Pia Long

@perfumer-pia.bsky.social

575 Followers 563 Following

Perfumer & co-founder of Olfiction (an independent fragrance lab) and Eau de Boujee (brand). Finnish. Gamer. Reader. Invisibly disabled. She/her. linktr.ee/perfumer.pia blog: https://open.substack.com/pub/perfumer

A colourful and chaotic melange of various paintings and drawings depicting botanical, abstract and fantasy subjects.
Woman with long purplish-pink hair is sipping tea out of a Moomin mug.
A multimedia sketch in a sketchbook of a grotesque chimera with two front legs wearing red jester boots, two back legs blue, a butthole that looks like a mouth making an o, a demon tail, a microwilly peeking out and pointing at a cute teddybear on the ground, and a long neck with Trump’s head, mask-like. The monster is infested with cordyceps and one of the fruiting bodies is Putin.
An amateur sketch in a two page spread sketchbook of a blue bunny hat surrounded by a fence and handguns.
a poster image with brand logos on a pale grey background advertising The Pop-Up Perfumery first edition, November 13-16, 69 York St London W1H 1QD
A big haphazard stack of yellow and pink-coloured small hardback books on a marble table with thank you slips, tote bags and flat boxes to one side.
Title text “WHO BANS FRAGRANCE INGREDIENTS?” over an image of sliced lemons resting on a grey stone slab.
A derpy brown tri Finnish Lapphund in orange autumn leaves.
Jessica Fletcher wearing VR goggles in a 1993 episode “A Virtual Murder”, which is still a better VR experience than what the modern billionaire class is pushing on us.
black and white illustration of a plain, rounded perfume bottle with a French cursive phrase underneath: ceci n’est pas un parfum (this image is referencing the famous painting called Treachery of Images). A stencil painted pink logomark DEMO ACCORDS is layered over it. www.demoaccords.com is written at the bottom of the image.
A 50+ white woman with wavy pink & gold hair wearing an orange dress
Grey and black Moomin mug featuring Stinky clutching glass bottles and sprinting away with a grin.
A screenshot from Spotify of The Eco Well podcast: Copy Cats, Counterfeit and Culture; the Ethics of Perfume. Roundtable with Christophe Laudamiel and Pia Long.
A stylised close-up photo of a middle aged white woman with gold wavy hair in 80s inspired makeup and grey zipped up bomber-style jacket.
A photo of a hardback book with a black cover that has red and white text on it and a stylised cartoonish illustration of a Bond Villain-type man holding a white cat. Starter Villain (it’s a family business) by John Scalzi.
A photo of page 251 of “Burn Book: a Tech Love Story” in which the pertinent section goes “Tony was entranced with the idea of what I thought of as forced joy.”
A fluffy brown dog looking up from a sit in front of bluebells.
Mix wet and dry ingredients separately. Then combine everything well in a large bowl. Spread evenly onto a baking sheet and bake in 150C for 15min. Then mix and turn it all over with a spatula & bake for a further 15min. When ready, give it another mix and let it cool down completely before storing in an airtight jar for up to one month.
A pen and ink sketch in a sketchbook of a frowning anthropomorphised cartoon eagle - patchy, truly balding, shakily drawn.
A photo of two books standing side-by-side: Careless People (a story of where I used to work) & Alien Clay.
A close-up of a white woman’s neck wearing a white rabbit Les Nereides charm surrounded by enamel flowers and two small pearls.
Middle-aged white woman with pale skin and a mischievous expression wearing blue headphones.
A pale middle-aged woman with straight mauve-toned hair is sniffing a cherry blossom.
A middle-aged plus sized Finnish woman with pale skin and fine, wavy pastel mauve hair pushes a perfume bottle with cap against the tip of her nose and smiles with her mouth closed.
“What if we looked at how literature, music and pop culture can have spaces that are parallel and connected to the creators and commercial enterprises but not directly driven by them?”
A middle-aged Finnish woman with long fair hair in a perfume lab.
A blue red and white book cover of Putin’s Trolls by Jessikka Aro (on the frontlines of Russia’s information war against the world).
A photo of a page from “BOOKS, Art, Craft & Community” with yellow themed images and text that reads “When the colours appear in the pot, it is quite magical and gives me the feeling of being some kind of alchemist or a witch. I find it incredible that plants can have so many secrets.
