4160 Tuesdays: Sarah McCartney Throws Open the Doors to Her Studio

Sarah McCartney, perfumer and owner of 4160 Tuesdaysby: Suzy Nightingale

Ah, perfumers—"noses"—the alchemists one sort of imagines live and work in ivory towers set on cliff tops amidst a fantasy landscape of green velvet hills; or nestled within a secret garden of rare orchids and mystical plants kept apart from the world by high walls and an air of superiority. Do they roll naked every morning in dew-covered rose petals and subsist entirely on a diet of organic nectar and unicorn tears? Well, no. Not all of them, anyway.

Sarah McCartney, the maverick perfume creator behind 4160 Tuesdays, recently threw open the doors to her London studio and invited perfume lovers far and wide to gather and goggle at her colourful lair. It's not what you imagine—no gleaming white laboratory, no clinical atmosphere of rarified snootiness.

Here, immediately on walking through the door, all is cozy and full of quirky charm. Vintage furniture such as you might see in the house of your favorite artistically inclined and effortlessly cool aunt; little collections of unusual crockery displayed haphazardly in cabinets and on shelves. Upstairs, where the mixing and creating takes place, an entire wall is given over to perfumes from many eras—some incredibly rare items rubbing shoulders quite happily with bottles from Superdrug or exotic looking oils from the local Arabian shop.

Sheets of brightly colored tissue paper are proudly hung to be seen, a rainbow of colours, used to wrap and twist around the dinky miniature bottles like little fragrant crackers. Wooden tables and benches reclaimed from a school science room are laden with colored pencils, glass bottles filled with every oil and ingredient you can think of are clustered intriguingly on the mezzanine level. The visitor is left in no doubt that this is a place of creativity, but it feels like a grown-up playroom of smells rather than some stuffy anti-chamber of olfactory snobbery.

I have been lucky enough to previously attend a full day workshop of perfume making in Sarah's studio, which I wrote a full account of for Fragrantica readers, the one I went to themed around the Oriental family of fragrances. The first half of the day was about learning what makes a particular perfume an Oriental, trying all manner of famous and lesser-known scents, vintage and modern alike. The second half was all about the making, a terrifying prospect de-mystified by Sarah who patiently explains why it might be best to try a few drops of that favorite oil of yours before hurling whole vats of the stuff into your mixture, and was one of the most relaxing yet pleasingly artistically challenging afternoons I have ever spent. I left clutching a bottle of my very own, completely unique perfume; and while it may not be the most competently made fragrance ever, it remains a treasure of my collection and makes me smile whenever I wear it—or even catch a glimpse of it sitting proudly on my shelves.

The last two days of this open studio event have been all about Sarah welcoming in people who perhaps haven't ever stepped foot in a perfumer's workshop before, and she had special offers and full access to the infamous "Naughty Box" (bottles with slightly wonky labels or some other minor imperfection and any number of exciting finds) to tempt them with. The eclectic charm of the place perfectly reflects not only the 4160 Tuesdays raison d'être, but Sarah's own character. Open days such as these gives "artisanal" or "niche" perfume—call it what you will—a much-needed human touch, bursting bubbles and getting back to the business of actually smelling perfumes and finding out what you like again. The studio is actually classified as an industrial unit, so doesn't serve as a shop exactly, but apart from holding various workshops here which you can learn more about on her website, Sarah is happy to welcome visitors (best to let her know you're coming beforehand, though, to make sure she's "at home"), who prefer to pick up their orders in person or would simply like to pop in for coffee and a natter, with perhaps some tasty nibbles thrown into the mix. Sarah always seems to have boxes of unusual treats with which to tempt you. Whenever I have visited, it feels like nipping around to a good friend's house, perusing the bookshelves and being fed exotic biscuits while Sarah pops up and down the stairs saying, "Now have you smelled this yet? I'm still working on it but what do you think?" It's a delightfully unstuffy way to get to know a collection of ever-expanding fragrances and, indeed, the perfumer herself (though I should add, Sarah herself is not ever-expanding, not matter how much authentic Turkish Delight she eats—must be all the running up and down stairs).

