Shooter still at large, but we go back to the French side to make perfume anyway!

Earlier in the week we had all signed up for a class in perfume making at Tijon in Grand Case--yes, over on the French side not that far from where the shooting was.

At Tijon (part perfumerie, part classroom/lab, part upscale boutique selling island-made items) all was calm and owners Cyndi and John Berglund were ready for us.

John started out with a very lively and informative lecture on the history of perfumes and how they are designed and made.  He talked a lot about aromatic oils (natural and synthetic),how they combine to produce pleasant and lasting scents and how our olfactory sense works. He threw in very cool facts like our sense of smell is the only sense fully developed at birth, and that perfumes don't last as long on blondes as they do on brunettes.

Tijon has a 300-oil "organ" with distillations of everything from coconut to wysteria (one of my favorites).

The idea was that we would learm a bit about the types of "notes" or depth of scent/oil. Base, middle and top "notes" or scents each play a different role in making a perfume last, have distinctive character and complexity.

We each got a lab station, a workbook, beakers and pipettes for mixing oils and trays for selecting and transporting oils from the organ.

 We could use the pre-mixed recipes, classified as citrus, earthy, oriental, floral and so on. We could also work from scratch or ask John to look up our own favorite commercial perfume recipes and pick some of those scents.  That was my choice--I have loved Fragonard's Soliel since we first visited their factory in the south of France in the late 1990's. I needed jasmine, orange, lily and wysteria for starters.


The champagne flutes you see are used for a toast to our successful completion of the class (you can also choose one as a souvenier--Bud and I now have a matching pair).

How professional do we look?  See how neat our work stations are?

This is after we've been working an hour or so!

We each ended up with our own scents (John and Cyndi keep the recipe in case you'd like to re-order), named (I called mine "Breeze" after the Caribbean breezes--light, a bit floral, a bit citrus)), bottled and labeled. You also get a gift basket of product samples as well as a bottle of one of the perfumes they have developed.

As much as the guys fussed about "being dragged" to Tijon, they got into it and each came away with very manly and nice colognes.

We decided NOT to go to Cul de Sac for lunch and headed instead for this open-air restaurant above Orient Beach (way, way above the nude beach).

How's this for a view of St. Bart's, Galeon Baie and the Bayside Riding Club--where Bud and I rode horseback on the beach for my article in the USAirways Inflight Magazine.

As a side note on the shooting, the newspaper account said the shooter had not been caught yet (we did see a number of gendarmes doing what seemed to be checking license plates today). It also said the victim was 30 years old.

John and Cyndi told us the "coconut telegraph"  (local rumor mill) had the shooting as a 8-month pregnant woman who was shot trying to avoid a robbery, with no word on whether her baby had been saved. How far from the truth can you get???

Too funny!