Save My Nails (and My Nose)

Hey, glad you could join me again! As I’ve been out for a bit for a previous week or so, I don’t think this uploaded properly, so here goes. (plus a behind-the-scene photo of my (ignore the messiness) workspace)

After lots of smelling and some research and shopping online for materials, I’ve come down to a few final notes I plan to include in this fragrance. It’s coming along more slowly than planned due to an unforeseen learning curve; however, I think that if I have ample time, the process of the next few possible creations will be faster!

Some things that were harder than initially expected was taking of the dropper bottle corks without breaking my nails (two got broken) and smelling the scent of the oil on me for the rest of the day, keeping track of all the different notes I wrote about, and smelling the different notes apart when they were all on the same table.

Experimenting… 🧪

I used a pair of gloves to take out the corks so I could use 1 mL pipettes instead, but that didn’t stop the scent of the oils from traveling and sticking onto my clothes for days. Which actually may be a good thing, because then the lasting power/sillage shouldn’t be too bad for naturals!

I’ve been getting used to the original essential oils set, but what I realized was that even though generally I knew what smelled like what, it was hard to keep track of so many scents, and it became harder to differentiate them if I smelled more than a few in the same day (Lakenda recommended 10/day! I did break it down a bit more as I’m less experienced, but it’s a good amount to do). Following her and Yosh’s advice, I would write down what anything that came up in my head when I smelled the scent dropped onto the scent strip. Unfortunately this probably took longer than it should have.. oops! I didn’t realize it was more effective to drop the oils onto the thinner ends of the scent strips and write my notes on the thicker end until later, as before that I was dropping them on the thicker end and then writing on both the thin end and a sticky note attached to it (which easily fell off).

I got another smaller set of essential oils which I think I’ll be using more extensively than the first, as they smell higher quality/layer better, and correlate with the paintings’ themes more. Some notes inside it include sandalwood (this one I prefer over the original set’s sandalwood, it smells more like the authentic sandalwood smell I get from Chinese wooden sculptures/objects/fragrances), cedar, and leather. Honestly nothing really seemed to be coming together well before the arrival of this set as I wasn’t satisfied with how the notes smelled together, so I’m glad this set was able to add nice touches to the combination. Let’s see how it goes next week!

Until Next Time

I hope you enjoyed this update on my Senior Project. Thanks for sticking by!

See you later,

Alina : )