Yardley is a fine traditional shaving soap, last made some decades ago, but still making a very fine and fragrant lather, with lavender being the predominant fragrance. Chiseled Face’s very nice brush with treated wood handle and synthetic knot, is as effective as it is handsome.
Three passes with the Fine aluminum slant, with its light weight reminding one to use a light touch, smoothed away the stubble, and splash of The Shave Den’s patchouli-rose.
And on fragrances in general, it’s interesting to see the rise of the artisan perfumer. Barbara Tannenbaum writes in Craftsmanship magazine:
Every August, Alberto Fernández travels to Northern Spain where his family owns some land in the mountainous region of Omaña. The land lies inside a United Nations-designated biosphere reserve whose natural flora include unusual plants that spill over to the open fields and roads leading into town.
Fernández forages the property for lavender, rosemary, tree barks, moss, and other leafy material to distill or grind into tinctures. Using beeswax from his family’s apiary, he creates a concentrated extract that perfumers call “an absolute.” In the village, he searches out wild-growing irises, culling pieces of large, fleshy roots called rhizomes. Once the roots have dried for at least three years, he grinds the material into fine powder. The result, tinctured in alcohol, “yields up a soft, violet scent,” Fernández says. “It’s a luxurious smell.”
I learned these details during a recent summer trip as Fernández and I sat cross-legged between rows of lavender at a small vineyard just outside of Barcelona. There, in the Catalonian wine country, my wife and I were tourists with fortunate timing. Mutual friends had just sent us a summons to help trim and gather the fragrant purple blossoms in this lavender field before they withered in the Spanish sun.
To describe the subtleties that are possible in hand-crafted perfume, Fernández reached into his backpack and retrieved a small vial labeled “Vernalia.” This scent, he said, was meant to capture that brief, seasonal moment when winter morphs into spring. Applying it, I smelled malty, wet vegetation beneath sweet springtime blooms. Most compelling, there was that unmistakable whiff of warming soil after spring’s first rain—a scent, I later learned, called petrichor.
Fernández was actually born and raised in London; he moved to Barcelona almost a decade ago, after graduating with a degree in Natural Sciences from the U.K’s Kingston University and a stint working in the sales department of Penhaligon’s, a venerable British perfume house established in 1870. Although he keeps a day job, working as a K-12 teaching assistant, making perfume the way it used to be done has become his passion.
To make his perfumes, Fernández often uses a process called enfleurage, a common technique of Victorian-era perfumers. For Vernalia, for example, he starts with fresh hyacinth and narcissus blooms purchased in a Barcelona flower mart. Because the scent of these delicate petals doesn’t survive modern methods of heat-based extraction, Fernández pours scent-free coconut oil into a small wooden chassis or glass container. (Any fat-based liquid that becomes solid at room temperature works.) He then presses the petals face down in the fat and lets it sit for 24 hours, or until the oil becomes saturated with fragrance.
“The amount of time depends on the flower and how intense a smell you want,” he says. “Take jasmine. The flower contains a natural chemical, indole. Press the flowers for one day, I find the smell very fresh and clean. Leave it two days or longer and the indole starts to emerge. That smells like moth balls to some. To me, it’s like animal skins and taxidermy. So you have to keep checking the mix.”
After returning from Spain, I was so taken by what I’d seen that I started looking into how perfumes are being made these days, and sold, in the U.S. To my surprise, I discovered a wide, incredibly varied world, where prices and reputations have little bearing on quality, and where myths and misconceptions abound. . .