Old Formulas & the Natural Perfume Academy

 

Poucher, Oregano, and Calendula January 2021

On Perfume: Natural perfumery has been around, well, forever. Quite a lot of people have a very dim view of it, too. When you say 'natural perfume', folks tend to imagine something unrefined, lacking in sophistication, basic. Natural perfumery is anything but that. Every piece of written history prior to the late 1800s on the subject of perfume is about natural perfume. All of the poetry, the biblical references, ancient temple writings on scent, that was all written about natural perfume. So for thousands of years using natural perfume was perfectly fine until chemists discovered ways to extract or create scent molecules and all of those thousands of years of experience and passion for nature just dissolved into the ether. But not entirely. Even today, modern synthetic perfumery relies on nature to coax customers into buying -- citrus, lotus, freesia, common and exotic, these words are used to bludgeon your senses with naturalness when in fact what they are really talking about are synthetics and/or isolates. Using synthetics/isolates to create perfume isn't the worst thing in the world, on the contrary, some very grand and gorgeous perfumes have come out of this. My point is, don't discard natural perfumery to the dust bin just yet. It has withstood, for the most part, the test of time, and, according to some accounts, is making quite the comeback. 

On Books: Poucher was one of the first books I used to learn perfumery. Where there was a formulation that used an early synthetic, I would seek it out to find out how it smelled and then tried my best to duplicate it using naturals. I wasn't always successful. In fact, there were more failures than successes. Most synthetics can't be duplicated using naturals, but every so often, you can get really close. If you can, get a copy of Poucher's 'Perfumes, Cosmetics & Soaps Volume II Manufacture and Preparation'. There are loads of formulations to practice using, with a bit of distillation thrown in to really refine the work. 

On Progress: This year, the Natural Perfume Academy Online is mixing things up a bit. We're preparing to launch a whole new curriculum that will help to better hone and elevate our student's skill set. We have a clear agenda going forward, to promote natural perfumery in a much less apologetic way, to teach our students the skills necessary to move forward and be as successful as they want to be, and more importantly, to bring joy and love, passion, ethics, and integrity with an eye toward environmental preservation to this art form.