Maxed Out

The scent The artist The inspiration Try a sample first!  One day, perfume Sarah McCartney was talking to her friend Maximilian Heusler about his ideal perfume. He imagined something wild--really wild, like his old nights out in New York. Inspired by the conversation, McCartney created Maxed Out, a dirty, seductive, I-know-what-you-did-last-night sort of scent that draws in the nose like an addiction. Thanks to the drop of cumin, Maxed Out smells appealingly human, but we're referring to a human who has been up to some naughty things. Maxed Out is part of perfumer Sarah McCartney's Crimes of Passion series, and it was nominated for Best Indie Scent of 2015 by the Fragrance Foundation. Notes include rum, coconut, lime, tobacco, coffee, cannabis essential oil, vintage musks, vanilla, cumin, and Atlas cedar.    We've met a lot of people in the perfume world, and Sarah McCartney of 4160 Tuesdays is one of our very favorites. Want to know why? Sarah, in her own words: "As a little girl, I did not make perfumes from rose petals. That was for softies. I made magic spells and wanted to be a witch when I grew up. When I was 16 I bought a bottle of Diorella. I studied maths and sciences, practised music and French, wrote books on brands and their evil twin—counterfeiting—and online marketing, and learned to dance Argentinean tango. For 14 years I was the head writer for Lush while the company grew from four shops—one in Poole and three in London—to 700 worldwide. I was writing 50,000 words every three months for the Lush Times, aiming to encapsulate the products' scents in their descriptions. During that time, I bought and read 200 books on essential oils and herbalism and learned the essential oils the founders gave me to educate myself. At the end of the 14 years, I took some time off to write a novel featuring a problem-solving perfumer. In it, I described the scents that she made and I wanted to have them available for people to smell. So I set off on a quest to see if I could buy them. This turned out to be impossible - and pretty expensive - because no one was making exactly what I wanted, so I started another quest to see of I could make them instead. Of course that turned out to be even more difficult, but once I'd started, I just kept going. 4160 Tuesdays perfumes is the result." When the perfumer is also a writer, you let her tell the story herself. "We were talking about the kind of night out in New York that involves cocktails, marijuana cigars, hookers, and passing out. I know what cocktails smell like. The rest? I have a good imagination."