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I’ve had a soft spot for Lepidoptera for a long time now. I can date most of it back the reading A Girl of the Limberlost as an impressionable adolescent, but the wee birds themselves are the only explanation for my continued fascination. Butterflies are gorgeous creatures - delicate feats of aeronautics and sturdy gossamer wings. Few things are anywhere near as inspiring.
So when I designed a fragrance, composed of equal parts sweetness and indol, bitterness and vegetation, I reached for my Field Guide to settle on a namesake.
The Pipevine Swallowtail is one of those big North American birds you see in summer. Not as classic as the Monarch, but just as elegant. The caterpillars like to nosh on (surprise) Pipevines so they make for a nasty poisonous mouthful for unsuspecting predators. Adults bear big orange eyespots on their wings as “don’t eat me” advertisement. My interpretation consists of: “Aromatic basil and bitter tomato leaf in an ephemeral haze of neroli and tangerine.”
This is a really simple creme-coloured soap, no additives, just swirled with Brambleberry’s Amethyst Purple Mica. You generally see mica’s in mineral makeup compounds, used to tint transparent melt’n pour soaps, or in lip glosses; applications that provide a lot of light play and shimmer so you can really see the colours. I use them a lot to dust the creamy surface of my soap slabs, but will swirl them throughout an opaque soap as well. The end result isn’t quite as striking, but provides a burnt marbling of colour through the log that I really enjoy.
In this instance, I also polished the top of the soap using a pair of cheap powder brushes from the drugstore and more Brambleberry Mica’s. Another touch of Amethyst Purple blended into Cornflower Blue blended into Lustre Black to capture the shimmering blue-black of the Swallowtail’s wing. I debated how truly I wanted to mimic the colour scheme (honestly, if I’d planned better, I’d have shadowed the entire soap with an Australian Black Clay and ivory swirls), and ultimately decide to use the Copper Sparkle in place of the orange eyespots. We don’t keep an orange mica in house, so I improvised a bit.
The final bars don’t capture the entire colour scheme, despite my strategic polish job, so I wanted to share the uncut slab. This is probably my new favourite scent - the tomato leaf is intriguing, and plays with neroli in ways I didn’t really expect. And the basil? Very quiet for such a pungent herb.
Not too shabby, right? 
Vil·lain·ess \ 'vi-lən-nəs \ n : a woman who is a villainVil·lain·ess \ 'vi-lən-nəs \ n
1 : an uncanny, articulate woman
2 : a deliberate antagonist or tease
3 : an intelligent woman in a tabloid or gossip
4 : the fall-girl in a particularly difficult situationVillainess. Redefining "bad."
Syndication:
Not shabby at all, it’s awfully pretty. I’ve read that book too, though not as a child, and can understand why it’d tend to be one to remember.
Posted by Pru | May 26, 2009 5:29 PM