Sheila Massetti

Alibi by Perfume & Skincare Company: Australia 2015

/ australianperfumejunkiescom / 2 Comments

Hey hey Crew,

You know how much I love Australian independent Perfumers. We are getting quite a few and I am always excited when they send me their newest releases. Recently I replenished my Gardenia by the Perfume & Skincare Company. I bought fragrance, soap and a candle. As you can tell I really love it a dirty blue cheese gardenia that combines all the creamy and fatty white flower gorgeousness with the rank and fecal. It smell exactly like gardenias off the bush, beautiful.

With it I got two new samples and today we will talk about the first….

Alibi by Perfume & Skincare Company: Australia 2015

Alibi by Sheila Massetti

There is no note list or picture on the site yet, just two sizes to buy, that’s how new and exciting Alibi is. So we will be walking blind together on my second wearing of Alibi.

Obviously I have no idea what this is supposed to smell like but imagine burying your face in a mink coat just out of cold storage while being dusted in baby powder by a naked, slightly sweaty man. Ha Ha Ha! It most reminds me of a softer version of M/Mink by Byredo, kind of gorgeous and disgusting. It’s true and real arm sniffing compulsion walking a knife edge between amazingly beautiful and stomach turningly gross. I am kind of hooked. To be honest I’m unsure whether I’d wear Alibi outside the house, it’s just too intense. In fairness, though I love M/Mink I would not wear it outside the front door either.

Alibi by Perfume & Skincare Company Black_cross_mink_fur_cape WikiCommonsPhoto Stolen WikiCommons

Remember too that all Perfume & Skincare Company fragrances are extrait strength with over 40% ingredients before the alcohol is added. You get a really beautiful and intense ride and the fragrances are spritzed. PERFECT!! It’s heady and hefty, great projection and has excellent longevity, I’m at around the 4-5 hour mark and still Alibi is as outrageous as when I first spritzed.

OK, so Jin came home and he told me I had to shower. It was too intense and slightly stomach churning for him, in our three years together the only other time this happened was with a Slumberhouse frag. Goodbye Alibi.

Alibi by Perfume & Skincare Company Bright Nude Man HaydenWeal PixabayPhoto Stolen Pixabay

Skincare And Perfume Company starts a $15/5ml

Sheila Massetti the perfumer sent me through this after I asked: “soft and powdery with a touch of musk and light floral”.  Any more and I’d have to give you the recipe.

If you are a serious, boundary pushing perfumista who likes to be fabulously outraged then Alibi could be for you. It could also be my skin chemistry and there may be a single note inclusion that doesn’t work for me. Try Alibi, it’s a ride and a half.

Portia xx

 

 

 

 

Gardenia Flower by Sheila Massetti for Perfume & Skincare Company

/ australianperfumejunkiescom / 15 Comments

Hi APJ,

Sometimes when I’m in the bath or shower I have to make a difficult choice, “Do I use this product and cut out a swathe of fragrances that will not be happy marriages, do I use this product and bugger the consequences or will I use something else” (yes, I know that my life is incredibly low stress and that I have my priorities skew whiff). This is a serious conundrum. I recently put a bar of the Perfume & Skincare Company Gardenia Flower Pure Vegetable Glycerine Soap in the bathroom and the next day Jin (who rarely mentions my bathroom choices for us) said it was his favourite so far. It’s soft and silky, quick foaming and leaven my skin feeling fresh but not tight, we use it on our faces and bodies. For only $8 it’s a complete bargain too.

It does mean though that I can not test fragrances after using it because I have a distinct smell of gardenia up to 3 hours after my bath. So I have been wearing a few white flower scents, especially the soaps companion…

Gardenia Flower Extrait by Sheila Massetti for Perfume & Skincare Company

I know I’ve written about this fragrance before but sometimes you all need to be reminded of things. Here is what I wrote in the previous post about the Perfume & Skincare Co range:
GARDENIA: Gardenia is one of the scents I am repeat applying, not only is it a killer soliflor fragrance that people “get” straight off the bat, but it is a huge compliment getter. Every time I wear it at least one person asks what, who, how and how much. One night I had 4 people do this. Now if you wear scent often you will know that 4 people in one night do not ask about fragrance that you are wearing, it was uncanny. If you love white flowers and gardenia especially, then this fragrance will be for you too.