There are some gorgeous new perfumes in the 4160 Tuesdays wardrobe and, as ever when sniffing them, I am struck by the sheer diversity and imagination of the range. It seems there are very few things Sarah McCartney isn't inspired by, wether it's sitting on a vintage bus and wondering what combination the passengers plus wood and seat coverings would like in a perfume, meeting someone with a peculiar life story or, often, being commissioned to make a bespoke perfume for a specific occasion. The first time I met Sarah, in fact, she was talking about her perfume A Kiss By the Fireside—originally a custom fragrance a chap had asked her to make for his girlfriend, though it turned out he'd completely misread what he thought she would like, and Sarah re-made the perfume having talked to the lady herself and discovered what she actually wanted. A new perfume to the 4160 Tuesdays repertoire was also originally a custom commission—-this one incredibly personal, being a fragrance for the perfume event organizer "Odette Toilette" to wear on her wedding day. I cannot imagine how difficult it must be to set about making a perfume for such a special day ... and so I asked Sarah just that.

Suzy Nightingale: How daunting was it to make a bespoke perfume for Odette Toilette's wedding day? Or do you approach every custom perfume in the same way, no matter the occasion?

Sarah McCartney: "This one was really difficult, and I needed to get it right not because it was Odette, but because it was her wedding. People are all people, but big occasions—you just can’t mess those up for your clients. (I did a while as a semi-professional wedding photographer before the days of digital.) You do NOT mess up for someone’s wedding, no matter whose it is.)

What happened was that I asked Odette in a roundabout way, “I suppose everyone’s asked if they can make you a wedding scent?” and she said, 'Funnily enough, no one,' so I said I’d do it. Then her exact words will remain secret, but it was really a very intimidating task. I smiled and said, 'No pressure then,' and set off.

"She knew exactly what she wanted, which cuts both ways. I understood so I knew where I had to arrive which made it easier to head in the right direction. This also meant there was very little room for interpretation. With most customers they have a vague idea of what they like, so they can either be delighted or end up having you back and forth nine times then saying 'Oh, well, never mind …'

"The first one was really funny and went horribly wrong. It smelled great in the lab, then this natural peach CO2 extract dropped out of emulsion (I thought it had dissolved) into peachy globules and all Odette got on the paper strip was a slap of peach, not a delicate touch. So back to the chemistry benches … I did four accords and blended them in four ways at first. We both decided on A, and it’s going to be this winter’s second best seller (after The Sexiest Scent)."

Odette wrote of the unique experience of having a perfume made for her:

"This last January, Sarah offered to make me a perfume for a special do. ie. my wedding. I’m not really a bespoke fragrance kind of girl, but hang on a second, when you’re offered like that, you bloody well accept. So I said Yes Please!

"The brief was a bit casual as I said could I have an ‘in the snow’ version of a spritzy 1970s chypre fragrance. Something fruity, fuzzy and mossy with crystallised fruits, fireplaces, furs, and the coldness going on outside somewhere.

Doe in the Snow was the result, the perfect name because I love watching the deer in Richmond Park—both when the bracken spreads over the grass in summer, and when their spindly stalks are covered with frost in winter. When the final version arrived, it was the most special smell, which Sarah describes as ‘citrus fruits, flowers and woods, stirred with an icicle’. I sprayed it all over the (faux) fur coat I borrowed from my mum on my wedding day—the same coat she’d worn for her own wedding."

