extractions, etc.

[Mr.P]

May have mentioned it before, but mostly been awaiting results on tinctures and extracts. Madrona, local tree mosses, and many ester experiments, but in a holding pattern there, along with seconds run on year old Madagascar vanilla, all pretty rote.

Otherwise, basic work, sourcing blending stock, doing blends and discussing on perfumery chats, working on tooling to make tracking of formulas and materials tracking and planning, gcms naturals matching and reverse engineering, etc. we're ina golden era of purpose built self made tooling without any skills required


For novel work, been looking into papers about lacasse.for it's ability to unlock oils from wood matrices as an option for yield increase in distillation. Some papers show promise, but spending moq for 1kg when I need like 20g has me in a... Do more research to ensure value pattern

"we're ina golden era of purpose built self made tooling without any skills required"

this is an interesting statement, I certainly think I understand but I would be curious if you could elaborate a little we're ina golden era of purpose built self made tooling without any skills required

Sounds like you're up to a lot and interesting stuff as well, deep down the rabbit hole. Would you be willing to share a little bit more about your interest /engagement /history with fragrance?

 

[Mr.P]

I always open the app with the latest posts page and skip the topics i don't really care about. Doesn't bother me they are there because i don't have to open or read them. So i wouldn't worry about posting on a topic with a bunch of follow-ups that may not be anyones cuppa tea as they can easily skip them. There's a constant pressence of guest visitors clicking on some google search result, that may find just what they were looking for in one of those threads and happily move on with their experiments without further engagement. So engagement is not a good gauge for value per se.
I think it's fun to read about experiments and the underlying thought process. It's inspiring. Specially after failure number x and in need of a boost to keep trying. It sparks ideas like to try find some botanical that wasn't on the radar before.
And yes it would be nice to have more 'tinkerers' around indeed🙂

Glad to hear it, I also get a boost when I see others posting about their experiments... I enjoy this as an individual endeavor but some degree of authentic collegiality is important to me.

I'm very fortunate that I met a neighbor who is retired paleontologist, spent his life unearthing Tyrannosaurus, triceratops, all kinds of dinosaurs… he is fascinated with all types of natural foraging, extracting, for fragrance and medicinal use etc. and this is motivating for sure.

 

[roflwaffle]

if you could elaborate a little we're ina golden era of purpose built self made tooling without any skills required

Sorry for dancing around it. Ai is awful and obnoxious in a lot of ways, however, it excels at building tooling, web uis, apps, etc. rather than finding someone else's vision of an app, you can just tell so in plain terms what you had in mind and it builds it. Ive used it for custom-to-my-needs webapps for browsing and rating wine auctions, for managing planning for a home remodel, for perfumery formula trials and stock management and price/source tracking, and all sorts of different hobby things. Even for home automation controls running on eink screen for a smooth, custom integration, I don't know how to do that, but in a few hours, it just worked, from scratch.

Now, it's pretty garbage at actually making formulas, but it can build you a tool to reverse engineer gcms and match to naturals, or analyize gcms for alterations or adherance to other examples or any specific thing you could dream of. build the tool and leave ai out of the actual loop. Anyway, it def lowers the bar for coding for tooling. I wouldnt trust it deployed out to the net, it's terrible for security, but now if you can dream up a tool, you can have it, exactly to your needs, and I think that's neat.

 

[roflwaffle]

Would you be willing to share a little bit more about your interest /engagement /history with fragrance?

Bit of a hobby jumper, but historically come from an interest in distillations, local foraging, home chemistry, crafting, gardening, etc. fragrance kinda the designer -> clones -> diy -> oud/naturals pipeline. Oud is still fairly new ground to me, but it's interesting.

 

[Mr.P]

Bit of a hobby jumper, but historically come from an interest in distillations, local foraging, home chemistry, crafting, gardening, etc. fragrance kinda the designer -> clones -> diy -> oud/naturals pipeline. Oud is still fairly new ground to me, but it's interesting.

Very nice.

 

[Mr.P]

Sorry for dancing around it. Ai is awful and obnoxious in a lot of ways, however, it excels at building tooling, web uis, apps, etc. rather than finding someone else's vision of an app, you can just tell so in plain terms what you had in mind and it builds it. Ive used it for custom-to-my-needs webapps for browsing and rating wine auctions, for managing planning for a home remodel, for perfumery formula trials and stock management and price/source tracking, and all sorts of different hobby things. Even for home automation controls running on eink screen for a smooth, custom integration, I don't know how to do that, but in a few hours, it just worked, from scratch.

