Goddess of Love & Perfume

Notes include plum, peach, strawberry, blackcurrant, raspberry, grapefruit, yuzu, oakmoss, opoponax, bergamot, patchouli, rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, and vintage musks. 

• The scent
• The artist
• The inspiration

• Try a sample first! 
  
  Who is this goddess? Put on this elixir, and it might as well be you. But perfumer Sarah McCartney was thinking of Aphrodite, of course, and she succeeded in making a perfume worthy of her. Goddess of Love & Perfume is from McCartney's much-beloved (and critically acclaimed) Crimes of Passion series, and we wish Aphrodite luck in prying this celestial romantic fluff from our hands. Notes include plum, peach, strawberry, blackcurrant, raspberry, grapefruit, yuzu, oakmoss, opoponax, bergamot, patchouli, rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, and vintage 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."

  
  
• When the perfumer is also a writer, you let her tell the story herself.

  "Venus (Aphrodite) was the goddess of love and perfume, also of pleasure and beauty. I wanted to make the ultimate fruity chypre, with backcurrant, peach and my favourite raspberry leaf and I decided that it ought to be good enough to make her want to wear it. I imagine her bathing in it before descending to earth to seduce beautiful shepherd boys tending their flocks on Roseberry Topping. (That's a hill in North Yorkshire and this perfume's alternative name, when it's at EdP strength).

  "There are two fruity chypre fragrances which particularly impressed me when I smelled the originals at the Osmotheque: Le Fruit Defendu from 1914 by Paul Poiret, and Shocking by Schiaparelli from the 1940s. I wasn't even sure if it would be possible to make something that gorgeous and legal these days. Anyway, I decided to give it a try.

  "The first small sample bottle was stolen; I was intending the Crimes of Passion series to inspire rash impulsive acts, but I wasn't actually expecting this."

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