Chatillon Lux AMA, June 4th, 2017

Hi all,


First I'd like to thank Chatillon Lux for taking the time to do an AMA (ask me anything) with the Damn Fine Shave community.  Shawn will be popping in and out of the forum after 11am CST for most of the day to answer questions that we have for him.  

Please keep in mind that the questions that are asked NEED to follow our site rules.  Failure to follow our rules will result in the removal of your post(s).

Check out Shawn and his shaving items at: https://chatillonlux.com/




Thanks,

Andrew

Hi Shawn, I want to thank you for doing this AMA but most of all I want to thank you for crafting some of the best post shave products I've ever used. The post shave soothing, conditioning and man, the scents are out of this world. Your scents are unique, imaginative and flat out awesome and the way you root your products in the history of the great city of St. Louis and the surrounding area is pretty cool. Whenever you do a collaboration with a soap maker the Chatillon Lux scent makes the soap a very special soap.

My questions are how did you get started in the post shave world? What was your inspiration? Have you always been interested in scent in general and the blending of unique and creative scents as well?

Thanks Shawn, I wish you all the success and happiness that its possible to have and I look forward to more amazing creations coming from your nose/mind down the road.
Cheers,
Mark

Firstly, let me congratulate you on your 2 year anniversary this month!!  


What I'd like to ask, as my nose isn't nearly as sophisticated as yours, where do you start with blending scents?  I always seem to end up going to very simple, often single note scents.  I'm quite envious of your ability to take a thousand different notes and make perfect, awesome sense out of it!

Shawn, I think you hinted at this in a previous post somewhere. I'm a huuuuuuge fan of Unconditional Surrender. Can you share the story of how you were inspired by this (aside from the story blurb on the website), and how you arrived at the completed scent? Were there close "beta" runners up that weren't quite the scent profile you were looking for?

As always, I love your engagement with the community, and especially how open you are on DFS. I'm looking forward to the meet up in less than a week sir!

Shawn, thanks for taking the time to do this AMA.  It's always a pleasure to see you on line here at DFS.

My questions are, will you be attempting more eau de toilettes with scents you already produce as aftershaves (Yuzu/Rose/Patchouli, for one ) and will there be new EdT scents coming out?

Hey all! I'm here with some steaming coffee and MLB Network on the TV. Ready to do this! Here we go.

Hi Shawn, I want to thank you for doing this AMA but most of all I want to thank you for crafting some of the best post shave products I've ever used. The post shave soothing, conditioning and man, the scents are out of this world. Your scents are unique, imaginative and flat out awesome and the way you root your products in the history of the great city of St. Louis and the surrounding area is pretty cool. Whenever you do a collaboration with a soap maker the Chatillon Lux scent makes the soap a very special soap.

My questions are how did you get started in the post shave world? What was your inspiration? Have you always been interested in scent in general and the blending of unique and creative scents as well?

Thanks Shawn, I wish you all the success and happiness that its possible to have and I look forward to more amazing creations coming from your nose/mind down the road.
Cheers,
Mark

Thanks, Mark! It's easy to make STL sound cool if you have a love affair with the city. I love it. My girlfriend is from Barbados and despises winter with ever fiber in her being, but she has fallen in love with the city so much that she actually tolerates the weather. It's one of the best endorsements I can think of.

The way I started was with the salve. I was a new shaver and was going through my first winter without a beard in a while. That winter was super harsh (not compared to yours, but still, for a relative southerner like myself) and single-degree (F) highs daily were killing my face. Some nice person had sent me a sample of L'Occitane Cade balm, which was amazing, but I started looking at the ingredient list and started wondering if I could make something myself in lieu of paying so much for a tube.

I have an inability to get into a hobby or interest casually. So once I started experimenting, I got super hardcore about it. Then, after a while, I began sharing it with my friends, who encouraged me to start a business. So I got off the ground with my very, very good friend as a business partner and he helped encourage me and ground me. Even though he left, Chatillon Lux never would have happened if it were not for him during those early days when we were basically inventing the wheel with every single thing we did.

As far as scents go, this is an interesting thing. During my high school days, aquatic fragrances were all the rage. I had a bottle of Tommy, and my college girlfriend made me wear Acqua di Gio. All of these scents were fine, but I never found them to be particularly interesting.

But I always did have an interest in scents thanks to my dad growing up. Not fragrances, because he wore Old Spice exclusively for 40 years until I started making aftershave. My dad was a forestry major and has managed a contractor-focused lumberyard for over three decades. I used to love visiting when I was a kid, when he would take me around showing me all the different types of lumber. He would sniff each board and have me smell it, telling me why he liked it so much. His favorite is red cedar wood. He always got excited if we came by the saw area and someone had just cut red cedar, because that meant we could go smell the shavings. He would take me to job sites and have me smell closets lined in cedarwood. When my parents first had a home constructed, he made the wet bar...you guessed it...red cedar. He and I also enjoyed camping, and we would smell all the flowers, undergrowth and plants of all kinds.

So now you know why I like green, woody and earthy scents. I made my dad a scent for Father's Day last year called Lumberyard Man. It was designed to smell just like his lumberyard after cutting some red cedar. Only he and I have that scent and I will never let anyone else ever use it. It's the scent I was most excited to make ever.

Thanks for the question, Mark! I sometimes wish I had gotten into fragrance at an earlier age, but then I remember that I am really happy with the journey that brought me to it.