Gardenia Flower Extrait Perfume & Skincare Company GreyerBaby PixabayPhoto Stolen Pixabay

What I know now that I did not know back then is that you cannot steal the fragrance from a gardenia, it needs to be recreated in the laboratory. Also, that many people try to do a gardenia but most of them simply do not understand how a real life gardenia smells. Sheila Massetti gets it. There’s the creamy, fatty facet: the petrol facet: the breath and shit facet, the bleu cheese facet, the sensual erogenous facet and a hundred other pieces to the puzzle. Gardenia Flower captures all of these and gives the closest photo realistic rendering of a gardenia I have yet found. Simultaneously clean and feral, divine and damned, Sheila Massetti has created the gardenia fragrance at the pinnacle of the heap.

Gardenia Flower Extrait Perfume & Skincare Company Nadir D'Onofrio FlickrPhoto Stolen Flickr

Perfume & Skincare Company has $10/5ml Sample Atomisers, $8/Pure Vegetable Glycerine Soap – 160g and a range of other great products.

Did I mention they are an Aussie company from New South Wales hinterland?

Portia xx

The Perfume and Skincare Company PERFUME GIVEAWAY

/ australianperfumejunkiescom / 35 Comments

Hey Hey Perfumistas,

We’ve been looking at The Perfume and Skincare Company from Australia this week; Monday we Interviewed Sheila Masseti and Tuesday we Reviewed PS&Co Fragrances (JUMP back to catch up if you missed them). We at APJ are so happy to have been able to bring you a new fresh Aussie perfume crew. What we thought we’d do for our P&SCo Perfume Giveaway is give you all a chance to win one of three sets of spray decant samples of the 5 Perfume and Skincare Company fragrances that we reviewed on Tuesday.

WOW!!!

Photo Stolen sassisamblog

How do you win? In the comments below you must leave then name of the P&SCo fragrance we reviewed that you think you’ll most love and the city/town in Australia where the P&SCo is located. EASY PEASY! 2 bits of information that could lead to 5 samples to try at home

How does it work? The draw is open to anyone in the world who follows this blog by email, RSS etc till 9pm Saturday 22.9.12 Australian EST that correctly includes the 2 items of information necessary. Yes, you may newly follow the blog to enter, email at the side of the page, RSS at the bottom, wordpress follow at top. All the names will be written on a piece of paper and TSO Jin will pick one three to get the packs. You must get in touch by 9pm Wednesday 26.9.12 Australian EST with your address details or I will give your prize to someone else.


Photo Stolen article.wn

If you Tweet or Facebook you will get and extra chance for each time you do the below
TWEET – @OzPerfumeJunkie https://australianperfumejunkies.com/ are having a GIVEAWAY!!!! Go get you some
FACEBOOK – https://australianperfumejunkies.com/ are having a GIVEAWAY!!!! Go get you some

Don’t forget to pop over and The Perfume And Skincare Company website too

Righto! There it is. Get to it and good luck to you all,
We’ll be looking for you tomorrow so till then, stay safe,
Portia xx

Perfume and Skincare Co. Australia Reviews

/ australianperfumejunkiescom / 17 Comments

Hey Hey Scent Addicts,

Yesterday we did an APJ Interview with Sheila Masseti if you’d like to meet the perfumer.

