Natural Perfumers Guild
Membership
Categories, Goals and Benefits
Professional Perfumer: Two categories depending upon number of employees $125 or $200/yr.
Associate: creates body, home or environmental products scented with natural aromatics. Two categories depending upon number of employees - $125 or $200/yr.
Supplier: Vendor of equipment and materials. Two categories depending upon number of employees - $150 or $200/yr
Friend: Anyone interested in natural perfume $75/yr
Benefactor: Please contact us for details and benefits of being a Benefactor member of the Guild.
Membership - Goals and Objectives
Professionalism: Raise the professional standards of artisan natural perfumers, and to help them receive the recognition for their dedication to the artistry of working with natural aromatics.
Communication: Promote interaction and the exchange of information between artisan perfumers amd associates with suppliers to further develop the perfumer's palette and materials.
Promotion: To bring together individuals involved in the production of natural perfumes, and to represent and promote their interests to the public and media.
Education: To encourage the education and training of people interested in careers as artisan natural perfumers, and to develop a mentor program.
Sustainability: Reaching out to growers and distillers around the world to encourage the production and sourcing of boutique natural aromatics.
Legislation: The Guild monitors and actively works towards the shaping of regulations that affect the perfumery industry.
Benefits
There are two types of benefits for Guild members:
1. Immediate: This includes discounts on products; group buys; liability insurance; educational courses; public projects on the Internet; being part of the community in a Yahoo chat group where Guild members share tips; social media promotions on Facebook and Twitter; and information and friendship via networking.
2. Long term: Educating the public via blogs, forums and presentations; special trade publications; self-regulation as a trade association to reduce government interference.
1. IMMEDIATE GUILD BENEFITS
Discounts
Guild perfumers, associates and suppliers offer discounts on raw materials including pure and natural aromatics and beach-harvested ambergris, perfumes, educational programs, books, distillation units and much more. The members can often recoup their membership fee with a few buys from other members. The Guild maintains a ‘log in’ page where a member can access the discount information.
Liability Insurance for Bath and Body Product Manufacturers
After negotiations with Stratus Insurance, we're able to offer Guild businesses a very economical rate for liability insurance. This type of insurance is a must for manufacturers of bath and body products. $1M in coverage for $475/year is available to members of the Guild. This is only available to members who reside in the USA.
Vintage Perfumery Books
Anya collected .PDFs of many vintage perfumery books over the years, and they are available to all Guild members for their background, history and blending ideas. You can ‘log in’ and download the books as soon as you join the Guild
Group Buys for Perfume Bottles and Natural Aromatics
Beautiful Bottles
Guild perfumer Elise Pearlstine hosted a group buy for bottles for our perfumers, associates and friends. She procured bottles that are often sold in case lots with high minimums. Most perfumers with a small business can’t afford, or don’t need, 300 to 900 bottles in one buy. By polling members who viewed the bottle photos on the Guild yahoo group, several cases of were obtained and distributed to Guild members. There will be another buy in the Fall of 2011, and this buy will be of either crimp top bottles (sprayers) or flacons or perhaps both, if there is a demand.
Pictured: the bottles selected by Guild members. Leaf motif on bottle from Bellyflowers Perfumes.
Natural Aromatics
Shortly before the Guild officially opened, a group buy was initiated by Anya for the perfumers on naturalperfumery.com. We are planning another one in early summer, 2011, focusing on rare and beautiful aromatics that are often sold only at a high minimum amount. These aromatics are often out of the price range budgeted for small businesses, but the group buys means they can be purchased and distributed in smaller amounts.
Golden Boronia flowers
Boronia & Sandalwood
Anya hosted group buys for two of the rarest, most beautiful aromatics in the world, and Guild members received them at very reasonable prices. Boronia from Tasmania has been in very short supply for years due to lack of care of the fields from the previous owners. Anya phoned the new owners and was able to procure several hundred grams of the precious floral absolute for the Guild, as the owners weren’t selling to individuals at that time.Mysore White sandalwood was another Guild buy that brought a rare aromatic into the perfume studios of Guild members at a price that was lower than any other offered on the Internet.
