The Big Smoke

The scent The artist Try a sample first!  This is a rare amber with no vanillin; McCartney wanted it to smell of dry smoked woods. Named after one of London’s nicknames from the days before the Clean Air Act, when fog mixed with coal smoke was too dangerous to go out in, but on your skin, it feels like a film noire. A dry, smoked woody amber, rich with tobacco, vetiver, and smidge of smoky white birch. Imagine finding your way through a swirling mist of musks as you enter a candlelit wood-panelled library soaking in the warm waxy aroma quietened by soothing labdanum, blended with incense for a hint of absolution. Yep, that’s it.   Notes include tobacco, vetiver, white birch, cardamom, aldehyde C10, labdanum, frankincense, dark patchouli, cashmeran velvet, cedramber, ambrox and two musks.   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."