Velvet and Sweet Pea's Purrfumery Launches With Line of Artisanal Natural Perfumes

EL CERRITO, Calif., Nov.1, 2006 – Velvet and Sweet Pea’s Purrfumery, a new natural botanical perfumery that aims to revive the legacy of the golden era of perfume through a blending of romantic scent and gorgeous packaging with a modern sensitivity to organics, health, and ethics, today launched its first line of high-end natural botanical perfumes, colognes, body oils and bath salts.

Laurie Stern, the artisanal perfumer behind Velvet and Sweet Pea’s Purrfumery, meticulously crafts each of her scents following a unique process that combines the practices of perfumers from ancient times to the Victorian era with her own innovative techniques. Stern named the business after two of her beloved cats, whose images are immortalized in the perfumes’ elaborate, fanciful packaging, and who can often be found lounging in her “perfumer’s garden” above San Francisco Bay, enveloped in the fragrance of the flowers that often end up in Stern’s perfumes.

The perfumes are available online at www.purrfumery.com. More than just an online boutique, the perfumery’s website serves as an extensive educational resource where Stern shares her expertise and love of perfume through photographs, guides, and tips, and through stories gathered from perfume’s rich lore.

Reading through the information contained on the perfumery’s website yields an idea of the many conscious decisions Stern has made to take Velvet and Sweet Pea’s Purrfumery in a somewhat different direction from the vast majority of perfumers. Stirred by the romance and mystery of the perfume production of bygone eras, from Cleopatra’s ancient perfumeries to the Victorian love affair with jasmines and roses, Stern’s methods and aesthetics harken back to the time before mass perfume manufacturing, while her commitment to ethical responsibility with respect to organics, personal and environmental health, and animal cruelty are planted firmly in the present.

For Stern, a former wedding florist and fashion designer, the Purrfumery represents a coming together of years of study and a wide range of passions: her love of flowers, of animals, of Victoriana, of collecting little jewel boxes and antique bottles, of making unique gifts, and of always making the time to rejuvenate and smell the roses.

And yes, she has long loved perfume as well.

“I used to like commercial perfumes until I really spent time working with the more subtle, complex scents of natural perfume oils,” Stern says. “Now I go into a store and my nose wrinkles. I know when I smell that stuff, it isn’t real.  Some roses have 400 chemical components, and they can synthesize about 50 to 75 of those, but not exactly. A synthetic perfume will use a small, small percentage of what you’d find in a true flower, and the rest is fake.”

Most commercially sold perfumes are manufactured using synthetic chemicals that are increasingly being discovered to cause illness or aggravate allergies and other sensitivities. “No one should have to question what is in the perfume that they’re putting on their body,” Stern says. “No one should have to wonder whether it’s safe, or whether it was made in an ethically and environmentally appropriate manner. No one should feel they have to choose between something natural and something luxurious.”

To this end, all Velvet and Sweet Pea perfumes are created from entirely natural constituents, blended in a base of organic grape alcohol or organic jojoba. Stern also uses as many organic, wild, and sustainably grown ingredients as possible in all her creations, so that each product ends up almost entirely organic.

Because of their purity, many of her perfumes appeal to even those people who are sensitive or allergic to synthetic scents. They exude a more subtle aroma than a blast from a bottle of typical mainstream perfume. Stern calls it a perfume’s “sillage,” a French word referring to a boat’s wake, or an airplane’s vapor trail. In perfume, it’s the cloud that surrounds the wearer. With natural perfumes, the wearer does not overpower a room with her entry, but instead makes her scent known with a close embrace.

Stern makes all of her perfumes by hand in small, carefully crafted batches.  The distinctive use of the word “botanical” is key to one of the core principles of the Purrfumery.  Many perfumers, even natural perfumers, use animal products such as civet cat musk or beaver castoreum in their perfumes.  When Stern, a longtime supporter of animal shelters and humane societies, discovered the appallingly cruel conditions under which these musks are “harvested” from the animals, she made the decision to forego the use of animal musks and fixatives in all the Purrfumery’s perfumes. 

Stern designates Velvet and Sweet Pea perfumes as “botanical” to indicate that only nature’s plant treasures -- flowers, fruits, seeds, leaves, and aromatic woods -- are used in creating the entire collection of perfumes, colognes, body oils and bath salts.   She makes sure to point out that her crème perfumes aren’t strictly vegan since they derive their silky texture from the incorporation of organic local beeswax.

