Musings

**Addendum August 31, 2008 -- This particular post seems to have garnered quite a bit of interest since the announcement of an online course I'm helping to tutor, so I felt it necessary to clarify a few things. I began this posting with the words "As some of you know" referring to the regular readers. The regular readers DO know that I took time off from my online businesses to more formally study natural perfumery -- in October 2007. I've been using and studying natural raw materials as a lay person since May of 1996. And that's really all I'm going to say in my defense. Ever.

As some of you who read this blog know, I've taken time off from the grind of mass producing skincare and perfume products to study. When I initially made the decision, I thought it would be difficult -- y'know, being separated from my loyal customers, some of whom had only just begun being loyal customers, perhaps never to hear from them again. I've been reassured through their occasional emails that they're waiting for me to get my education squared away -- some impatiently waiting. This has dispelled my fears that I was creating art in a bubble, away from the rest of the 'uncaring world'. In that place, that bubble, was where my fears of not being a perfumer would plague me. Aloneness, though one of my favorite states, makes for poor conversation. I realize I'm not a perfumer in the sense that I've been to Grasse and trained under some obscurely famous to the world at large perfumer in a lab at a chem company for the requisite 6 to 10 odd years that would come after 9 months of school and a few years of apprenticeship. No, I'm not that kind of perfumer. I'm the kind who self-trains, daily -- reads old, sometimes nonsensical books on perfumery, historical books, books of poetry and lyrical prose, listens to music that fuses cultural sounds, walks in nature and appreciates the perfect forms of stones against trees against sky. The kind of perfumer who treats the raw materials as an artist of any other modality treats their paints or charcoals or canvases or tattoo guns -- as a means of creating something utterly phenomenal, an opus, a culmination of their creative talents funneled and concentrated and infused into this one single piece.

A real perfumer does this with each and every piece of art work he or she creates.