Parfum

A few things occurred to me over the past weekend: 1) I am about 97.37321% obsessed with perfume making, and 2) I hide that fact in my everyday, here life. Why? I guess for the same reasons I'm not chasing down Sniffa reps and prostrating myself before them for a review, or sending umpteen gazillion samples to a single blogger so I can be rated an accomplished and acclaimed NBP. Homey don't play that . . . very . . . well.

But I do admit that I have to step up my game. And so I have. A few samples of my unaccomplished and unacclaimed fabulous perfumes are now, as I write, jetting off to be sniffed by honest, hard-working perfumistas. If this is how it's got to be done, then by golly, I guess I'll do it! Watch out perfume sniffin' world, another pesky bell ringing NBP is on her way! And I need to talk about it more here at home -- not my house home -- my city home. There are a few places I can do free seminars and drum up some interest locally. Another out-of-my-comfort-zone project on the not too distant horizon.

'Nuff of that. After hours, literally hours and hours, of editing and reformatting, adding and removing photographs, and a whole bunch of other stuff, mostly to do with FONT sizes 'n' such, the workbook is finally --- finally! done. Well, not really done done, that'll never happen -- the last time I went in for a major edit, I expanded the original puny primer by 88 pages to a full-on workbook. Why? Because questions demand answers, that's why. Once the NNAPA course got going, I was fielding questions for which the primer had no answers, so I decided to put those subjects (q&a) into the workbook. This next course will demand the same, so next year's workbook will be expanded yet again. Until it no longer qualifies as a beginner's tool and becomes a comprehensive beginning to advanced (accomplished/acclaimed/award winning/boy, aren't you just the sh*t?!) workbook.

Remember a few months back I promised to do a little labdanum lab and share the results here? I'm to do the project with a sniff'a, not a mak'a of perfume, one of my partners in perfumed crime, Ms. T -- well, maybe that'll happen sometime after the beginning of the new course as ahm booked! Got a soap primer to write, and a soap class to teach, and then there's that online thing . . . and maybe planning a little perfumed tea party for the locals scheduled for some time in the fall . . . so that labdanum lab will probably be squeezed in between early summer and early fall. But I'm going to get the jump on it and share a little something about that creticus -- it isn't as gorgeous as I'd hoped it would be, BUT, not to put it down or anything, it works into perfume beautifully. When you sniff it compounded with other aromatics, you can't distinguish it as labdanum, it just melds into the compound and creates a subtle, sweet, slightly resinous ambery push. I'm wearing some on my wrist and it's almost like a perfume alone, multi-faceted. Okay, I take it back, it is pretty gorgeous!

The other afternoon I was testing perfumes on my wrists, stuff I'm working on, and I had the resident schnozzes take a sniff, and my son, the 21-going-on-22 dude said, "It smells like you, mom." I asked him to define what he'd just said, because clearly I wasn't getting it, and he said, "You smell like a stew pot of everything you make all the time, even when you don't put on perfume, you still smell like you're wearing it. Just your skin, though, your clothes smell like nothing." I don't know if I should be upset or happy about that. I remember my older not-living-at-home boys saying that to me, that my scent reminds them of home, and my scent is distinguishable from the air around me. And I rarely put on perfume. Usually only to test it. And it's always something different, so how is it I smell like what they're talking about all the time?

I guess it's better than smelling like cow pies.