What is unusual about these Perfume And Skincare Company fragrances that are made in Australia by Sheila Masseti is that they have between 45-70% fragrant oils per volume. What does that mean to the regular person? It means more depth, character, longer lasting, more nuanced olfactory ride and best of all; you need use less to get an incredible fragrant experience. These amounts are double and above what you would get in a Parfum or Extrait level fragrance from the big players. The prices are beyond reasonable for the quality and you can get a great sample range for $10/5ml which is enough to get a real feel for the fragrance on your skin and won’t break the bank. Imagine having 5 new fragrances in extrait level to try for a week each for only AUD$50. Seriously great value!!

FIG & OLIVE: Fig & Olive is the P&S signature scent. Opening with fresh, green citrus it becomes a fuller, deeper and stronger version of my favourite fig, Un Jardin En Mediterranee by Hermes. There is the familiar broken leaf and branch, slightly salty olive and milky fig, it is an interesting sweet and sour bi-play that offers an absorbing frisson that I can get quite lost in smelling, it has some very definite herbaceous notes through the heart keeping it green and I can’t decide whether I’m getting spice or woods. Interesting and beautiful right through to dry down.

FORBIDDEN FRUIT: This is a huge sweet burst of fruit, I get pineapple, passionfruit and peach though the notes say blackcurrant and lemon, the oudh is extremely clean with the soapy orange flower and sandalwood. Staying power is excellent, I got nearly 7 hours of unrelenting fruit sweetness before I had to shower. Sorry but I can not imagine using this, it is so far from what I’d like to smell like that I can’t express properly how little I like it. If you like the fruity sweet fragrances though this is the one, it has everything you love in the other fragrances like it in bags, plus more interesting journey with real change as it matures on your skin, I wish I could have enjoyed the journey.

GARDENIA: Gardenia is one of the scents I am repeat applying, not only is it a killer soliflor fragrance that people “get” straight off the bat, but it is a huge compliment getter. Every time I wear it at least one person asks what, who, how and how much. One night I had 4 people do this. Now if you wear scent often you will know that 4 people in one night do not ask about fragrance that you are wearing, it was uncanny. If you love white flowers and gardenia especially, then this fragrance will be for you too.

GINGER MILK: Ginger Milk is my favourite of the selection sent. It has everything I want in a fragrance and if I wasn’t such a scent slut I think it would become my signature scent. Every time I put it on I am transported, even making the most embarrassing throaty moans on first application. It is quite linear, there is growth but it’s more circular than a story, going over the same few scents on slow, languid rotation and really does smell like spiced warm milky ginger tea. Almost gourmand, um what am I writing? This is Oriental Gourmand, from the east and delicious. The dogs try to lick it off me when I go out to them, that’s how good it is.

PINK PEONY: Pink Peony opens with a luscious fruit accord, the notes say peach and apricot but I get some citrus too, that is sweet but not like a fizzy fruit tingle or like a sugary sweet but piece of fruit sweet. Then I get a mild anise feeling mixed with a spicy white flower and something that may be peony but I wouldn’t know how a peony smelled if you held me at gunpoint and made me guess, even though I love them as cut flowers I can never recall the scent. Maybe the green-ish scent that comes through after about an hour is peony? Later on you notice the vanilla and sandalwood have been quietly taking over, still giving enough room for the flowers to show but the whole fragrance has warmed considerably. then it dires down to a sooft and mellow, nearly amber-ish vanilla that clings for ever.

Something else I really love about the Perfume And Skincare Company is their simple and elegant packaging and bottles. It all fits together in a really well thought out and stylistically simple extravagance, like it’s so good that it doesn’t need bells and whistles to make it stand out. Which is quite true. Do take some time to sample this wonderful Aussie range at The Skincare And Perfume Company.

Also, come back on Thursday because we have a wonderful GIVEAWAY!

Thanks for dropping by, we wish you the best of everything till we see you tomorrow,
Portia xx

Sheila Massetti of Perfume and Skincare Co. Interview

/ australianperfumejunkiescom / 11 Comments

Hey APJ Family,

Part of what I and EvieC wanted to do when we started this blog was to ferret out and show the world our emerging perfumers down here in Australia. We are far away from much of the world but our fragrance makers are doing some pretty inspiring, wearable, boundary pushing, affordable scents in the true niche historical context. Going for product over marketing and price.

