Formulating When and Where

I'm assuming everyone else is assuming that all the recent perfume posting over at my store is the result of a few recent weeks of pounding my head against the blending desk, late nights sipping stale coffee, and flasks and beakers and test tubes of strange smelling fluids being poured together, but it's not. All but one of the "new" perfumes is really an old perfume. Not old like past its prime, expiration date from 2002, but old to me. I worked on it for weeks, maybe a month or so, then put it aside to mature, then forgot about it as I had moved on to the next project. Starting the online course really put me off my game. But starting the online course also honed my skills as a perfumer. I've learned almost as much by teaching other people how to do this as I did taking a year off to study on my own. So of the nine or ten new perfumes put up in the store, there are literally 40 or 50 more that didn't quite make the grade. Putrid beyond belief, flat, boring, not surprising at all, ordinary, or "been there, done that" for the dozenth time. And all this diluting, filtering and decanting has set another fire blazing under me bum. I'm ready to start formulating again.

Got a call from the place where I teach my perfumery workshops and they want to add a soap making class to the roster, sooooo . . . . yeah, guess I'll be updating the workbook for the soap making course as well.

Just as with writing or research, once you start formulating perfumes, your inspiration and spark just arrives, one observation after another, one rabbit hole after another until you find yourself popping out on another continent; there's no waiting around to be struck with divine understanding, you discover inspiration through the work. And through diligence. Maybe that is the divinity of inspiration after all.