Narcotic Natural Perfume: My Absinthe Brute

I actually made my experiment with Calice Becker's Absinthe Verte formula (see my A Taste of Heaven) quite a while ago, but I set it aside, feeling rather ambivalent about it, and maybe it cured a bit, and I did get some distance on it.  Wormwood, as I mentioned, is so intense that while I was mixing up the darn brew, I kind of overdosed on it, and rather felt as if I couldn't do enough to mitigate its smell, or maybe neutralize it?  I couldn't decide which was better for my concoction, although my aim was, without a doubt, to feature the Wormwood in a totally different way from the other scents and drinks I had experienced, but it's so darned pungent!  I love bitter vegetables and herbs, more so as I get older, perhaps my system is too sweet and it balances me out somehow ; )  I should ask my herbalist, right?

So here is what I did -- Becker's formula is for 1000 g of essences, which I divided by 5 to get the ingredients down to amounts I could imagine, and I used DROPS instead of GRAMS of course , which is how I saw Mandy Aftel mix her Maroc in a a demo once.  I started with one drop (ONE!) of Wormwood CO2 Extract in 10 ml of denatured alcohol so I could experience it on it's own, yikes!  Then I mitigated it with whatever I had on hand from Calice's (I feel I know her now) formula:  my own Amber mixture from the time I read Aftel's Essence and Alchemy (CB used Ambrarome), Vanilla, Oak Moss, Patchouli, Lavender, Orange Flower, Rose, Geranium, and oodles of Bergamot (her formula contains a full third of it!).  What I got was still so sharp I decided to soften it with a little Clove, Benzoin, and Labdanum, and still it smelled a bit rough.  What to do?  I was missing a major aromatic component of her formula -- four different types of Lavender!  I had added whatever I had, a paltry 10 drops  whereas hers had a whopping 50% of the stuff, but this was a riff on hers after all,  made at home!

Luckily I remembered that I had some Ambergris tincture from the era when wonderful Luca Turin had his blog, and a few of us went in on some of the pure Amber Gris after he extolled its virtues, divided it up and tinctured it, and it sits in my cabinet to this day.  LT had done an experiment where he sprayed something nice and normal, perhaps Guerlain Vetiver on each hand, and on one he added a drop of Ambergris and the effect was utterly transformative.  So I added 4 drops (in what turned out to be a 70 drop formula) and hoped for the best.  By this time I had completely overdosed on the Wormwood and my nose had shut down completely,  so I put it aside for further study.   

Every once in a while, during the last month, I've spied the cobalt bottle containing my potion on the table, and I've dabbed it around a bit . It's bitter, not sweet like CB's, and it's undeniable herbal, is it an egregious hippie aroma?  No, it's so darned heady, rather  more Goth, not fuzzy and friendly, yet not nasty either.  As it develops, and it actually does develop, its warmth surfaces, but it never loses that Wormwood Wallop, and yes, I do find it strangely addictive, even in this makeshift form, thanks to Ms Becker, or to this mysterious herb, or both.

So the Victorians had something there, perhaps Absinthe wasn't in and of itself downright dangerous, but had a narcotic quality to those who were oddly susceptible to it, and that would have been, and is, me.  I've always had a weakness for sensibilities of the past tempered by the present, and my homemade juice is very evocative, probably just to me -- luckily I work at home!