Thanks to the workshops organized by EDUCO, I've been able to cook French food, taste French wine and cheese, bake French pastries, and, last Friday, mix French perfume. The apartment was way, way over in the middle of the 16th arrondissement (on the left bank, but still a distance away), and I had to ride the Metro in order to arrive on time. There were about eight of us students, total.
The parfumeuse first explained to us some of the different "families" of perfumes, each of which is composed of different "notes" (individual scents, like "lily" or "oak moss") just like a musical composition. Some of these families had clear names ("floral" and "fruity"), whereas other names seemed entirely arbitrary ("cypress" and "oriental"). The parfumeuse passed around examples of various recipes for us to smell, in order to get an idea of ; for example, the "Floral Oriental" was 1/3 passion flower, 1/3 vanilla flower, and 1/3 vetiver (most were more complex). The "Eau Fraiche" made my eyes water, and reminded me of cheap perfume; "Fruited Cyprus" was milder and pleasanter, and "Oriental" smelled strongly of vanilla. "Woody" notes were relatively mild, but apparently take longer to dissipate; by contrast, "Fern" notes are quite strong.
Each pair of us (I was sitting next to Brook) had 40-50 small flask in front of us, each one of which was only about an inch high, and contained one olfactory "note." We also had three empty flasks, in which to practice mixing, and thereby arrive at a desirably formula. I had somebody in mind who deserves a special gift from France (actually, that probably describes every woman who reads this blog), and had already decided, for quite some time, that I was going to mix her some unique perfume.
I knew that I needed to stay away from "Eau Fraiche," which was too strong, and also to steer clear from anything overly sweet. I also wanted to avoid simply choosing a list of the scents of my favorite fruits, seeing as I assume that most people don't want to smell like a mixture of figs and pears. I took task this quite seriously, and Mr. David Friedman took an excellent photo of me staring very intently at a tiny bottle of scent, which you can view on Facebook.
My first flask was a mix of roses, jasmine, carnations, exotic fruits, peaches, passion flowers, ginger, and vanilla flowers (I had decided against oak moss, no matter how good it smelled to me). This first experiment smelled overwhelmingly sweet, and exactly the opposite of what I had been trying for. Meanwhile, Brook was having success making scents that reminded me strongly of my Mother's flower garden (was it the lavender? I don't know). I was also impressed with Madeline's and Sharon's concoctions (meanwhile, David, who was just trying to mix something for his mother, was going overboard with the mandarin orange scent). So I cut down seriously on the exotic fruits and the jasmine, which were overwhelming the other scents, added a bit of ginger in order to temper the sweetness. The result was fresh and floral, without being too sweet. I made two more different attempts, in which I tried adding coconut and suppressing certain scents, but I ended up using the second recipe in the end, making only the slight modification of replacing jasmine with coconut. In the end, however, my nose felt so over-stimulated that I had difficulty differentiating between the different fragrances: too much of a good thing! In case anyone's interested, here is the final recipe:
Rose: 10%
Carnation: 15%
Exotic Fruit: 15%
Peach: 10%
Passion Flower: 10%
Ginger: 10%
Vanilla Flower: 25%
Coconut: 5%
The girls, to whom I had explained the gifts recipient, all thought that the scent would go over well as a gift, and that she would enjoy and appreciate it. Well, I hope that she will.
Oh, and today is a rainy, disgusting Monday, in which I'm not taking a run, even though I just took my Contemporary Arab World exam (2 hours). Next up will be this weekend's visit to the Petit Palais and the Conciergerie.
~JD
"A landmark in the progress towards the general heritability of fiefs, at least in Italy in Germany, was the ordinance issued by the German emperor Conrad II in 1037 which granted security of tenure, protected by the judgment of their peers, to those who held benefices on royal or church land, together with the right to pass on their land to their sons and certain other male relatives" (Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted, p. 49).
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