Steffen Arctander CD
Allured Books, Guild Supplier, has been very generous with providing 3-volumes of Steffen Arctander's best-selling books, Perfume and Flavor Chemicals (Aroma Chemicals Vol 1 & 2) and Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin CD to members in several random-draw giveaways. This CD has been valued at $900, and is a valuable research resource for perfumers. Allured also provide deep discounts on their vast library of perfumery and cosmetics books to Guild members.Community
The Guild maintains a private Yahoo discussion group where members can interact by asking questions pertaining to natural perfumery, posting notices of sales and special events, and generally networking with each other, which builds the community. Guild members have formed many fulfilling friendships in this forum. Helping other members on the path is a lovely outcome of this group, so it may also be called a long-term benefit.
Social Media
The Guild’s Facebook page promotes the Guild members' sales, launches and other promotional materials on a daily basis. Guild members can post their ads and announcements there, which are then sent to the Guild Twitter account. These pages are then picked up by Google, helping provide links to the member’s websites. In addition, when a Guild member posts to Facebook, Anya will “share” that post to her readers. These two pages combined can result in over 2,500 views! Anya has also helped many Guild members build Facebook pages to improve the visibility of their businesses.
Internet Links
The value of Internet links to a member’s website is tremendous. On the Guild website, members are linked from two pages, the Member’s List page and the respective page for their category of membership: Perfumer, Associate or Supplier.
Links are also provided on Anya's blog, which also functions as the Guild’s blog. Both the member’s website and blog are linked.
LONG RANGE GUILD BENEFITS
Public Education
Anya was present at the birth of perfume blogs on the Internet in the Spring of 2005. She has taken part in countless chats, forums and blog postings. Over time, and with persistence, the outreach effort to educate bloggers and blog readers as to the beauty of natural perfumes began to take hold. She encouraged Guild perfumers to offer samples from their websites, start blogging and let themselves be known to the larger perfume community. The result? Many perfumistas who had previously dismissed natural perfumes as "medicinal, poorly-blended health-food store" perfumes, said, after sampling the professional perfumers' perfumes, that they now based a decision to buy a perfume on "whether it smelled good to them."
This was a huge leap forward: for the first time, natural perfumes were being judged alongside and by the same criteria as those of established perfume houses. For more on this, see the Mystery of Musk and the Outlaw Perfume projects, below.
Lobbying Efforts to Protect our Businesses
On another public front, Anya began blogging about the industry and government forces in 2006, and gained the attention of perfume industry representatives and perfume lovers, who realized that her common sense approach to the sometimes Draconian and illogical constraints that were being put upon perfumers, e.g., the limits on using jasmine and rose and other aromatics. The Guild contributes to an industry fund that pays for an attorney/lobbyist in Washington, D.C., who is working to challenge the Safe Cosmetics Act, which is problematic to our work with natural aromatics.
White Paper
A USA-based natural products corporation stated that they were going to define natural perfume, and they declared that it could contain a percentage of synthetic aromatics. The Guild took a stand against allowing synthetics in natural perfume and Anya, Steve Earl (Associate) and Tony Burfield (Associate) collaborated and produced a white paper on the definition of a natural perfume, published on June 1, 2008.
2007 - IFRA/EU Primer
Robert Tisserand (Associate), Anya and Tony Burfield (Associate)wrote the primer to educate the Guild members and the general public as to the negative aspects of the IFRA/EU association on perfumery.
Internet Visibility
2010 - The Mystery of Musk Project
Backstory: Guild perfumer Ambrosia Jones blogged about the ways that natural perfumers use varied aromatics in their quest for a cruelty-free musk note in perfumes. Guild perfumer Abdes Salaam, wrote to Anya and suggested that the Guild host a competition among the Guild perfumers to compose musk-based perfumes, with the entrants to be judged on blogs. Feeling that perfumers would be shy about a competition, especially since many weren't already active on the blogs, Anya instead proposed and named the Mystery of Musk project.
Participating members enjoyed composing their musk perfumes and received invaluable publicity. Twelve bloggers and twelve perfumers participated, and the Basenotes.net community and the Yahoo Natural Perfumery also contributed coverage by way of forum commentaries. The project was a huge success. As one blogger wrote: "Who knew there were so many talented natural perfumers out there?!"
2010 - The Outlaw Perfume Project
Outlaw Perfume was the second project of the Guild perfumers, based on Anya's deep-felt opposition to the bad science that had steered the International Fragrance Association (IFRA) to adopt guidelines that severely restricted the use of natural perfume aromatics that at the worst, could cause a rash or sneezing. Rose, jasmine and hundreds of other common aromatics were then limited to a tiny percentage of a perfume.
