Sandalwood Again ["come with us now on a journey through time and space..."]

A couple of years ago, I very accidentally happened into some very vintage sandalwood oil. I'd bought a cute mini flask, green, corrugated glass, that I had plans to fill with something special. When it arrived, it was already full of liquid. A dab on my hand and a few long inhalations told me that this was sandalwood oil. Very old, probably from the 60s or 70s. It was, as I like to call it, the cosmic motherlode, and I love to imagine who used to own it and what his or her life was like at the time.

Silver Factory hijinks.

While my life is more The Mighty Boosh than Doctor Who (thankfully, yet regrettably), every once in awhile, I like to revisit the past and bring out that little flask. It now resides in a lovely deerskin medicine bag given to me by my beautiful friend and employer, Angela Shore, who creates spectacular oils for her brand Jiva-Apoha. Today was one of those blessed days. I put a dab of vintage on one hand, and a dab of Angela's sigh-inducing sandalwood she obtained from India last year, on the other hand. As per usual, I called in my husband to be the sniff-tester, and I took note of his reactions [he is a very gifted savant fragrance critic- I guess creativity is creativity, no matter how you slice, dice or roll it].

First, the vintage. Seventeen sniffs later, he said, "Powerful. Ripe, almost skunky. Dirty leather and dusty sex. Easy Rider with twice the drugs." That's a lot of drugs.

Lord Hopper on his low-rider.

Then, Angela's sandalwood. He measured his words more carefully this time."Gentler. Sweet. Godly."

Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree.

I totally agree. And do the scents represent the times from whence they came? Absolutely. And they are both wildly attractive to the point of obsession, as far as I'm concerned. They are both gifts from the earth, and when they're gone, there will be no more that is exactly the same.  So in the meantime, I will treasure every drop and allow myself to occasionally experience the sublime nature of real, precious sandalwood-- not the fragrance industry's estimation of what it should smell like. And the best part? The unleashing of my husband's unwitting genius in distilling the essence of fragrance in very few, pithy and mostly hilarious words. I often find the best inspiration to write about my own passions in the people and places that orbit in galaxies far, far away from fragrance. Even if they happen to sleep next to me at night.

Crimping for the greater good