For three years, POWER-Boise Marketing and Proposal Coordi-

nator Elise Wishlow had a well-kept secret. Almost no one at

POWER knew she had her own business making and selling

perfumes. Wishlow wanted to grow it a little more before letting her

co-workers know. But once Boise Weekly got wind of her bespoke

scents and published an article on Wishlow, her secret was out.

1 Surges IN•depth March 2019

MARCH 2019SURGESPOW

ER

IN•depth

She persisted.

After more than two

decades of learning

aromatherapy principles

and testing blends,

Wishlow’s high-end

perfumes and oils are

now being sold online.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF CJ WARD PHOTOGRAPHY

“There was a flurry of emails within the department after the Boise article and the reaction was really positive, people were inter-ested,” Wishlow says now. “I could have had a lot of support if I had been out there earlier.”

Behind the name

Wishlow started in the scent business in the ‘90s while she worked for a tea and aromatherapy shop in Victoria, BC. While there, she took a course to become certified in aromatherapy and found she had a passion for blending scents. Interested in the subject, and loving the various ingredients that go into it, she continued blending, reading texts, teaching classes and expanding on her collection of oils.

Oils can be extracted in several ways, but the most natural methods (without the use of solvents such as hexane, heptane or ethanol) are steam distillation and expression. Distillation uses steam to vaporize the plant’s aromatic compounds. The steam is condensed into a liquid where the water is then sep-arated from the essential oil. When a plant is pressed or crushed with no added heat to produce its essential oil, it is said to be cold-pressed. Both methods have been used for centuries.

A newer process, called CO2 extraction, uses pressurized car-bon dioxide. Although the partially liquified or supercritical gas acts as a solvent to pull oils and other substances from the plant, there is little-to-no solvent left in the final extracts, and they’re con-sidered pure enough for therapeutic use. The all-natural oils are

the only ones Wishlow uses. She even named her company after them: Press & Still. She uses the purest oils and extracts possible.

“Synthetic oils last longer and are predictable and cheap, but they don’t have the same effect on me as the natural oils. It’s such a dif-ferent experience. I love working with natural ingredients.”

Blending scents

Wishlow starts each new formula by focusing on one ingredient (usually a middle note) to build around, and then layers on other scents that would blend well with it. She makes the per-fume by adding oils and extracts drop by drop and keeping track of what each drop adds to the overall scent. She complements the combination with top notes, lighter scents that don’t last very long, and base notes,

heavier scents that work as fixatives to anchor the perfume and make it last on the skin. The blends are usually 40% base notes and they can last for a couple of hours or overnight.

There are other considerations as well, such as sillage—the trail of scent left behind the wearer. For natural perfumes, the sillage is very low. It can be almost undetectable unless you’re within one or two feet.

“You have to be in someone’s personal space to smell the scent,” Wishlow explains.

There are books that give scent profiles and charts of what mixes well together. Wishlow spent years following the advice of previous perfumers, but more recently she has become more adventurous,

2 Surges IN•depth March 2019

“…the reaction was really positive, people were

interested. I could have had a lot of support if I had

been out there earlier.”

Processing the scent.

Wishlow smells blends in the lab

using a type of perfume “cloche.”

The inside of the funnel holds a

tissue dabbed in perfume, and

the funnel fills with scent, making

it easy to detect all of the notes. PHOTO: CJ WARD PHOTOGRAPHY

combining different oils and coming up with her own chords. After a more structured blending session of following recipes, she will throw her used droppers into various pots and let them sit overnight. If they smell good the next day, she will reverse engineer the myste-rious concoctions. “It’s a blend of being strategic and not strategic.”

But, she says, new blend attempts don’t work out more often than they do. “There is failure, lots of failure. It’s a process that every-body has to go through,” says Wishlow. “You have to be patient and go easy on yourself.” Wishlow is inspired by a quote from Ira Glass about creativity [see sidebar] and how it can take years for your work to match your ambitions. “It makes me feel better, this is the process.”

Despair Is Folly, Joy Luck, and more

For now, Wishlow sells her perfumes primarily on the internet although she would like to start having them in small boutique shops around the country. There are seven different perfumes—with names like Despair is Folly, Joy Luck and Sombrio—for sale on the site. In addition to the botanical perfumes, Press & Still sells aromatherapy blends. The products aren’t cheap, but neither are the ingredients that go into them.

Take agarwood, one of Wishlow’s most unusual ingredients. A bottle with a few milliliters of the oil can cost several hundred dollars, depending on the oil’s quality and origin. Also called oud and especially popular in the Middle East, the oil is created when

3 Surges IN•depth March 2019

“There is failure, lots of failure. It’s a process that everybody has

to go through. You have to be patient and go easy on yourself.”

The product, the person.

A rare shot of Wishlow at her desk. She’s

usually active in the lab, formulating,

blending or packaging up orders.

Not just perfume, a next step.

Now that she has launched her first perfume

line, Wishlow is shifting gears to formulate a

natural skin care line. That will mean doing

a lot more research and a lot more testing.

PHOTOS: CJ WARD PHOTOGRAPHY

Press & Still’s first-ever product.

Despair is Folly body oil is per-

fumed with lavender, lime, jasmine,

cedarwood, sandalwood, patchouli

and several other aromatherapy-

grade essential oils and extracts.

the Aquilaria tree is infected with a type of mold, and it then exudes an aromatic sap.

Every oil is influenced by several factors: the geographic loca-tion of the plant, what part of the plant the essential oils are collected from, and the method of harvesting, among others. In addition to the strength of some scents—including agarwood, which can completely take over a blend if not mixed properly—each of these factors helps to make each blend unique, despite any similarity in ingredients. The scent can be very different based on the quality of the ingredients or where the ingredi-ents were sourced, and the addition of a single drop of oil can completely change a charted blend.

A passion project

Wishlow may have a position in one of POWER’s division mar-keting departments, but marketing perfume is very different from what she does at work all day. Working at POWER has given Wishlow an appreciation for things like business plans and not sinking time and money into something that might not work. She has no desire to quit her job at POWER, but plans to continue blending perfumes in her spare time.

“I can’t help myself. It’s a little new and a little risky, but it’s super fun. That’s where the magic happens. It’s a passion project.”

Sandra Wood is a marketing and proposal coordinator for the Power Delivery division in Boise.

Ira Glass, host of National Public Radio’s This American Life, on creativity:

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal, and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work…It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

…It takes a while. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

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“It’s a little new and a little risky, but it’s super fun. That’s

where the magic happens. It’s a passion project.”

PHOTO: CJ WARD PHOTOGRAPHY