Many classic perfumes were reformulated by perfume houses that were afraid to challenge IFRA. Anya came up with a simple, elegant solution: a label. If peanuts, which can kill, can be sold, why not just a label stating the ingredients in the perfume and a caution to discontinue use if you get a rash. This project was a sensation on the Internet, bringing well-earned attention to the perfumers in the Guild who declared themselves Outlaw Perfumers, willing to place a label on their perfumes.
2011 - Brave New Scents Project
The Vision of this Project: The new avalanche of glorious aromatics, including the ones we create ourselves, deserve acknowledgement as perfume materials as the Outlaw Perfumers create Brave New Scents. The Outlaw Perfumers of the Natural Perfumers Guild are staking out more aromatic territory, moving into the 21st Century with an attitude of capturing the beauty of aromatics introduced after the year 2000, or that have been made available to us via the Internet after 2000, or that we created ourselves. Many of these are untested by regulatory agencies. History is our guide, since many of these have been in use for hundreds of years, such as ambrette seed absolutes, kewda flower absolutes and others from India. As with any product, do a patch test, and if you get a rash, discontinue use. How brave, how sensible! 21st Century Brave New Scents
O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in it! ~ Miranda in Shakespeare's "The Tempest", Act V, Scene I
I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin. ~Aldous Huxley
Members of the Guild took part in a workshop on Internet Marketing in June 2011. Topics covered with be public relations, press releases, search engine optimization and google ranking. There are more workshops planned as topics are identified.
Professionalism and Quality
The Guild standards of professionalism and quality are comprehensive and firm when it comes to raw materials such as essential oils, absolutes and other perfumery ingredients; packaging, message and - first and foremost - quality. The Guild is in the midst of revising the SPQ and will publish them in 2011.
Industry Standards
By early 2012, the Guild will have industry standards, guidelines and policies in place to protect the interests of Guild business owners by defining these elements for all levels of Guild membership. Self-regulation is necessary so that a set of standards can be presented to the government to minimize their presence in our businesses. A committee will draft the documents needed to reach this goal, and they will be presented to the Guild members for their feedback.
INCI Label Template
The International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients (INCI) is a worldwide standard for listing ingredients on cosmetics, which includes perfumes. To help assure the customer that the ingredients are pure and natural, organic, wildcrafted, etc., an INCI label is a must. The government will also demand an INCI label on your products. A template for Guild perfumers and associates to use for their fragranced products was made available June 1, 2011.
Lilac Flower Project
In 2009, Anya blogged about a lilac flower CO2 from Ecomaat, in Bulgaria. Finding it very close in scent to the lilac flower, Anya noted that it has a very short drydown time, which was less than five minutes. Anya frequently searches the connections she has in the raw aromatics world, obscure corners of the Internet, and via word of mouth to find new aromatics, and despite the problems with the lilac, she encouraged Ecomaat in their efforts.
In March 2011, Anya put together a team of alchemists to look into the lilac harvest and extraction process for Ecomaat, who had joined the Guild in 2010. They worked with Anya and Atanas of Ecomaat tirelessly for several weeks, researching and formulating a strategy to capture the highest quality scent profile in the lilac CO2 extraction.
As of mid-May, the lilac harvest has been plagued with weather problems, but the research is all in the hands of Ecomaat now, and we have bright prospects for what can be salvaged from this year's harvest, and plans for 2012 and beyond.
Committees and Staff
Several committees are in place to manage various aspects of Guild business. There is a Review Committee, a Planning Committee and a Grievance Committee. As mentioned previously, committees are being formed for various industry and internal projects.
Elise Pearlstine of Belly Flowers Perfumes is the Guild Manager, assisting in the day-to-day operations of the group. Chris Ziegler is the Guild Communications Manger and works with press releases, intra-group communications and database management.
Scent Library
Guild members submit samples and full-size bottles and samples of their products to the Scent Library, which Anya catalogs and maintains. This is both a historic and pragmatic collection of items from perfumes to soaps to rare pieces of ambergris, and shows the diversity of products, packaging and beauty of offerings from the Guild members. Anya can refer to the Scent Library when a journalist contacts the Guild about products and provide descriptions, photos or other materials as necessary.