Photo of Hans Gruber sitting in a brown leather chair from the film Die Hard.
Photo of a fragrance laboratory showing lab benches, shelves full of glass bottles and a compounding desk with a chair.
Closeup of a brown tri Finnish Lapphund looking very cute.
There are a lot of misconceptions about “concentration”. I often use art as a metaphor (the alcohol or water or any other fragrance solvent used when creating a perfume is the “canvas” and the composition made up of the fragrance materials is designed to be either a watercolour or an oil painting, or in the case of some - a statement single line of ink). Point being = the whole thing is the piece, and one style isn’t qualitatively “better” than the other, as long as the intent of creation and reception is met. Another analogy is cooking - 60% of passata is not the same as 60% ghost chilli. The ingredients we use in perfumery can have high impact, low impact, high volatility, low volatility - and it’s all the ingredients used that matter in what a 10% concentration will do vs what 60% would. Adding more of something isn’t necessarily going to make a perfume better, more long lasting or more impactful. More of what? This is before looking at skin safety, laws & IFRA, but it’s totally possible to create a super high concentration finished product that meets all of those, so that’s not really the point of the post. And if a brand is telling you that they’ve used a “high concentration” of fragrance oil, their fragrance oil might be half solvent itself. Focusing on a bit of marketing razzle dazzle is nothing new in perfume, but it rather misses the point of where the “value” of our art lies. We’re not creating tomato puree here. Now, in the world of (especially corporate) fragrance & its customers, COMPRESSED fragrance oils, using high impact materials & as little solvent as possible, are all the rage for fast moving consumer goods -because they can help create less waste, use less carbon, require less liquid sloshing around in 125kg drums transported all over the place, are able to be dosed much lower in shampoo, lotion, etc. This is a cool trend for functional & personal care fragrances. That kind of compacting could reduce the dose of a fragrance in a product significa…
A screenshot of an Instagram caption by Perfumer Pia reads: Inspired by some recent posts on here about “filler ingredients” in cosmetics made me think of that perpetual myth in the perfume world that perfumes should be judged based on how concentrated they are. I wanted to show you a different way of looking at it. When I teach someone to always evaluate perfume oil concentrate in its intended base, it’s because the base product is like a canvas - without which you cannot see the true picture. You must create with intent, and an Eau de Cologne will not smell good if you add it to the solvent mix at the same concentration as Eau de Parfum. You would get a distorted, over-saturated image. Now - whether someone has actually given the perfumer a proper budget for the oil in the first place, well that’s another issue entirely. You can definitely still create beautiful perfumes from inexpensive materials, and skilled perfumers can make something glorious out of something simple, but there is a breaking point of course and then you’re left with no money for the sophisticated ingredients that can make all the difference.
A stack of Donald Duck comic book “pocket books” in Finnish
A photo of two library books stacked on top of each other on a black fabric surface. The top book is blue with a white title “An Ugly Truth” authored by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. The title below is white with a black and white photo of the author visible on the spine. Red title reads: Burn Book.
A photo of fragrance chemistry describing the route to obtain Ysamber K
An extremely Good Boi (Finnish Lapphund of the brown tri colour variety) sitting on a forest chair carved out of wood.
Cover image of a book “An Ugly Truth”, Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination authored by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. The cover depicts a black and white half portrait of Zuckerberg.
A screenshot of an Audible title “Agatha Christie’s Poirot’s Finest Cases: eight BBC radio 4 full-cast dramatisations starring John Moffat as Hercule Poirot. “