The Letter No. 5 — the rules of the game

Hi Fragrant Friend 👋

Some weeks the work is quiet. This one wasn't.

What Max Found

Max, from this community, pointed me to something I didn't know existed: South Africa's National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act, and the Bioprospecting, Access and Benefit Sharing regulations underneath it.

In short, if you want to commercialise an indigenous South African plant, or the traditional knowledge attached to it, you need a permit and a benefit sharing agreement with the community that knowledge belongs to, signed off by the state. Not a gesture. A condition.

Rooibos is the example everyone knows. Since 2019 the industry pays a traditional knowledge levy of 1.5% of the farm gate price to the Khoi and San, recognised as the rightful holders of that knowledge. Around 700,000 dollars a year. It isn't perfect, and there is a live debate about how that money gets split, but it exists and it is binding.

We posted about it. It became the most read thing we have ever published.

Our intention wasn't to take a side in the argument currently going on around a Senegalese root. It was quieter than that. One country has already written the rules of the game, and written them rather well. Had something similar applied elsewhere, I think every party involved would have come out of it better.

Most of the replies were warm, and they came from all over the world. A few weren't. That was new for us, the first time we've had to sit with open hostility instead of curiosity. I'm still working out what to do with it, other than keep going.

Four Bottles From New York

Meanwhile Mansour has been working in Christophe Laudamiel's lab in New York, and what arrived here is remarkable.

Four modifications. Very different from one another, all of them made with a level of craft I don't have to fake enthusiasm about, and all of them inside the charter we wrote for New Niche, the guardrails a perfumer works within here.

He has my first reaction already. Next the modifications go to our evaluator group, and their feedback moves us towards the formula freeze. In parallel our compound manufacturer produces the first samples, so we can put the lab version and the production version side by side.

Same Number, Different Material

That sounds like a formality. It isn't, and it's the thing I have learned most about these past months.

Every raw material carries a CAS number, a unique registry number for a chemical substance. Think of it as an ingredient's passport. Two materials with the same CAS number are, on paper, identical.

In the bottle they can be worlds apart. Same number, same country of origin, different producer, and the smell changes. On top of that, every compounder works with one or two suppliers per material. So unless you are big enough to work exclusively with one of the large houses, you never quite get the palette you had in your head.

That is the complexity of working with independent perfumers who don't compound themselves. It costs trials, and trials are a luxury. A year ago I had no idea.

Five Samples

Last thing, and this one is for you.

Art is lovely, but we also have to make ourselves heard. So we are giving away five samples of Before the World Moved Again to five people who will write an honest review on Parfumo or Fragrantica. Honest means honest. If it isn't for you, write that.

You only pay shipping, and we send worldwide. Reply to this email with your address and I will come back to you personally. Five spots, first come first served.