Now, it's pretty garbage at actually making formulas, but it can build you a tool to reverse engineer gcms and match to naturals, or analyize gcms for alterations or adherance to other examples or any specific thing you could dream of. build the tool and leave ai out of the actual loop. Anyway, it def lowers the bar for coding for tooling. I wouldnt trust it deployed out to the net, it's terrible for security, but now if you can dream up a tool, you can have it, exactly to your needs, and I think that's neat.

Aha! I wasn't sure what you meant by the word tooling!

I think the technology is amazing it's just not being presented or used in quite the right way yet. To me it represents the first fundamental change in the human / computer interface since the mouse. I wish it was mainly integrated into the operating system of my phone not as a gatherer of information but as a way to communicate my intent.

i'm very excited for these LLM's as a way to facilitate communication and inquiry, something to facilitate access to quality information but not to provide the information itself.

 

[roflwaffle]

something to facilitate access to quality information but not to provide the information itself.

Exactly. It makes for a terrible source of information, and it's easier for a human to validate a tool does what's expected and have it correct, vs catching incorrect statements of fact. It's also pretty great at writing scrapers, so you can bring external data into your system. Want to grab all naturals from your favorite 6 shops, link them up by natural and compute each's cost/g? Ezpz.

And great at firmware like if you wanted to have your still auto temp control or cut off or alert at diff milestones for cuts or whatever, ai could plan all of that fairly trivially, or the sky is the limit. Esp32s with Bluetooth and wifi are like $2, so you can do a ton for nothin

 

[Mr.P]

Super interesting. using it to help program micro controllers is a great application

 

[Mr.P]

We will see how things go but thanks to some real collegiality from a motivated/curious neighbor I am anticipating a good run of distillations and extractions over the next couple of months.

Currently Nicotiana alata is starting to flower, this is the variety of tobacco that is pollinated by moths and produces long tubular extremely fragrant flowers, with a lily like aroma. Depending on how many flowers are available at one time I may have no option but to accumulate a collection of dried flowers for later extraction as opposed to doing a batch of fresh flowers. The flowers have fragrant resin on them just like the leaves so I imagine an extract of the dried flowers would be like a sweetened variation on the traditional tobacco absolute. This variety is low in nicotine so a safer one to work with than the other types of tobacco that I'm also growing (burley and Aztec).

I have almost finished collecting and drying the clary sage, I am very excited about this one can't wait to add a resinoid of this material to my collection of absolutes and distilled oils.

I have several large elecampane plants in flower - I discovered last year that waiting until autumn to harvest the roots is probably not the best approach. These are beautiful because they make something with an aroma like orris and maple but you don't have to wait five years for the dried rhizomes to cure. A truly excellent material and there aren't any real equivalents in the other naturals. Like costus, some people develop a skin irritation so it's not used in IFRA cosmetics at all. Used to be more commonly available in the 90s...

I'm also interested in trying to capture the aroma of hay scented fern - the patches in my yard have been expanding, and I should have enough to harvest soon. They have this very diffusive light sweet cucumber like aroma that might be something I could extract with a distillation over alcohol.

One of these days I would like to try some extractions with hydrocarbons but for now it seems a little too risky and I'm not sure it's legal to do at a residential address anyway. For example New York State cannabis law says you can extract cannabis with alcohol at your home but it is illegal to extract it with hydrocarbons or anything else.

The main area that I'm excited about though are more variations on the distilled colognes, but moving away from the traditional bergamot, lavender, rosemary, neroli complex and working instead with novel and local materials to make a completely different type of fragrance using the same codistillation methodology.

The nature of production of colognes limits somewhat the materials that can be selected for the initial stage which is a relatively low temperature (~80C) distillation over alcohol - it never gets hot enough to effectively distill materials whose core aroma comes from heavy molecules like sesquiterpenes. This initial distillation produces a very ephemeral top note bouquet, which then has to be matched with a more enduring collection of oils added after distillation to give some duration to the fragrance.

