A week at the Gin Garden

The Chelsea Fringe Hoxton Hotel Gin Garden Bombay Sapphire Experience, to be precise.

We've just had a whole week making personal perfumes using botanicals that Bombay Sapphire also use to make their superlative gin.

We made a base with two synthetics and two natural materials: bergamot, vanilla, Iso E Super and cedramber. On top of that each visitor chose from a selection of gin flavours and fragrances, including juniper berries, cubeb, coriander, lemon, orris, a lavender violet accord I mixed up myself, almond, aniseed and petigrain.

It's amazing how many different perfumes you can make from such a small selection. (Well, it's not really, not if you know a bit about maths and probability theory.)

A couple of people, including the lovely Katie from The Tatler, fell in love with the base, so it's just possible that it might appear at some point as a standalone scent. OK defintately; we've already got the name.

In the meantime, we've still got a little of of the scent I made up for the occasion. It's called The Gin Garden, named after Jo Farish's pop-up events of the same name, and as well as the materials listed up there, it's got rose, rosemary, peppermint, black pepper and a fabulous new CO2 extract of olive fruit.
Coming to the 4160Tuesdays shop soon. Available until it runs out.

What lovely people we met. Barmen who make ace cocktails, writers, herbalists, historians, bloggers, brand experience consultants and people who just happen to love perfume and fancied a taste of the ultimate G&T. I had several of those, and even a gin cocktail with an infusion of pear drops and grapefruit peel.

Fingers crossed we get to do it again sometime. Soon.