My Quest for perfection is bogging me down.....I was supposed to be taking part in Monica Miller's wonderful perfume project around the 5th Sacred Thing..."Primordial Scents 2012"
A Challenge to design perfumes around one or more of the 5 Elements, Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit...
A Project really close to my heart as a) I love and adore Starhawks book "The 5th Sacred Thing" and b) designing scents around the elements is what got me started in perfumery in the first place....
but Life this year has been pretty....emotional. Upheavals, depression, relationship changes and other stuff have been either dragging me away from my workshop or making me too tired and confused to focus properly....
Plus I was stupid enough to want to make a full set of scents, covering all the Elements.
"Should be easy", I thought, after all I used to actually make and sell Magickal Oils along these lines...
But when I actually sat down with my old recipes and starting looking at them properly, it dawned on me that my skills have come a long way since then...and that what may be a perfectly apt blend as say, a FIRE oil, does not translate as easily into a wonderful perfume! I mean, you gotta look for longevity, wearability, generlal wonderfulness and all there...
So I began to rework the formulas...and the collections of little sample bottles for each element got larger and larger....
Whether it was the sheer magnitude of what I was trying to achieve, or the muddled self doubting mess in my head over the last few months, nothing seemed to be good enough. Time rolled on, the deadline grew closer and closer, and I became almost paralized with indecision. And finally gave up, took a job contract for 2 months to get away from the house and the dramas, and left behind my project bottles unfinished...Now I'm back, brain heart and soul refreshed from 2 months out in the desert, the project is rolling out, and I'm sitting in my workshop staring and sniffing my little bottles. And here is the big question:
Do I just stop dithering, pick the best out of each lot and send 'em off to Monica? Or do I give in to my need to have them "just right" and thereby miss out on the project alltogether?
I have a pretty damm good "Air" that is like a fresh seaside breeze, with tads of seaweed and driftwood in the background...I have a very watery "Water" that I'd love to fiddle with to make it a wonderful perfume as well as a great representation of the element...my "Fire" again is very firey rather than perfumey...and I'm tempted to send in my "Love Potion" which is applied Fire incarnate and maybe PAN as the ultimate Earth elemental...but is it acceptable to add to older perfumes to the set?
Both of these are great perfumes...whereas the Fire and Earth in my experiments are primordial rather than rounded perfumes....arrrggghhh!!!!!!!!!