Doe in the Snow:

Top notes: grapefruit, cedrat, yuzu, peach aldehyde, snow
Heart notes: cedarwood, rose, jasmine, oak
Base notes: opoponax, oakmoss, leather, green tea absolute

It never fails to amaze me how perfumers manage to accomplish this, but it actually smells frosty to me, on first sniffing my arm. There's a soft scent of pine trees somewhere in the distance, as though carried by a cold breeze from a recently opened window; I imagine standing in a room bedecked with vintage furniture and lace curtains, a bowl of oranges on a dark wooden table polished with beeswax. A delicate spiciness takes shape, warming the mixture like a kiss on the nape of the neck, body warmth, skin warmth, with snowflakes gently melting on eyelashes. Warmer still it feels earthier, now, a hint of animal musk but infused with a sweetness that feels like sifting caster sugar and breathing in the powdery cloud; tasting the dry sweetness in the back of your throat. I don't know what a doe smells like—in snow or otherwise situated—but if you have ever cuddled a cat recently returned from a reluctant winter trip outdoors, or buried your face in a horse's mane; you will know the sweet but warm animal scent I'm attempting to describe. Somehow, after this olfactory journey through opulent old houses and winter landscapes with various animals gambolling about in cold weather; Doe in the Snow takes on the peachy nectar glow of a truly refined chypre, all silk pajamas and fur-trimmed slippers. Gorgeous, comforting, unexpected and quite unlike anything else, Doe in the Snow reflects the characteristic charm and ebullience of 4160 Tuesdays.

Sarah: "Tart’s Knicker Drawer is a supremely sophisticated floral amber oriental of the old style. Powder, lipstick and cocktail dresses. Women can wear it too.

"One day in the lab we were filtering six different fragrances at once. Sarah tweeted, 'I’m about to get in the E3 bus smelling like a tart’s boudoir.' The replies came back, 'You should make it!' 'I’d like to smell that one.' 'Can I buy some?' So the next day, she sat down and blended some versions of all six. One of them was a sophisticated smooth rather grown-up powdery perfume. That’s the one we chose, and the name is the phrase her gran used to describe women wearing too much scent. The sort who went out after seven o’clock at night and were obviously up to no good. Absolutely. At the same time, it’s our most complex, but probably the most easily wearable."

Tart's Knicker Drawer:

Top: bergamot, orange, grapefruit, pink peppercorn
Heart: raspberry, rose, jasmine, sandal, cedar, violet, tuberose, guiacwood
Base: amber, musk, vanilla, benzoin, tobacco

Oh, it could so easily have been too much, and it sort of is, yet Tart's Knicker Drawer is completely saved by being fabulous in a Mae West 'goodness had nothing to do with it' kind of a way. [Mae West's retort to someone's compliment, "Goodness! What lovely diamonds ..." on her expensively glittering necklace]. I first smelled this a little while ago, when it was still called the original name of "Tart's Boudoir." McCartney decided that moniker was a little too like another famous designer's perfume, so wanted something that kept the same cheeky spirit but wouldn't ever be confused (or seen to be inspired) by it. I remarked to Sarah that if I had smothered myself with several differing perfumes—a professional problem I often encounter, but really have always reveled in, for who can chose just one perfume for a whole day?!—my mother often humorously commented I smelled like "a tart's knicker drawer." And thus the phrase seemed cemented in the 4160 Tuesdays lexicon. You'd think a blend of so many things would become muddy and confused, like joyfully mixing up all the colours in a paint palette as a child, only to discover the result of a curmudgeonly and disappointing brown instead of the magical rainbow one had imagined. Instead, perhaps because Sarah somehow has a unifying signature style despite the eclectic nature of the perfumes, everything here just works well together. It's an orgy of appropriately tart fruits rubbing up against powder puffs and smoking purloined roll-ups while eating handfuls of jelly beans in a slightly seedy dressing room; delicate it ain't, but it still manages to exude classiness, and all the better for it, I say. Tart's Knicker Drawer crashes the party in style and probably leaves with a pocketful of silver spoons and somebody else's husband. I approve entirely.

