Bases I think the major bugaboo among the more snooty perfumers (if that's what we can call them), especially in the club is that it's somehow cheating to use bases. Some of the new fragrances that have hit the market are nothing more than old fragrances that have had new materials added to them to create a variation on the original. In short, they've used the original as a "base" on which to build a totally new perfume. With the public wanting newer and more original fragrances, the pressure to produce them in shorter lengths of time requires the use of premade bases as starting points, saving months of experimenting. The public is familiar with the basic fragrance groups and using these base groups as starting points, the perfumers can crank out variations in jig time, and under budget, which has shrunk to less than a third of what it was ten years ago, hence the use of more and more aroma molecules. As Luca Turin said in his book, the budget used to be anywhere from 200 to 500 Euros a kilo for the base, from which the finished product was made. Now, it's more like 100 Euros a kilo. It's no longer the perumers that control the creativity, but the accountants, paring every excess cost off the budget. Sandalwood is so expensive now that overharvesting has brought the Indian trees to the verge of extinction. So Givaudan analyzed the molecular structure of the oil and came up with their own version "created" molecule. The cost? Less than one fiftieth of the natural, and of consistant quality every time. Some of the cost cutting creations have made creating fragrances cheaper, but at the cost of the complexity of the fragrances. The Sandalwood from Givco is great, don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't have the nuances of the natural. But what the hell, the general public can't tell the difference between the two so they use the synthetic. If they did use the natural, the finished cost of the product would make it prohibitively expensive. What exacty is a base? Let's say that you love Geranium but you'd like it to smell a little more green, perhaps a tad more spicy, and just a bit exotic. Then you'll add some violet leaf for the green component, some pepper or clove, for the spicy note, and a bit of frankincense for the exotic smell. Now this becomes your interpretation of what Geranium should smell like. This, in effect, becomes your Geranium "base". It entails a lot of work, every time you want to add your Geranium note to a fragrance, to drag out all the components just to add that one note to a blend. By making the bases for the notes, as you want them to smell, you save a lot of time, and the results will free you to be more experimental. It's a given, that this is the way you want Geranium to smell, and every time you add your base to a fragrance, the results will be consistant. Perfume houses use this system all the time. Caron has their own signature rose note, as does Guerlain, Dior, Laroche, and so on. If you smell their fragrances, you'll see that the rose note, in each, is slightly different. In one, it's slightly musky; in another, a bit more spicy; still, in another, a bit more citrusy. In your case, this will be your signature note that will enable any man who smells one of your blends to instantly know that it comes from you and no one else. So, in the end, you're tailoring your perfume organ to reflect your own personal interpretation of how certain elements should smell. And each time you use these element bases in your blends, you'll be cutting out some of the work you have to do to arrive at that point. It's a kind of fragrance shorthand. I have a Fougere base that I use all the time. When I'm blending something and I want to add a fougere note, rather than dragging out the various oils that make up that element, all I have to do is add the base, drop by drop, til I have just the right balance. __________________
