(07-17-2016, 07:51 PM)BoarderPhreak Wrote: Will, you and I discussed this (so I know the answer) but for the benefit of others...
Will we see any matching deodorants from B&M?
If you do, it will take quite awhile. I would want to create an actual anti-perspirant rather than just a deodorant, which gets us into drug (and thus FDA) territory.
(07-17-2016, 07:56 PM)zaclikestoshave Wrote: Will, you and your family seem to have such a positive attitude and do your best to make things the best you possibly can. It is great reading how you can take constructive criticism on your fragrances and understand not everything sticks. Cool to see you doing the pre-order and I have been happy to try it out and purchase. It's seems like you are flexible enough to try and accommodate your customer base if it's within reason and is worth trying. BTW Thank you to Marko for bringing up Wonderbalm. I lost mine somewhere, probably on a trail when I was hiking in winter. I plan to pick some up when it become's available.
Do you make your own body soap or have any qualities you look for in soap when buying it from a store or online? I seem to buy a ton of bar soap to test out and use. I actually made my first batch of soap a couple days ago.
I make my own bar soap on occasion (and have developed a formula that I like quite a bit), but I'm also a big fan of Yardley bar soaps. They lather well, are quite inexpensive, and the scents (especially the Lavender and Cocoa Butter) are excellent. I also just recently tried one of L'Occitane's bar soaps (the Verveine) and found it to be wonderful.
(07-17-2016, 07:58 PM)SharpSpine Wrote: Will, I first would like to thank you for your friendship and willingness to answer questions. While this may be an AMA I have lost track of the number of times that I have messaged a question to Will and he has answered everyone with more care and info than I expected.
Let's see if I can throw a few different questions at you.
1. Can you suggest either a family of fragrance or even a few specific perfumes to pair with each of your available soaps?
2. You mentioned above about industrial ways to increase scent strength. Can you recommend any tips for how to get the most longevity & projection out of a fragrance? Any specific points on the body to apply? Do you recommend multiple sprays on top of each other? Any other tips or tricks?
3. What are your top 5 fragrance houses? Favorite available option from each house?
4. What are your top 10 fragrances of all time?
5. Besides Azzaro Pour Homme, can you recommend an easily attainable and affordable fragrance for people to try as they start to dip their toes into the fragrance world?
6. What's your favorite way to unwind when you just have to turn off that working side of the brain.
It's my pleasure, Brian.
1) That's a really long list. I'll try to put one together in the course of the coming week, but it would take quite a lot of time right now.
2) Moisturize your skin (which I know is not a viable solution for everyone). Sometimes, it just depends on the scent. But I usually spray my fragrances on one side of my neck (usually the right) and one wrist (usually the left). The pulse points are best because they tend to vaporize the scent a bit better. Depending on the fragrance, I will sometimes layer sprays on top of each other (such as with
Pour un Homme de Caron, Atelier
Orange Sanguine, and
Chanel Pour Monsieur EdT. If you prefer to wear something lighter, like an Eau de Cologne (my favorite being Puig
Agua Lavanda), really spread it all over your skin. It will dry down beautifully.
3) Top Five Houses and a Two Scents From Each
1) Chanel (
Cuir de Russie and
Bois des Iles)
2) Guerlain (
Derby and
Mitsouko)
3) Atelier (
Orange Sanguine and
Sous le Toit)
4) Bogue Profumo (
Maai and
Cadavre Exquis)
5) Zoologist (
Bat and the older formulation of
Beaver)
4) I wrote this post for reddit awhile ago, which I characterized as "The Top Ten Perfumes Every Man Should Smell Before He Dies":
a) I speak about
Mouchoir de Monsieur so often that it hardly needs an introduction. It's one of the great classical civet fougères, the dirtier, citrusier cousin to the more famous Jicky. It's the kind of fragrance that is never out of place. Elegant, sophisticated, stylish, and sexy, it's phenomenally well constructed and has largely escaped reformulation other than some minor tweaks to bring it into conformity with IFRA regulation. Sadly, it's very difficult to obtain in the States as it has long lived in the shadow of its more famous cousin. Still, if you happen to come across it, give it at least a day's wear. I'd be very surprised if you were disappointed.
b)
Knize Ten was created by François Coty and Vincent Roubert, the first arguably the greatest perfumer to ever live and the second the man who created
Iris Gris for Jacques Fath, a perfume of such legendary quality and beauty that it is one of the most guarded preservations of the Osmotheque. It's a brilliant, dusty, dirty, well-worn leather with an unusual strawberry top note and a rich, superbly balanced floral heart. Many people dislike it because it smells like old leather rather than the newer, sharper leathers to which we have become accustomed, but it's one of those fragrances that recalls a lived-in motorcycle jacket in every sense, all the way down to its attitude. Remarkable stuff.
c) If you were to ask 10 perfume aficionados what fragrance they would take to a desert island, probably 7 of them would say
Mitsouko. Legend has it that François Coty sold the formula for
Chypre to Jacques Guerlain, who added the peach base Persicol (now known by its chemical name undecalactone) until he achieved a sparkling, rich, elegant, spicy perfume that smells absolutely phenomenal on anyone. I've often heard it referred to as "the chypre, perfected," which I don't find to be an inaccurate statement. It took the slightly rough but revolutionary structure of
Chypre and smoothed it out into a fragrance of unearthly beauty.
d)
Vol de Nuit, or "Night Flight," was unusual for its time and remains one of the strangest of Jacques Guerlain's many creations. It's a bitter, cold, dark floral that opens with bergamot, galbanum (which is extremely bitter), and petitgrain, then smoothly transitions into powdery jasmine and rose kissed with vanilla. Unlike most vanilla fragrances, it is in no way warm or sweet; it remains one of the only vanilla perfumes that I would describe as "cold." The idea was to capture the exhilarating feeling of ascent in an airplane, which I think it does perfectly. If I had but one fragrance to wear for the rest of my life, I would have a very very hard time choosing between this and
Mouchoir de Monsieur.
e)
Pour un Homme de Caron is another fragrance about which I speak often. It's a simple but superbly well-blended composition of lavender, cedar, vanilla, musk, and Mousse de Saxe. One of the few elder fragrances that requires a certain "trick" for wearing it, it's best when layered on top of itself, which allows the lavender/cedar accord to shine while toning down the doughiness of the vanilla. As Luca Turin has written, it's still probably the best lavender perfume around (though he ignores Agua Lavanda Puig, which I feel is a heavy contender for the top spot).