So I'm really fascinated to see what I can find locally that could contribute lots of volatile top notes. The local variety of szechuan pepper was my first experiment. There are a variety of evergreens nearby including white pine, Hemlock, fir, juniper, dawn redwood, larch that might be appropriate for that initial distillation.

 

[Nathan]

For novel work, been looking into papers about lacasse.for it's ability to unlock oils from wood matrices as an option for yield increase in distillation. Some papers show promise, but spending moq for 1kg when I need like 20g has me in a... Do more research to ensure value pattern

I've been looking into this recently for treating ingredients for incense. I started a (very quiet) invitation-only forum some time ago for experienced incense makers, and I got an application to join from someone who read my blog. To verify they're not a complete beginner, they sent over a document of some writing they had done on a Chinese forum, which I put through Google translate. The document contained information on using laccase, its mechanism of action, and using other enzymes such as cellulase, glycosidase, protease, and amylase to break down various components that produce acrid notes in the burn. Ever since I read this, I've desperately been trying to find these enzymes. Apparently they are cheap in China, but here in the USA, they seem to be very difficult to find and very expensive.

I haven't been able to have a proper conversation with this person as they've been busy traveling and haven't managed to follow through and join the forum yet lol. I'm dying for want of more info on this, and to try it out. If anyone manages to source some of these enzymes, maybe a few of us who are interested could split the cost and take a little each to experiment with.

 

[roflwaffle]

If anyone manages to source some of these enzymes, maybe a few of us who are interested could split the cost and take a little each to experiment with.

It's a very cheap product, the problem is there's a 1kg MOQ, so the floors about $80-100 for 1kg shipped (yea from china, there is a US supplier but 1kg MOQ as well, and they just bought it from china). Far more than I'll ever use, but a small quantity for the normal users of laccase. One could prob ask for smaller samples for the cost of shipping from these producers, but yea, I was just going to suck it up and order 1kg. I'd certainly be happy to share the cost load if others are interested in experimenting with it if we can figure out a way to make it make sense.

 

[MaxFromHolland]

The main area that I'm excited about though are more variations on the distilled colognes, but moving away from the traditional bergamot, lavender, rosemary, neroli complex and working instead with novel and local materials to make a completely different type of fragrance using the same codistillation methodology.

I think it is very appealing to reduce something from elsewhere in the world to its conceptual form and then rebuild it with local material. Its something that lingered in the back of my mind as a vague idea. Lack of knowledge of the scents hidden in many of the local botanicals mostly..

 

[Nathan]

I'd certainly be happy to share the cost load if others are interested in experimenting with it if we can figure out a way to make it make sense.

Where are you in the world? I'm definitely interested.

 

[Mr.P]

This documented perfume process is something I've been doing intensely for three years now although I also had a line back in the 90s that were sold in the Seattle Asian Art Museum teahouse for a while there. Long gap of nothing but undocumented layering, literally nearly three decades. It's been super fascinating building up an understanding of controlled blending itself. Unbelievably challenging for me to be honest especially the first two years coming back to it after the gap, not something really subject to flights of fancy or playful intuitive discoveries and simultaneously not reflecting any real mastery of the Art of blending itself. It was kind of like groping around in the dark even though I know the raw materials I use like the back of my own hand, literally. now I happen to enjoy groping around in the dark, i'm not complaining and it was a FUN process but each step took multiple trials it seemed. A beautiful puzzle that I had no real strategy for.

What is fascinating is now that I have accumulated a wide number of basic perfumes of my own formulation that I'm happy with and understand (and the various bases that were developed part of the way in their construction), it's a whole new type of experimentation and creating new things from a carefully balanced base or bouquet is an entirely different endeavor than working with the raw materials themselves. It's kind of a surprising shift that I did not anticipate and something to look forward to if you are early in your journey; this might be obvious to others, but I feel I could've leap-frogged ahead a little faster if I had been tuned into this from the beginning.

it feels like a step towards a slightly more creative and relaxed freeform approach... not yet really drawing on personal mastery but by building on strong bases and adjusting their ratios to one another, simple layering experiments can suddenly result in complex balanced formulas with distinct aromas and reflecting a sort of personal signature

On a related note I'm 100% convinced that the baffling complexity of many posted perfume formulas that have dozens and dozens of lines simply reflect the fact mature businesses are blending with bases that have each been developed step wise over who knows what kind of time., and so a single "ingredient" that a perfumer is working with may be adding dozens of different essential oils or aroma chemicals. Took me a while to tune into the significance of this.

