It has been brought to my attention that there is a rumor going around that I am discontinuing the CB Individual Accords. I'm not. However, there are certain ones in the archive that are temporarily unavailable and a few that may well have to be permanently retired. This is due to my inability to find certain raw ingredients that are necessary to make them. I have found over the years, this is a perpetual dilemma - especially for the small independent perfumer.
i work with a great many strange and unusual materials both real & synthetic, and unfortunately I've discovered that these things often become very hard to find or have completely gone the way of the Dodo. With natural materials such are certain essential oils or absolutes, they may go away because producing them becomes too expensive to be generally commercially viable. A few years ago, one of my very favorite essential oils - Bourbon Geranium - disappeared off the face of the earth. I was told that the Island of Réunion decided to stop distilling altogether. Apparently they were more interested in developing a tourist trade... For a short while I was both frantic and heartbroken. Bourbon Geranium is an oil that I have used pretty much since Day One (it was the major ingredient in my very first public perfume) and I'd been using it as a key ingredient in several other CB perfumes as well. Of course the world is full of Geranium oils but to my nose, none of these had the same crisp greenness of the Bourbon. Fortunately though, I found a similar essential oil of Geranium from Madagascar. It's close enough to work but there's slight difference that perhaps at this point, I am the only one who remembers...
And a while back, I had to pull my 12th Archetype perfume "Cradle of Light (white flowers)" from the website because I couldn't find the necessary Jonquil Absolute to compound it. Fortunately a few weeks ago, I was able to find more - which should be arriving here in a few weeks - but it was ASTRONOMICALLY expensive. Still i will now be able to make more of that perfume and hopefully have it back on the website by early fall - it's an extremely complex formula to compound and the absolutes are very tricky to prepare - this all takes time. Still I'm shooting for September...
Synthetic materials can be almost more of a dilemma than natural ones - especially "new" or "very strange" aromachemicals. Manufacturing aromachemicals is a HUGE and highly competitive business and like any business it is largely driven by what the market wants as well as what the shareholders expect. The major houses create countless molecules annually but only a handful make it to market. And frequently, those that don't perform well sales-wise will be suddenly discontinued. I've found those tend to be the oddball molecules that I find very useful in creating the scents of strange objects or foods and without them, the scent will not ring true. I've also found that the major manufacturers of aromachemicals will sometimes discontinue certain materials because they've created something "new" "improved" and "better". Naturally they feel they need to do this in order to have more to sell in a calendar year. This is understandable but what is maddening about that process is that even a tiny variation in the odor of a molecule can radically alter a given scent and again, I lose the reality of the original.
But this is the way perfume and the making of perfume have always been. Things must change. Even a great perfume like Shalimar will be forced to change its formulation over the decades to the point that what it was when it was introduced in the 20's bears little resemblance to the perfume as it exists now.
As for myself, there are a great many accords that I originally worked on back in the mid 90's that have undergone a radical change. I have never been afraid to improve things. When I opened my doors here in July of 2004, I realized that what smelled good as "fresh cut grass" or "tomato vine" in 1997 could be INFINITELY better now. So I redesigned a good portion of my accord collection. This is something I still continue to work on and always will.
But i completely understand how upsetting it can be for my clients and customers to suddenly not be able to have a favorite smell. After all, few understand as well as I do just how powerful our emotional attachments to certain scents can be. And it's extremely upsetting for me every time I am forced to retire a scent from the Accord collection - it's like completely losing touch with an old and dear friend. Of course I do everything possible to prevent that from happening and my assistants and I spend hours scouring every possible source for the necessary bits and pieces. But sometimes they're gone and what's gone is gone. Change must happen.
I think more than any other, perfume is the art that most demonstrates the concept of change within the context of life - it is powerful, it is often profound and it is inevitable...
But still, I will continue to rework those accords that have been temporarily retired (at least I HOPE it's temporary) from the main Accord Collection. I can rarely say when a certain scent might be back. There are SO many variables and my position has always been and will always be "a scent is finished when it's finished".
Hopefully some of my scents like "porcelain" won't be finished for good!