seemed ideal for samples: less prone to leaking and much easier to store and use. Unfortunately it's come to my attention lately that leaks still happen and sometimes the rollerballs get stuck, making the perfume application difficult. Obviously this is no good. I want you to have the best possible experience when you try one of my perfumes and a big part of that is presentation. If you can't actually use and enjoy the perfume, I'm letting you down.

So I've shopped around again and I've found something that I hope solves the problem once and for all:

How cute are these little bottles? They're 2ml amber vials and here's my top 5 reasons they beat out wand caps and rollerballs:

1. They're bigger! You get double the sample to play with.

2. No messy wands to fiddle with. I always find I can never apply as much perfume as I want with a wand; these little bottles will let you slather to your heart's content.

3. No sticky rollerballs. I'll admit it, I love those rollerballs, but they just don't work! The bottles mean there's no fuss and muss in applying your perfume.

4. They're adorable! Like little baby perfumes.

5. They're easy on my fingernails. Alright, that doesn't really benefit anyone but me, but believe me - it's hard to get the tops on those rollerball vials!

So as of today, all sample sets and single samples will be packaged in these bottles. As these bottles are a little costlier than the previous vials, I have raised the prices just a tiny bit (50p/$0.80 per set) to cover the cost, but you're getting twice the amount of perfume so I reckon we all come out even! 

So I think this will tackle the problems we've been encountering with sample vials. As always, I thrive on feedback, so I hope you'll let me know how you find them :)

"Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clear-headed and sane."

The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust.The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up, and made a garden in the cafe. “Don’t you see them?” I said to him. “Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien.” - Oscar Wilde

I've been collecting a lot of unusual essential oils recently and it occurred to me that whilst everyone is going to see notes like "rose, jasmine, nutmeg" and have a good idea of what a perfume will smell like, not everyone is going to be quite so sure when they see "sweet gale, zanthoxylum, styrax." So I've decided to start doing a regular blog to chat about these more uncommon scents and what you can expect from them. And since I'm road testing a wormwood perfume today, that seemed the perfect oil to start with!

Although, actually, you're probably already familiar with artemisia absinthium - it's an ornamental plant used in absinthe and a few other spirits like bitters and vermouth. Absinthe, of course, was the darling drink of the 18th century Parisian arts scene, reputed to be dangerously addictive due to one of the chemical compounds in the plant, thujone. This wicked reputation lead to the drink being banned in America and parts of Europe. During the temperance movement, one critic claimed that:

Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country.

Since then it's been proved that the so-called psychoactive properties of absinthe were greatly exaggerated, but it's fair to say absinthe has retained its mystique.

But back to the essential oil. For me, there's definitely some truth to the idea of this being addictive. The smell is so unusual - clear, bold, with hints of aniseed and fennel - I can't help sniffing it over and over. Although it's primarily herbaceous, there's just something very...dessert-like about it to my nose, a certain syrupy quality that tempers the bitterness. It really is utterly unique among my herbal essential oils, and is surprisingly versatile despite it's strong, distinct scent. Generally speaking, herbaceous/medicinal oils go well with other herbaceous oils, as well as earthy, woodsy notes. Wormwood definitely loves its fellow herbs and can play well with certain florals. Wormwood with beeswax and woodsy notes? A dream. I haven't tried it with chocolate yet, but I'm pretty sure it would create the most amazing gourmand experience (maybe that's because wormwood was once believed to be an appetite stimulant?).

So what can you expect from a perfume with wormwood notes? Well, I'll start by saying that I only use a minimum of wormwood in the perfumes I've made with it so far. Despite the fact that the dangers of thujone were overstated, it is true that prolonged inhalation of wormwood oil can cause headaches and nobody wants that from a perfume oil. So if you want a real "absinthe" perfume that truly captures the licorice-like fragrance of the drink, I'd actually advise trying one of my absinthe fragrance oil blends. But in The Expert Dreamer, you'll find the smidge of wormwood gives a tangy, musty note to the incense and floral notes of the perfume, and when Merricat becomes available, you'll see the combination of wormwood and tea rose turns a regular floral into something much darker and more intriguing. This is the magic of wormwood: you don't need a lot of it. Certain oils just work best when they're invisible - lending depth and edge to other notes, rather than standing out on their own.