It's really obvious when you walk around the studio that Sarah has surrounded herself with things she feels closely connected to or inspired by. What could have been another faceless "light industrial unit" has magically been transformed into a cozy nook that feels homely and hip and delightfully nerdy all at once.

Suzy: What do you love about your studio—why does the space you have created work so well, do you think? What are your favorite objects/pieces of furniture, and why are they important to you?

Sarah: "You should see it on a busy day. I’m not sure the ergonomics specialists would agree. And most perfume labs don’t smell of perfume these days, just the artisan places, not the big ones. On creative days I have to keep running downstairs, out the back door into Tesco’s car park to smell my arm.

"I couldn’t believe it when I found the space. It belongs to a housing association so the rent is very fair. (My accountant thought they’d missed a nought off it.) I needed a light industrial unit with a manufacturing lease, and they are usually somewhere remote; draughty buildings with concrete floors.

"I have my desk downstairs and the creative area upstairs so I get loads of exercise; I did that on purpose. I love my chemistry benches. My old 1930s school was demolished, and replaced with a shiny plastic one, so it only exists in my memory, but sitting at high stools messing around with test tubes in Mr Grieveson’s chemistry lab is firmly embedded as a really exciting time. I bought old school benches and stools to remind me of it.

"My favorite area is the kitchen cupboard which house all my materials, and the 1950s yellow formica covered table where I create all the scents. These were at our family homes in Redcar, Durham and West Boldon. It reminds me to say thank you to my late parents.

"I do love my collection of fine china, all bought off eBay ridiculously cheaply. If it gets broken, so what? There’s more out there, sitting sadly in boxes waiting for an occasion. Every day is an occasion. Use the best porcelain."

Suzy: You're always so welcoming—inviting people in to your studio to look around, try things, just for a natter ... it seems very rare for perfumers to do this! What do you get out of the experience and why do you think many perfumers are so secretive?

Sarah: "For me every moment I get to spend making new perfumes is a special treat and telling people how I do it is part of the fun. (Although the other admin stuff takes up most of the time these days.) I think we underestimate people’s ability to understand and accept what really happens. When I tell someone that there are no natural lily of the valley fragrances and never have been, a lot of people are disappointed, then they just get over it. I don’t think that an industry founded on mystery and myth is a sustainable one these days. Although it’s usually called “what the customer wants to hear.”

"Partly I think that the perfume industry has gone and tied itself in knots by insisting for years that all the materials they used were completely natural. It was some kind of pact that a French perfumer told me about. It was just understood that customers should never be able to tell—or to be told—what was in a perfume.

"This was what led to the serious round of reformulations in 2000, the ones thatThierry Wasser of Guerlain said destroyed the industry. I was at Lush at the time and Mark Constantine was furious. He was happy to declare all the ingredients on the label, but the perfume industry worried that if customers could read that there were no natural peonies in their peony perfumes there might be a bit of a fuss. Instead they bargained the right to keep the word 'parfum' in exchange for declaring the list of allergens.

"I think that hiding the truth from your customers, and living in a secret world behind locked doors is a thing of the past. With the internet, customers are just walking around the building and looking straight through the windows. Now we’ve got this half-arsed situation where customers—and bloggers and journalists—can see what’s happening, but they can’t hear what’s being said, so they understand some of it and can misinterpret other bits.

"Press releases are still going on about 'the finest possible ingredients' while the ones they mention really they probably make up a maximum 5% of the blend and the rest is synthetic. But they are briefed in the elegant room outside the locked door, where the marketing people have decided how much to tell and how much to keep secret.

"There’s the other thing, of course. That lots of people who call themselves perfumers are not the ones who create the formulas. They don’t really know what’s in their own scents so they just enter the World Waffling Championships and blether on about their tuberose being picked at midnight by pixies when the moon is waxing, and how they’re only making 5000 bottles of this amazing limited edition with box, personally autographed in Welsh ink. Or whatever.