Firstly, let me congratulate you on your 2 year anniversary this month!!  


What I'd like to ask, as my nose isn't nearly as sophisticated as yours, where do you start with blending scents?  I always seem to end up going to very simple, often single note scents.  I'm quite envious of your ability to take a thousand different notes and make perfect, awesome sense out of it!

Thank you, Paolo! I missed seeing you at the Maggard Meetup this year.

Also, I wouldn't sell yourself short! I got Terroso at the meetup and it is beautiful. I love the scent so much (also, I hate lime scents normally and like Agrume, which says even more), and there is a lot to be said for doing simplicity really, really well. Sometimes it's harder to hide things.

So here is how I approach scent making from a 30,000-foot view. I think of the general idea I want to go with and start going through ideas of what types of scents I would like to see in there. I think of things like families: so for me, there aren't 12 scents, but rather more like 3-5 families of scents in a blend. I make a bunch of practice formulas in my notes before I ever go in, and so really, I have the basic outline then add different things when I realize what I'm missing. So it's like, here's what I have, what else do I need?

Of course, every single scent is different in how I get to it.

Thanks for the question, Paolo! I am glad to hear from you!

Shawn, I think you hinted at this in a previous post somewhere. I'm a huuuuuuge fan of Unconditional Surrender. Can you share the story of how you were inspired by this (aside from the story blurb on the website), and how you arrived at the completed scent? Were there close "beta" runners up that weren't quite the scent profile you were looking for?

As always, I love your engagement with the community, and especially how open you are on DFS. I'm looking forward to the meet up in less than a week sir!

Thank you! Unconditional Surrender is a scent that was a year in the making. I kept walking away and coming back to it over and over again. I love amber and wanted to make an amber scent, but couldn't quite figure out what I wanted to do.

lt started off with just wood, coffee and amber. I tried a lot of different things on top of those, ins and outs. I wish I would have saved all the formulae from along the way. Man, there were so many false starts and with my crappy memory, I don't remember the majority of them. I kept giving up on it, but then coming back after realizing that I didn't want to give up on a scent that I so badly wanted to make. Plus, a friend who enjoys similar types of fragrances that I do kept sending me decants of his favorite amber fragrances in hopes of giving me inspiration. And oftentimes it worked.

That same friend last summer asked for a custom lavender fragrance that had the same type of vibe as L'Occitane's L'Occitan, a beautiful masculine lavender that was a big inspiration for Lavande Poivre. This one, however, I was also struggling with at first. I did what I do whenever I feel in a creative rut and ordered a bunch of new scents that I had been wanting to try. One of these was amyris. Man, I LOVE amyris. To me it's what I wish labdanum smelled like. Rich, dark and deeply resinous. And that, along with newly acquired agarwood, planted the seed in my brain about using amyris in conjunction with the amber to anchor it a little bit. The custom scent featured lavender, sandalwood, cedarwood, amyris, camphor, black pepper, clove, cinnamon, vetiver, musk, agarwood, jasmine, and tonka bean.

So you'll notice the tonka bean, agarwood, cedarwood, amyris, jasmine and musk (a component of the amber accord) are similar to Unconditional Surrender. I was kind of testing out an idea that was forming when making that scent. In the end, I came up with the Unconditional Surrender formula then added geranium to really finish it off. When I came up with the Unconditional Surrender EdT, however, the off-the-shelf amber I was using just wasn't cutting it. So I created my own proprietary amber accord, which led to me developing my sandalwood accord (Santal Auster) and rose accord that will be in Rose Santal.

Thanks for the question! Going back and actually writing this out made me remember a bunch of stuff I had forgotten. I really need to go deeper into my notes and put together a long blog post about it.

Shawn, thanks for taking the time to do this AMA.  It's always a pleasure to see you on line here at DFS.

My questions are, will you be attempting more eau de toilettes with scents you already produce as aftershaves (Yuzu/Rose/Patchouli, for one ) and will there be new EdT scents coming out?

Thanks, Freddy! I am really excited about this and about meeting you next week!

There are definitely going to be new EdT scents coming out. It's where I want to focus my energies more in the future. It allows me to do some stuff that I normally couldn't do with aftershaves. At the same time, that's why I want to do some simplicity scents (Santal Auster sandalwood, Pure Lavender in August, etc) and try to satisfy those who think they wouldn't enjoy a scent unless you can list the ingredients in the scent name (although I never understand why you can't just enjoy a scent without fully understand what's going on, but that's another story for another time).

As far as adaptations go, I would like to mess with Yuzu/Rose/Patchouli. I macerated some in EdT strength to analyze what I could do to fill it out and make it stand up at a higher fragrance and more longevity. I'm thinking on it. I do have Omnostre EdT coming this fall, which will be very loosely related to La Quatrième Ville. Another one I want to make at some point is Eau de Treget, inspired by Delor de Treget. I also made a small batch of Colonia Balsamica for EdT after getting a few requests from people.

In the immediate future, I have Rose Santal EdT coming permanently along with the LE aftershave/soap release at the end of the month. That one took so many hours of development, but testers have enjoyed it. It has rose, sandalwood, black pepper, cardamom, labdanum, geranium and bergamot.

I'll probably have some of that along if you want to sniff it on Saturday. Looking forward to it! Thanks, Freddy!