One unusual aspect of Stern’s business is what she calls the “Perfumery Adventure.” She can perform this aromatic tour-de-force, a dynamic mixture of stories and scents, for a single client or for a classroom or an auditorium full of people, taking them on a journey through the history and origins of perfume and perfume materials, and educating them about the sensual, surprising, striking nature of scent.

Stern wants to educate people. Much as a boutique winery might walk a visitor through the history of a certain grape, and the particular growing season, Stern is likely to offer her insights into the osmanthus flowers that grow not only just outside her Perfumery’s doors, but also in a valley in China where for centuries they have been harvested and put into perfumes and tea cakes. Stern uses that Chinese osmanthus in her Narcissus Poeticus perfume, along with the rare and unusual oils of narcissus flower and violet leaf.

Stern’s own education came when she left the flower business six years ago, forsaking her former 18 hour workdays and searching for something new and meaningful. Her love of natural scents from flowers and plants led her to the world of perfume.  “The materials blew my mind,” she says. “I was awed to see how profoundly different scents affected my moods and I found myself drawn in by the mysteries of perfume creation and lore.”

She spent six years immersing herself in the world of perfume, collecting antique oils and perfume memorabilia, studying musty volumes, some 150 years old, drenching herself in the stories the scents had to tell. “It was the most delicious period of my entire life,” she says. “I could just experiment endlessly with hundreds of gorgeous materials.”

She kept diaries on every scent she smelled, documenting her observations and how each one made her feel. She learned about rose otto, a steam-distilled rose scent, and found a supplier from the Valley of Roses in Bulgaria, where the same families have grown roses for perfume for hundreds of years. Rose otto’s bouquet, she says, “is just the most calming and beautiful smell. It always makes me feel everything is going to be okay.”

Other scents compelled her; jasmine is “narcotic,” she says. “That’s the best way to describe it. You put it on and it’s intoxicating. It relaxes you and makes you feel beautiful and sensual at the same time.”

Boronia, a rare flower from Tasmania, and fragrant tuberose found their way into her Songbird perfume. “The songbirds were singing like mad outside the perfumery window when I made it,” Stern says. “I love wearing Songbird when I go out into the world, because something about the particular combination of sweet, spicy, and citrus always makes me feel confident and self-assured.”

She even found inspiration in her husband, Gary Lazar, a landscape architect and not a scent-wearer before she began experimenting with the scents of the land he loves. She now sells his favorite, Terrain cologne, made with the scents of the geraniums and citrus trees found in their garden.

Many of the plants in that garden end up integrated into Stern’s perfume creations. While many of the essential oils, absolutes, ottos, attars, tinctures and infusions she uses are sourced from all over the world, some of the ingredients Stern uses come right from her own “perfumer’s garden,” a scentmaker’s paradise she designed and brought to life. The garden’s colors and scents have long inspired Stern, and now it serves as a fragrant laboratory as well. 

One of the many innovations the garden has inspired is the incorporation into each perfume of a unique, house-infused alcohol base.  Rather than simply blending her ingredients into a base of plain perfumer’s alcohol, Stern uses a technique she developed through experimentation in her garden to infuse organic grape alcohol with flowers, spices, and even honey to create a base that complements and enhances the rest of the perfume. 

Stern’s artistic sensibilities, love of the past, and spirit of invention are everywhere in the Purrfumery. A package from Velvet and Sweet Pea becomes more than just a bottle of perfume. The crystal perfume bottles are from a small plant in France that’s been making them for 150 years; the jewel-topped sterling silver boxes for the crème perfumes were dreamed up by Stern and custom-made.  Stern’s background as a fashion designer and her love of Victoriana are reflected in the opulent packaging she designed; each bottle or jewel-top box comes in a silk purse or pouch bedecked with velvet flowers and rhinestone buckles.

One of Stern’s favorites from her treasure-trove of perfume memorabilia is a collection of Victorian scent cards, stiff paper cards printed with romantic pictures and florid advertising copy that perfumers of the time would douse with their scents and use to promote their wares.  So when Stern was designing her packaging, she knew each perfume would have to come with its own distinctive scent card, featuring whimsical designs that capture for her the spirit of an era when even the advertisements were little works of art. 

Velvet and Sweet Pea’s Purrfumery offers a variety of products, including liquid and crème perfumes, colognes, massage and body oils, hydrosols and bath salts for a home spa.

For more information, visit www.purrfumery.com.