Hi everyone! This is Release Notes. 

This monthly newsletter is my way to reconnect with all of you and share what I’ve been working on since closing Ceylon in Summer 2024. I have a few new projects in motion that touch on my interests in art, fragrance, wine, and spirits. I’ll share more details about each of them as they go live. 

PB-Two

PB-Two is my consulting practice which helps companies bring personal care products to market. It's a way to share my deep expertise while keeping my creative energy in motion. For those wondering, you'll find that much of what was good about Ceylon's products manifested through some of the practice’s upcoming client work and in some instances, there might be good replacements for long-gone, much-loved products. 

Do you have a project you’d like for me to help you build? I’m taking new clients this summer, so please reach out if you have something in mind.

PB-Two also operates as a product laboratory, producing small-batch projects as creative explorations and testing environments for future client support. I also write occasionally. The first of these explorations is in fine fragrance. Why fragrance?

Fragrance

IAO Awards

I recently had an opportunity to be a judge for the finals of the Art and Olfaction Awards, which is a major global competition to “raise interest and awareness for independent perfumers, artisan perfumers, and experimental  practitioners with scent on an international scale.” Last year, I judged the ‘Experimental’ category, which was incredibly fun. This year, I judged the ‘Artisan and Independent’ category. In both instances, the experience was incredibly challenging. While all of the scents featured in the competition achieved varying degrees of success in their attempts to articulate both abstract and more concrete ideas, I kept questioning my own capacity to thoroughly and fairly assess each one. More than anything, learning how to balance a more technical understanding of what makes a ‘successful’ scent with an appreciation for more difficult or unfamiliar ideas continues to push the boundaries of my thinking on the category.

The Institute of Art and Olfaction (IAO) is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit dedicated to access, education, and experimentation in perfumery and olfactory art. For those of you interested in learning more about scent, I highly encourage you to get involved by taking one or a few of their excellent in-person and online courses. My journey in fragrance started with an “Open Session”, blending all sorts of materials in an open format, playing around with abstract concepts.

Gardening Leave 

After closing Ceylon, I wanted to revisit the brand’s Eau de Parfum scent and managed to find a small quantity of the oil that had been ‘aging’ under refrigeration, making it a bit more intense. “Gardening Leave” is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the idea of tackling that project again. Putting this together required making some slight adjustments to the formula for stability and it is only available in a 50 mL bottle, which is substantially larger than the 8 mL “travel size” previously available. There are only 45 units and I likely won’t make another batch.

Buy it here.

A New Brand (Launching September) 

Through my art company Goliath, I’m also launching a new brand at the intersection of fine art and fragrance. Conceptually, it references Marcel Duchamp’s “Belle Haleine, Eau de Violette”, which plays at the tension arising from the line between an art object and an everyday commercial object after the artist’s intervention.

Wabi (coming 2027)

Next year, PB-Two will release another studio fragrance called “Wabi”. I see “Wabi-Sabi” thrown around a lot in design/creative endeavors and I think it’s an interesting way of approaching creative development. Using it as a framework for scent development seems like a worthwhile experiment. Doing so is actually quite high-risk, primarily because we have a tendency to prefer wearing sweeter, less difficult scents and there’s no guarantee that the resulting fragrance will end up being palatable in that way. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, “Wabi-Sabi” references a Japanese perspective that finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness. So, the prompt pushes back on some of the conventions we might typically expect in perfuming.

It is also primarily inspired and based on this playlist and the general idea of letting something external and ephemeral guide you as well as accepting any imperfections that arise from the process. The mindset essentially is, “listen to this playlist on shuffle and interpret what it makes you feel into note selection and structure. There are no mistakes and every imperfection is by definition perfect.” I’m still primarily interested in bringing unique ideas or perspectives into creative processes, so we’ll see how this goes.

Further Reading

Here are a couple of books that I think are good introductions to the fragrance world from two completely different yet equally interesting angles.

Essence & Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume by Mandy Aftel

The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York by Chandler Burr

The Institute of Art and Olfaction’s Reading List is also a great resource for discovering more texts on the topic.

If you got this far, thank you. How are you all doing? Feel free to reply directly. Otherwise, I hope you all are having a great start to summer.

Go take a class at the IAO! 

See you next month. 

Patrick