Showered With Spices

The scent The artist Try a sample first!  While working with the first Kazakh fragrance company, Aura of Kazakhstan, perfumer Sarah McCartney had the opportunity to visit some several thousand-year-old Buddhist carvings in the Central Asian Steppes. After creating a perfume for them, she kept thinking about standing in the scorching sun, in the same place as thousands of travelers over thousands of years, watching shoals of fish swimming upstream in the Chu River's clear water. Aptly named Showered with Spices, notes of black pepper and incense evoke the atmosphere by the warm carved boulders, with a heart of labdanum and cedar, and cruelty-free musk to round out this scented nod to the Silk Road, the route traveled by caravans from the Far East to the European markets, through the plains of Central Asia.   Notes black pepper, labdanum, cedar, and cruelty-free musk.    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."