Gnosis Diary: Life as a Heathen

My personal experiences, including religious and spiritual experiences, community interaction, general heathenry, and modern life on my heathen path, which is Asatru.

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Launching Magical, a Perfumery

Posted by on in Paths Blogs

Those of you who have been following my Monster Powers / Gila Lizard Powers (GLP-1) posts know I became obsessed with perfume after starting the GLP-1 drug Mounjaro. I like to call it getting Gila Monster powers because GLP-1 drugs were derived from a Gila Monster natural product. I have been trading perfume samples and posting reviews in the What Did You Test Today thread on Fragrantica. Recently another fragrance afficianado posted on the thread to congratulate me on my great review posts and suggest I have a soft launch as a fragrance influencer. I replied that I was planning to launch my own brand. My reply was the simplest and clearest explanation I've ever given for what I'm doing and why, so I copyied and pasted it here for all of you, with a few minor edits:

I'm planning to launch my own brand, to be called Magical, which will be mostly soaps and lotions but with perfumes too. I have a handful of test batches already made for the Erin's Garden collection and notes for many future collections.


It was a natural outgrowth because I already made fragrance soaps for my friends for gifts for years and even taught a class in it once. I used to grow wheat and make whiskey for my friends, which I gave up because processing the wheat by hand became too physically difficult for me. I used to dye fabrics and make sunprint art and sold those, other items, and aromatherapy supplies from an eBay store called Magicalrealist Gallery, which I closed about 10 years ago to concentrate on writing and editing because I had become physically unable to do the fabric dyeing. A couple of years ago my industry got wrecked by genAI; I've been trying to ride it out and hope the small publishing industry would come back but at this point I don't think it will and those jobs are not coming back. I became obsessed with perfume after starting a GLP-1 drug and started mixing my own scents just for me and then for gifts and started making soap again for gifts and then I thought, hey! I need a new home business and this looks like a good one. I decided to call my new brand Magical because I still have business lines of credit in the name Magicalrealist Gallery so it's an easy choice." 

***

Why start a new home business when I already have a home business editing books? 

 

I just glossed over the problem with the publishing industry because it was a forum post but I'll go into more detail here. The genAI problem could have been just a fad like NFTs if the software giants had ignored it and gone on with business as usual. Instead they supported it. They shoveled money, power, and irreplaceable water resources at it, and stuffed it into all sorts of products where no one asked for it. GenAI books in particular could have been suppressed if Amazon had used its corporate power to suppress the plagiarism engines and the books full of lies that have definitely already gotten people killed (the mushroom hunting books in particular, just like writers warned would happen.) Amazon could restore the small publishing industry, because the small press revolution largely happened because of Amazon. It chose not to. The government could have cracked down on the plagiaristic nature of genAI "training," with existing copyright laws, but instead they supported genAI and the mass theft of labor from creators. Many different powerful entities could have saved the industries impacted by genAI -- writing, art, voice acting, etc. -- but they didn't. Those jobs are not coming back. The high quality human made products are not coming back; they are being replaced by AI slop. The mass theft by corporations from human creators has driven creators to stop making and and trying to sell their work. 

I can't sell editing services to writers who have decided to stop publishing and do something else. I waited for 2 years for something to be done but it is clear nothing will be done about the genAI problem. I have to do something else too. 

Why perfumes and bath and body products?

I'm not starting from nothing with the perfumed products and soaps. I've made soaps for myself and for gifts for friends for years. I even taught a class in it once. I used to make a medicated hand cream for mom from birch oil. 20 years ago I sold Green Valley Aromatherapy products from my eBay Store, which was called Magicalrealist Gallery. I closed the eBay Store long ago, because it was primarily for my art and fabric dyeing, which I stopped doing due to arthritis, but I still use the eBay ID magicalrealistartist. So this is something I've been interested in for a long time, I just wasn't obsessively learning everything and sampling and collecting and organizing my collection with online "shelves" before like I am now. I'm excited about fragrances and making perfumed products, and I wanted to make some for me and for gifts for my friends and family anyway, and since I needed another home business and this is what I'm excited about, it's the perfect choice for me for right now. 

