How we read a blotter.

A blotter is a strip of cellulose, dipped and left. Everything this house believes about a fragrance is read off one, and everything on this website is drawn from the same eleven numbers.

The method

  1. Strip 12 cm × 12 mm cellulose, unbleached, cut in the building. Bleached paper carries its own smell for the first hour.
  2. Dilution 10% in perfumer's alcohol, which is the strength this trade evaluates at and the strength every photograph on this site is printed at.
  3. Dip 10 mm, once, no swirl. The strip is dated and hung in a rack, not laid on a bench.
  4. Room 20 °C, no draught, no other work in progress. A room with something else open in it is not a reading.
  5. Panel six people, the same six, reading at 30 minutes, 2 h, 8 h, 24 h, then daily. A material stops when four of the six can no longer name it.

These are our readings, not a published standard. Substantivity moves with the lot, the dilution and the weather, and a panel is six noses on a Tuesday. Treat the numbers as this house's practice.

Eleven materials, in the order they leave.

Time runs logarithmically, from 0.5 h to 400 h, because the first hour of an evaporation does more than the next ten. The rail at the edge of this page runs on the same scale — scroll this document and you are moving along this axis.

Every material in the house, and the hour it stops being legible on the blotter. 1 h 4 h 12 h 2 d 1 wk 17 d Bergamot 2 Black pepper 4 Neroli 7 Lavender 14 Jasmine 26 Rose absolute 34 Orris 62 Oakmoss 140 Sandalwood 220 Hay absolute 260 Frankincense 400

Two that never settle.

Blotter Twelve

One material. The reading at seventeen days is the reading at half an hour. 1 h 4 h 12 h 2 d 1 wk 17 d Frankincense 400

One material, dipped alone. Nothing is above it to leave, so the top of the strip and the bottom of the week smell the same. There is no pyramid here — there is a material with a price on it. We sell it as Blotter Twelve because people kept asking what the base was doing on its own.

Panel 41

Five materials that stop at the same hour. It does not resolve; it stops. 1 h 4 h 12 h 2 d 1 wk 17 d Oakmoss 140 Cedar 140 Benzoin 140 Vetiver 140 Ambrette 140

Five materials matched for tenacity on purpose, to see what happened. Everything holds, and then everything goes at once. Nothing resolves out of anything, because there is no difference in rate for the fragrance to be made of. It was abandoned after two weeks and the chart is why.

Come and read one

The bench is open Tuesday to Saturday and the rack is always full. Ring first — a reading in progress means the room has to stay shut.

Order discovery set 0121 496 0271 bench@orrishaw.example