The Scented Soap Opera, How Róisín Became a Natural Perfume
I went looking through an old Blogger archive recently and found something I had almost completely forgotten about; a scented soap opera I started writing on the 15th of January 2008, right at the beginning of my perfumery life and just before the Natural Perfume Academy began.
At the time I had started personifying perfume materials as I smelled them. They became people in my head, with personalities, habits, strengths, weaknesses and relationships. I found myself wondering who would get on with whom, who would overpower whom, who would disappear, who would last and who absolutely would not. Somehow it became a way of understanding how materials behaved together.
The story begins with three old brothers, Cepes, Blond Tobacco and Oakmoss, and then gets completely out of hand. There are three sisters, marriages, an affair with Frangipani, a French waitress called Bergamot, Ambergris behaving exactly as Ambergris should, an exploding boiler, some rather angelic neighbours, an elderly bookseller called Sandalwood, a lot of cooking and, eventually, the perfume that became Róisín. Pasted text Pasted text
I’m reading it pretty much as I wrote it. Some of it has aged. Some of it makes me cringe. Quite a lot of it makes me laugh so much I can hardly get the words out.
Underneath all the madness, though, there is something I still believe about perfumery. Materials have character. They dominate, soften, disappear, harmonise, overwhelm, support and sometimes surprise you completely. And you can use absolutely anything to help you compose a perfume: a story, a memory, a painting, a person, a place, tarot, astrology, whatever gives you a way into the materials.
What I hadn’t really understood until I found these old stories again was that I hadn’t created Róisín first and invented a story around her afterwards. The story itself gradually became the perfume. Ambergris, Sandalwood, Vanilla, Rose, Jasmine, Bergamot, Rosewood and Coriander all became part of Rose’s journey and eventually part of her formula. Pasted text Pasted text
So here it is, the scented soap opera, almost exactly as I wrote it in 2008.