In my customary manner I decided to bulldoze my way through this cold and even though I’m still a bit blocked I don’t care I started back evaluating this morning. Enough’s enough.
With that I began exploring the Leather family, but since I’ve already evaluated Cedarwood Atlas for the Wood family and as there are only so many hours in a day I decided to explore this family using other notes not part of the school syllabus: Birch Tar rectified, Tobacco Absolute, Rock Hyrax and an Ambergris tincture from Profumo.it. I’ll have an update on those next week. This week I’ll continue to share my impressions of the various Families starting with the Aromatic and the Powder.
During the time off I immersed myself in my online Photoshop Mastery course where I’m getting a really good lay of the land and have tried my hand at editing a few of my photos. I just love Photoshop! It’s such a behemoth of a program that there will always be something to learn. Fun things learned is how to turn images into B&Ws, correct the colour and feel confident about taking pics in RAW. There’s no going back now.
I also took myself and my friend off to Florence for the day for her birthday. We ended up in a very well known leather school in the heart of the city which sits cheek to jowl to the monastery instrumental in its founding. Entering the quiet atmosphere we breathed deeply that warm, luxurious smell of leather and felt a thrill that any self respecting woman with a healthy shoe and bag fix would understand. Ahhh, leather! Our jaws got a lot of exercise as we brought each other up to date on our lives, then went to the most excellent steak restaurant in Florence (imho), I say this because we got some very nice comments on our fine taste in restaurants from the locals who know and prize the place highly. There we really gave our molars something to sink into with a 1.2kg steak between the two of us! Yum-mmy! Left overs were not wasted as they were brought back for Charlie, who I’ve no doubt was very happy.
A city is olfactively alive, this I learned on my week “off”. Yep, training and learning perfumery shouldn’t stop just because we’re out of the lab. Now I can add the smell of peppery steaks, wet cobblestones and leather to my own personal olfactive library of Florence.
What does your city smell like?
Her Two Scents 