"I’m normally described as 'self-taught' although that’s not strictly true. I didn’t learn in isolation. I read books, and at Lush I learned that you can do it yourself (but not how, as I never got near the labs on creative days). I learned the Jean Carles method, which everyone does at perfume school, and Karen Gilbert’s classes were amazingly useful. I also did Stephen Dowthwaite’s UK course. I did a couple of years of serious tinkering before I thought that any of my perfumes were worth smelling. Plus I’ve always been a bit of a brainbox so I assembled it all into what I needed to make what I wanted to make. I have LOADS to learn still, but I can generally get where I want to be, although I probably use more expensive materials than a commercial perfumer, because I don’t always know how to do it more cheaply, and sometimes I just choose to splash out.

"Put it this way, I know about every drop of every material I put in, natural and synthetic, and I do it for the smell. I have a master’s degree in marketing and corporate strategy, and I choose to use it for good not evil. I can get really annoyed when companies spin yarns to their target markets and consumers. We’re all people and no one wants to be lied to.

"Call me naïve—some do—but I’m not worried about being open, because my strength is not the perfumes I’ve already created, it’s that I can come up with another dozen that no one else would consider launching. Also, as I have such a small organization, with no shareholders or backers wanting to see big profits (thanks goodness, because there aren’t any) I can choose to use the materials I want to create the effects I need. I know that no one could put Sunshine and Pancakes on the commercial market without charging £300 a bottle for the 50 ml.

"I can be open because no one is going to copy my fragrances. They easily could. They can run them through the GCMS and in 20 minutes know how to recreate it in their shiny labs, but I don’t think they’ll bother because they’re too expensive. I don’t operate in a cut-throat competitive market. There’s nothing secret in what I do. I like sharing, I love what I do, and I like to tell people all about it."

For those who missed out on the studio open days, the 4160 Tuesdays website has some great treats on offer, including the new dinky little "taster" sets (perfect Christmas gifts if you're not sure which to plump for), mini bottles (surely the best cracker/tree gifts ever?) and special offers such as the Vintage Cities range currently half price in the original bottles. Incidentally, the infamous "Naughty Box" is on the website, too, and features some serious bargains if you snap them up quickly enough. It's also worth subscribing to the Facebook page, as Sarah occasionally posts exclusive discount codes, which are incredibly helpful at this time of year.

Quite apart from beckoning people forth into her scented lair (though somewhere so cosily furnished can never truly be lair-like), running perfume making workshops, giving talks and scenting all manner of artistic events; Sarah is also an author, having written a novel now available on Kindle, by Sarah McCartney The Scent of Possibilities: Five love stories, one crime, eight perfumes, two broken hearts and a lot of broken glass.

Down a cobbled mews off one of London’s rare tranquil backstreets, people come to talk, gaze at the garden, have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, then leave with a small blue bottle of perfume. Captured inside it is a scented memory of happy times.

What could be the harm in that?

London is a big city, but paths cross, and get all tangled up. A small misunderstanding leads to a seriously large one. This is the novel that accidentally launched a London perfumery, 4160 Tuesdays.'

Refreshingly honest in what can be a world of highly scented hot air, Sarah McCartney was recently described as a "punk perfumer," and you certainly get that when you meet her, a crackle of electric excitement about what she does, a genuine belief in staying true to herself and the customers she takes such pleasure in creating for. She may not have a safety pin through her nose (though frankly, it wouldn't surprise me in the least) but Sarah McCartney is leading the way for perfumers puncturing poppycock, throwing the doors wide and proudly showing the world what she does—and all without a hint of unicorn tears.

If you would like to visit the studio, let Sarah know before you pop in (to make sure they're in to welcome you!)

4160Tuesdays Ltd
8 Issigonis House Cowley RoadActon LondonW3 7UN
United Kingdom

Telephone: 020 8749 8015
http://www.4160tuesdays.com
Email: sarah@4160Tuesdays.com