Sweet Pea Season

The sweet peas are at their peak now, producing armloads of flowers for bouquets. My Mom gets many more in her garden than I do because she has the perfect spot in full sun for them and they’ve naturalized there. We cut the flowers to keep them blooming as long as possible and then let them go to seed for next year. It’s fun to have these beautiful, strongly scented flowers that just return on their own each year. I’ve not found a true sweet pea perfume even though I’ve tried a few that people swear by, but the flowers are even more of a treat because there’s nothing manmade that is very similar to me.

I tried a few more options for the Ambre Noir reformulation, but so far I still like #14 the best, which is the same as the one I started with but just a bit less clove. I decided not to use that extra rose ingredient I tried.

I tried the beeswax absolute in Gardenia Musk and think it’ll be nice. I hope to have time to work on the gardenia today — I’m making progress. I have an interesting quote I’d like to post from a technical paper about gardenia in perfumery. I’ll try to post that soon.

So good to have internet back to speed!