So when Director, Perfumer and Product Formulator for the Perfume and Skincare Co, Sheila Massetti, from Robertson NSW gets in touch and offers to send some samples to APJ to have a sniff around with I was ecstatic. When those samples arrive as bottles I am overwhelmed. So I sent a few decants around the world to some of my blogging buddies, shared a few with my friends and I have been wearing 3 of the 5 fragrances sent quite a bit too.

We’ve asked a slightly tweaked version of the APJ questions and here is Sheila…

Give us a brief history, who was young you, important you defining moments or early fragrant memories that may have herded you towards the ever moving now and how did you become interested in becoming a perfumer?

I started my career as a Journalist – something that is now incredibly useful as it taught me the art of research, research, research.  My early fragrant memories have guided me into the Perfumes I now formulate.  Gardenia for my Mother off to a ball wrapped in swathes of white chiffon and smelling of Gardenias.  Ginger Milk for my Grandmother who used to make me a “homesickness” remedy with warm milk, honey, ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg.  Fig & Olive from a trip to Tuscany etc etc.
I did as I think a lot of little girls did and collected Rose petals, put them in a jar of water and left them for a few days to create my own Rosewater.

How did you get your education as a perfumer?

I trained as an Aromatherapist and discovered my interest in Perfume through blending Essential Oils but they were never enough.  Meeting up with the owner of a company which specialised in the production of Aroma Accords and Synthetics brought my dream to life and he helped me with the basic tenets of Perfume formulation.
Working with Synthetics gives me a much broader base on which to draw and I find them more stable with the ability to steer a fragrance from the “norm” to spectacular.
Training as a Perfumer is impossible in Australia so I became an Artisan Perfumer using my intuition and love of fragrance to steer me in the right direction.  My trips to France lead me to meet Perfumers from Chanel, Issey Miyake and Jean Paul Gaultier and I had the opportunity to work with them, or should I say “play with them”.  This furthered my technical knowledge but I still work from intuition.

Robertson Photo stolen ideal-sydney-getaways

Why did you want to come home and be a perfumer in Australia where the culture of ‘perfume’ seems somewhat limited?

Being a Perfumer in Australia is somewhat limited as the general perception is that “all Perfumers come from France”, but if you can get people to think outside the square they realise that this is not the case.

Do you have any inspirations in the perfume world?

My inspiration in the world of Fragrance would have to be Jean-Claude Ellena.  How could you not be smitten with him.

Do you have a favourite mass-market perfume?

My favourite mass market Perfumes are Tom Ford’s Black Orchid and Tobacco Vanille – very opposite in type but equally beuatiful.

What about a favourite independent perfumer and how have they influenced you?

I don’t have a favourite independent Perfummer as yet but I’m sure that will change.

What does your immediate future at Perfume and Skincare Co hold?

The immediate future of the Perfume & Skincare Company is affected by the market.  It is incredibly difficult to convince Wholesale Buyers to try something new when Retail stores are finding it hard enough (under the global financial situation) to get their customers to spend anything.  This is a situation which will improve over time and I forsee Retailers going back to a time when they want something new to tempt customers.  In the meantime we have our own Retail stores in the Southern Highlands and our Web Site which offers the chance to sample all the different fragrances.

Carrington Falls Photo Stolen sydney.com

I applaud Sheila for her push to bring the good juice to Australia. They ship worldwide and have a really terrific sample program, you won’t believe how reasonable their prices are for true niche extrait-plus strength fragrances. Do jump across and have a look at ThePerfumeAndSkincareCompany. Then come back tomorrow to have a look at our reviews for 5 of the fragrances they offer.

As always wishing you the best of everything till we see you tomorrow,
Love
Portia xx