Day 56 ~ One Year, One Nose

Coffee ~



Who is unfamiliar with the scent of coffee? Practically no one. It seems to be everywhere at any time of the day. Walk into a corner convenience store and you're assaulted by the scent of coffee, among other things. Come into the office for work, again, coffee. And then at home too, coffee. And there are those brave, brave souls who sip the stuff at night, after dinner with dessert, without fear of insomnia.

Some years ago even I would sit and drink coffee at all hours, giving no concern whatsoever for the lack of sleep I suffered -- why should I? I could always wake up unrefreshed and start in on the coffee again! Instant perkiness. There was a time when I was really picky about what coffee I would drink (and to be honest here, I still won't drink flavored coffees AT ALL) my favorite being Kona, primarily because it was the first coffee I drank that didn't come directly from a can already ground, and it was so different from what I was used to. It was cleaner, fresher, darker, and more earthy than what I had been drinking.


Coffee tincture ~ I have loads of this stuff. Probably five or six different tinctures of different types of coffees grown all over the world. And, see, the trick with using coffee scents in a perfume, especially if you're not really going for the gourmand angle, is to use the right coffee at just the right amount (deft hand, deft hand!) -- or you'll be left with something that smells like you poured a cuppa into it. Unless that's what you want.

Coffee tincture can be bitter~ish, oily, fecal, earthy, dirty, and oftentimes smell of cigarettes (unsmoked, no filters) -- there's a tobacco~y tone to it, though not strictly the tobacco, but the whole cig, from paper to leaf to unwanted chemicals. It's kind of weird. Coffee blends well with all sorts of other raw materials; patchouli, santal, cedars, resins, ylang-ylang, clary sage, and a lot more than that. Experimentation is in order. Right coffee with the right level of application in the right blend and all that. I'm still hoping to one day buy a packet of kopi luwak and use my handy-dandy solvent extraction thingamabob to get something perfume-usable.