After a few weeks of gorgeous weather, today is rainy, chilly and dreary. I'm never at my best during such weather - except strangely when I'm in England. Maybe it seems more normal there I really don't know.
At any rate, I spent a lot of spare time over the weekend working on the labels for 2 new perfumes. And this morning I've been prodding myself to finish them. Not easy when I find it so hard to simply stay awake...
But now they're finished as are the 2 new perfumes they'll shortly be on. Frankly I'm excited!
The first perfume will be added to my Metamorphosis Series. It was inspired by a passage toward the end of Chapter Six of one of my favorite E M Forster novels. Here's a bit:
"She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.
Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone.
George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her."
I've long loved that passage in this novel as well as its counterpart in the Merchant Ivory film - although I've always been sad that nature didn't oblige the filmmakers by providing that deluge of violets. They had to make due with barley and field poppies. But the point of this passage, and the reason I love it so, is what it represents: the moment when one simple beautiful gesture can transform an entire life.
That's why I chose to include this particular perfume in my Metamorphosis Series. And naturally, it will be called "A Room With A View". It is the scent of the hills above Florence - the vineyards, the wild grass, the finocchio, the hot dusty Florentine earth. And of course, a torrent of Violets.
The second perfume is an Amber blend. I've always loved this particular incense and have worn and used it a lot over the years. And bizarrely, my own name is derived from the ancient Latin word for amber although at some point through the centuries, we managed to loose the "am". Recently, I decided to rework a version of an amber scent that I'd been wearing myself for a while. I blended a few types of real amber with cistus, labdanum and benzoin (among other natural resins) and arrived at a perfume that seems to crackle and smolder on the skin. Naturally I love smoky incense scents but this one is particularly delicious. And it will be added to the Reinvention Series and will be called simply "amBrosius".
We're in the process of compounding both these perfumes and should have them in the gallery by the weekend. And I hope to have them on the website sometime in very early August. It might seem somewhat strange to introduce an Amber scent in the middle of summer but frankly I love them on a hot summer evening. Perhaps it's memories of camping as a child but I find there are few things more appealing than the delicate waft of a rich smoky scent...
At any rate, those are the two new CB perfumes that are about to appear. As soon as I'm back at the end of July, I'll keep working on the others.