Incense & Perfume

Today the new washer and dryer arrived. They're on their second load now -- the second of many more to come. It's lovely having a washer and dryer inside of the house again, rather than in a cramped garage. It's just plain lovely having something that works the way it is intended to work.

The unpacking continues, and I suspect it will for many months to come. My main priority now is getting the course work done, sorting out the studio, and getting a Kyphi batch started up for the course on Kyphi making I teach at the Academy. It opened in May and so far we haven't created a single batch. I still have the second half of that gorgeous blue lotus Kyphi I made last year. It's ripe and delicious smelling and ready to be sold again.

It still amazes me how incense -- real, natural, resin-rich incense -- behaves over time. It's like a beautifully crafted natural perfume that ultimately ages into something exquisite and sublime. I've been going through a few of the boxes of old finished perfumes and discovered that the ones crafted with water -- the eaux -- are not as pretty as they once were. The water degrades them a bit, I think. Something about the pH level -- I'll have to test them to see if my theory is right. Which means only one thing (to me) -- natural perfumes don't need water. Over time, water does not benefit the perfume, and, in fact, might harm it -- a lot.