Working longer term to modify and combine and adjust bases or perfumes that I consider successful is super gratifying and a very different experience from what the early few years were like. I think in any type of discipline as you apply yourself you end up having times of rapid growth in understanding and plateaus where the only way to progress is by grinding and grinding. Musical instruments can be like this… Maybe everything is.

 

[roflwaffle]

On a related note I'm 100% convinced that the baffling complexity of many posted perfume formulas that have dozens and dozens of lines simply reflect the fact mature businesses are blending with bases that have each been developed step wise over who knows what kind of time., and so a single "ingredient" that a perfumer is working with may be adding dozens of different essential oils or aroma chemicals.

I'm not sure I understand this portion. Professional perfumers generally do not work from blended accords or single ingredients being groups of items across products. I mean sure, with the rise of the 'flanker', they almost do, by essentially forking a formula and swapping out top notes for something else or generally working from an established formula, but conventional perfumery has for at least 100 years generally used a metric ton of ingredients in the blend. Shalimar has 41 aromachemicals added one by one in compounding. I'm sure some blend up their own groupings and use that as an aid in balancing out, but I think thats more of just a bench method trick, same idea as Jean Carles method, just a method to balance materials in a sort of binary tree type way. Now, maybe the sheer number on average has gone up, as many are certainly above 60 at this point, but I think its more of a mental model 'oh I added Hedione, I should prob consider toss in a bunch of Iso E as well', or even 'i'll start with a Grosjman accord to fill up some bulk and round it out' but I don't think they're blending up a literal grosjman and adding that as one ingredient. Maybe some do, but thats not been how its been described by those perfumers that do actually talk through their craft.

I do see a pretty common argument on basenotes about amateur perfumers who compose by accord vs those that do not, likely as heated and contentious as the naturals only vs synths are gud debate. 🙃

I think my main takeaway is the point about flankers.. Perfumery is expensive and time consuming to get right, and it's relatively cheap and easy to just spit out flankers with different top notes or subtle differences to 'remix' it into a whole 'new' product.

It is certainly a different mindset than working with naturals, where even the selection of *which* patchouli is its own thing, and it comes with a symphony of notes, but you get what you get and have limited options to surgically 'fix' or 'add' minor touches of things. Its doable, certainly, but less options than 'just add a 1/10 percent of zingerone for a bit more ginger oomf'

 

[Mr.P]

I'm not sure I understand this portion. Professional perfumers generally do not work from blended accords or single ingredients being groups of items across products. I mean sure, with the rise of the 'flanker', they almost do, by essentially forking a formula and swapping out top notes for something else or generally working from an established formula, but conventional perfumery has for at least 100 years generally used a metric ton of ingredients in the blend. Shalimar has 41 aromachemicals added one by one in compounding. I'm sure some blend up their own groupings and use that as an aid in balancing out, but I think thats more of just a bench method trick, same idea as Jean Carles method, just a method to balance materials in a sort of binary tree type way. Now, maybe the sheer number on average has gone up, as many are certainly above 60 at this point, but I think its more of a mental model 'oh I added Hedione, I should prob consider toss in a bunch of Iso E as well', or even 'i'll start with a Grosjman accord to fill up some bulk and round it out' but I don't think they're blending up a literal grosjman and adding that as one ingredient. Maybe some do, but thats not been how its been described by those perfumers that do actually talk through their craft.

I do see a pretty common argument on basenotes about amateur perfumers who compose by accord vs those that do not, likely as heated and contentious as the naturals only vs synths are gud debate. 🙃

I think my main takeaway is the point about flankers.. Perfumery is expensive and time consuming to get right, and it's relatively cheap and easy to just spit out flankers with different top notes or subtle differences to 'remix' it into a whole 'new' product.

It is certainly a different mindset than working with naturals, where even the selection of *which* patchouli is its own thing, and it comes with a symphony of notes, but you get what you get and have limited options to surgically 'fix' or 'add' minor touches of things. Its doable, certainly, but less options than 'just add a 1/10 percent of zingerone for a bit more ginger oomf'

sounds reasonable, I truly don't know much (that's an understatement) about what is typically done by professional contemporary perfumers!