Since then, I've made a number of fragrances and perfumed products. I soft launched during the Black Friday shopping season by selling on eBay. I made a number of gifts for my friends and family and everyone liked them, and some people asked for more. I have a potential retail partner who might be interested in selling my products in person at events, although of course more retail partners would be awesome. My ability level does not extend to attending events in person all day so selling at events in person myself is not an option. (That's the same reason I can't just go look for a normal job.) I am hoping to sell wholesale to retail partners. 

The Erin's Garden Collection is based on extraits of plants from my garden. Each fragrance in the collection has those plus its own notes. I plan other collections which I hope to launch soon. My next collection will be the Net Collection, my interpretation of internet phenomena with fragrances named Trollslayer, OP, Downthread, and Pirate's Bay. I have already made several custom fragrances and accompanying products such as lotion and molded soap for friends and family and hope to sell custom fragrances as well. 

I sort of commissioned a sign. Actually I asked for it for my birthday, because the sign painter is a friend who used to live in my little bohemian artist and pagan colony aka my house. I'm an Aquarius so we'll see it soon hopefully.

The products I've made that my friends asked for more of are lotions and lip balms. I have so many ideas, for new product types and for new fragrances. I used to have this many ideas for fiction stories, but I couldn't write them all because I had more ideas than I had time to write them. So far I have only made a small number of the ideas I've had for perfumed products, but I feel I don't need to run from more ideas with this the way I did with writing. It's more like making art than like writing.

When I'm actually doing the work it's more like cooking. I've been making extracts of my garden herbs in my kitchen for decades. They were for eating and drinking. Now I'm making the exact same things but using them for fragrance.

I've won awards for my original recipes and published a cookbook, so I'm used to creating my own flavor formulae. Decades ago, I started making my food from scratch because I have a lot of allergies. If I make it myself I can just leave out all the stuff I don't want. I know how to do a lot of things in the garden and kitchen because I grew up in farm country.

I am not cooking as much food now and I no longer want to make my own alcohol, so I am just using the time, energy, and creativity I would put into food into perfumes and products instead. 

I've always had an incredibly high ability with smell and taste. As an adult, I would go to a restaurant, have a dish once and replicate it at home. In college, when I studied in the Soviet Union, my sense of smell kept me from starving. I could track a shashlik stand for 5 miles through the subway. 

But my smell and taste abilities started with being a child who needed glasses and didn't get them until I was 12, and who had hearing loss from a childhood illness, so my brain grew up devoting a lot of sensory processing space to smell and taste instead. I couldn't see peoples' faces at all. I could hear the electricity in the walls but human voices were really hard to hear and understand. I learned to mostly understand what people were saying but I couldn't recognize people by their voices either. Instead I recognized people by their brand of cigarettes or some other olfactory clue. My parents smelled like Pall Mall. 

That's the same experience that informed my sunprint art and fabric dyeing, and my love of books, because I could not see shapes beyond my own hand but I could see colors. So my childhood visual experience was all about color without shape. I could also read, because I could get books close to my face. So I read a lot of books. I started writing my own stories and poetry a child. I spent a lot of time with animals too. All the things that transformed into my favorite activities as an adult started as an adaptation to being visually impaired. And that was also one of the things that drew me close to Odin, as I've mentioned before on this blog. I not only had a great sense of smell all my life, but all my senses starting getting sharper due to my Monster Powers, which finally controlled my diabetes in a way more like what a healthy person experiences instead of in wild swings between too high and too low. My sense of smell is back up at the level it was when I was a small child.

So although I did not become obsessed with perfumes until I gained my Monster Powers in the autumn of 2024, I have a broad variety of experiences, skills, and innate abilities that I am working with in my perfume and product making.

I am thinking about bringing in some of my art and hand dyed scarves as items to include in gift boxes or product sets. I might even re-explore my old craft of glass bottle painting, to make unique bottles. I have so many ideas. And I'm so excited about my perfume journey!

To see my latest products check my eBay ID magicalrealistartist 

 

 

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Erin Lale is the author of Asatru For Beginners, and the updated, longer version of her book, Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path. Erin has been a gythia since 1989. She was the editor and publisher of Berserkrgangr Magazine, and is admin/ owner of the Asatru Facebook Forum. She also writes science fiction and poetry, ran for public office, is a dyer and fiber artist, was acquisitions editor at a small press, and founded the Heathen Visibility Project.

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