6) Caron
Narcisse Noir, the Black Narcissus, is one of the fragrances sadly destroyed by Richard Fraysse's hackneyed reformulations for the House of Caron. The new version is ugly and sweet, a citrusy, brutally saccharine confection of orange and jasmine. But the original was a totally different animal: built to showcase Caron's use of the perfume base Mousse de Saxe, vintage
Narcisse Noir was a bitter, leathery, sexy, blackhearted thing, the very essence of the proverbial femme fatale. It's a tragedy that the original has been lost to time; it was the kind of perfume worn by women who would chew you up and spit you out and whom you would thank for the pleasure.
7)
Chanel pour Monsieur is a superbly well-crafted chypre created by Henri Robert, second in-house perfumer of Chanel, in 1952. It's another one of those fragrances where you're never out of place in wearing it. Quiet, elegant, reserved, and gentle,
pour Monsieur opens with bright citrus layered over a classic chypre structure, buttressed with just enough vetiver to make it interesting and just enough patchouli to keep it from being too dry. I hope to god they never stop making it.
8)
Bandit was created by the legendary Germaine Cellier, supermodel, master perfumer, and reputed lesbian (in a time when that was a serious offense). Cellier was fond of using bases in her perfumes and the original
Bandit supposedly contained well over 1200 separate perfume compounds. It was similar in spirit to
Narcisse Noir as a bitter, sexy, unabashedly wicked creation, and its original unveiling in Paris involved models wrapped in leather in a glorious gothic display. It was reconstructed by Calice Becker in the early 90s, but whomever purchased Piguet has not seen fit to follow her formula and it has been altered since, much to its detriment. It's still very good, but not the great masterpiece it once was. Damn shame.
9)
English Fern is a fragrance so renowned in wet shaving that I'd be very surprised if you haven't already tried it. It's one of the closest extant relatives to
Fougère Royale, but is distinguished by its peculiar overdoses of clover and fennel, which give it a strangely eerie scent not unlike the smell of a running stream in the heart of a forest. Some people can only get a few hours out of it, but I can easily wear it all day with only 2 sprays. Another perfume that you can wear any time of year and which is unusual enough (at least among those not into grooming) that you'd definitely stand out for good taste.
10)
Eau Sauvage was one of Edmond Roudnitska's greatest masterpieces, a brilliant, citrusy, mouthwatering floral for men in a time when men's florals had largely died out. His use of the compound Hedione, which produces a unique "watery floral" effect, was revolutionary for its time, and the perfume is still spectacular despite its many reformulations. Remarkably, Dior has managed to avoid damaging it severely, but I'm not sure for how much longer they will be able to exercise such restraint.
The Honorable Mention:
Diorella is a very close relative of Frederic Malle's
Le Parfum de Therese, which was actually created by Edmond Roudnitska as his wife's exclusive fragrance. I love the story behind the latter (which I'll tell in a moment), but I think vintage Diorella is a remarkable perfume in its own right. It contains an unusual "plum floral" note shared by only a few other perfumes I've encountered (and one whose source I have been seeking for some time) and blends that note perfectly with lemon, basil, honeysuckle, peach, and melon to produce an elegant perfume of nearly unearthly beauty. The only reason that I didn't include it in the list is that it has largely been destroyed by reformulation and is now a tragic shadow of its former self. However, its quieter cousin, now in the keeping of Frederic Malle, has survived largely untouched (or at least had when I wrote this; Malle's house has since been purchased by Esteé Lauder, which has begun reformulating its various works).
Le Parfum de Therese, as I mentioned, was created by Roudnitska for his wife Therese as her exclusive perfume. Frederic Malle's grandfather, Serge Heftler, founded Christian Dior Perfumes and his mother later served as the art director for the house for many years. He remembered hanging around Dior when the Roudnitskas would visit (Edmond was not known for leaving Grasse without serious prompting) and the impossibly beautiful perfume that Therese wore. Malle later went on to become a master perfumer and to found the now famous line Editions de Parfum, which was revolutionary for its practice of treating perfumers as authors and artists rather than as hired guns. Edmond Roudnitska died in 1996 but, when he was collecting fragrances for the launch of EdP, Malle went to Therese and asked if she would be willing to part with the formula for her perfume. The story goes that she sat quietly for a minute before responding, "I've been waiting forty years for someone to ask me that question." Thus, Edmond Roudnitska's seventeenth masterpiece was put into production and remains one of my favorite perfumes both for its incredible beauty and for the wonderful story behind it. The reason that I didn't include it in the preceding list is that the story takes long enough to tell that I felt that it deserved its own separate spot.
5)
Geoffrey Beene Grey Flannel, which has survived the last forty years remarkably well. It remains one of the most unique fougères I've ever smelled and is incredibly inexpensive; I paid $16 for my bottle.
6) I've actually been getting back into video games a little bit recently. It's a lot of fun, but I'm not the kind of guy who can play for hours and hours, so it works well to unwind.
