Elisabetta Del Re, boxer and gridiron football playerSA boxing champion, Australian silver medal holder, Adelaide Phoenix captain
Annette Edmosdson cyclist
two times World Champion , Team Pursuit World Record Holder , Olympic Medallist and a Commonwealth Champion Mariafe Artacho del Solar, beach volleyball playerAustralian and world champion and olympic hopefulits been really exciting, flying over with a photographer, staying in a hotel and doing the perfume consultations in interesting venues like the Botanical gardens!Talk about an amazing project! When i was first approached by their manager Shane Jones about doing a custom perfume design project with 3 young Australian sportswomen, I was a bit doubtful.I'm not a sports follower, and it wasnt a big money gig. But the more i got to know them, the more the idea began to fascinate me...Perfume, luxury and a silver medal in bike track racing dont normally go together.we associate perfume with girly girls. Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, and a whole slew of female actresses have perfumes marketed by big corporations.
These perfumes are the ones we all know from the shops. Cheap, mass produced things that are designed by focus groups and marketing analysts rather then perfume artisans. And they sell us a really narrow image of femininity that is tied to well, looking pretty, and being famous. The women these perfumes are promoted by, are not real people. They are the artificial star images, created and photoshopped by their management and PR teams. And so are their perfumes.
These Australian sportswomen by contrast, work their asses off for their passion. And unlike their male counterparts, they don't get huge corporate sponsership deals to support their efforts, in fact they all have real world jobs they work at on top of all day training sessions, weekend competitions, overseas trips....And part of the idea for the project is to showcase them and their achievements as women.What also fascinated me about this project, was that they had chosen "me" in particular, because not only am I one of the few existing indie perfumes who actually does custom design, I am also one of the few proffesional perfumers out here who works exclusively with botanical ingredients.It makes sense when you think about it, as athletes they need to pay attention to what they put on and in their bodies. Fresh, organic, no junk....their bodies are their business, so they need to be treated as temples and kept at their utmost best...So they want perfumes made from natural, eco friendly, healthy ingredients too!
Its a such a great perfume project, because there is no commercial focus dictating what i have to create.
Yes, the perfumes will be available to buy, but we're talking small batches here from a small indie perfume house. Not David Jones, we gotta please our investors style mass production.Real personal hand made luxury.The concept is to simply sit down with the 3 women, and design their own perfect fragrance. No constraints on making it a commercially viable product, no target market consultations, no pricepoint restrictions on the ingredients we choose.Just what each of these women dreams of as her own special personal bespoke perfume. Real, amazing women who are the kind of roll models I'd want my daughters to look up toAnd Real perfume. Natural oils, plant extracts, tree resins, the best of the best.And I get to give them one of the most feminine of luxuries: A perfume designed to fit who they are...with all their strengths, beauty and longings!What makes the project even more exciting is that I get to tell their stories in the process!Designing their perfumes means I have to get to know them, what they dream about, what makes them tick....a custom perfume is like a hand sewn dress, cut to fit perfectly...So we're making a scent doco of these womens journeys as we go along.stay tuned for more blogs about each of the individual perfumes!#realperfumeforrealwomen