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    <title>Benjawi Field Notes</title>
    <link>https://benjawi.com/field-notes/</link>
    <description>Meet Rhun, our lead fragrance, and The Six, a collection exploring Indonesian materials and places. Discover the Benjawi fragrance house.</description>
    <language>en-gb</language>
    <lastBuildDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</lastBuildDate>
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      <title>How to smell a little more.</title>
      <link>https://benjawi.com/field-notes/how-to-smell/</link>
      <guid isPermaLink="true">https://benjawi.com/field-notes/how-to-smell/</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Scent school</category>
      <description>Take a fragrance, a strip of paper and a little time. Start with the sensations you notice; names for the notes can come later.</description>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[Describe before you identify.

The pressure to recognise a note can make a person stop smelling. Begin somewhere easier. Is it cool or warm? Smooth or fibrous? Near to the skin or filling the room? Does it arrive as a flash, a cloud, a line or a weight?

Try a short sentence: ‘At first it feels cool and green; later it becomes softer and closer to skin.’ Your words can change as the fragrance does. Temperature and texture are comparisons for the impression, not measurements.

Temperature · texture · distance · movement

Paper compares. Skin decides.

A blotter makes it easier to compare several fragrances under similar conditions and to keep a record over time. Skin adds heat, movement and the smells already present on the body. Use paper to study. Use skin to decide whether you want to live with it.

For a simple comparison, apply the fragrance and let it dry without rubbing. Keep the amount and the surface consistent when comparing two scents. Write down when you applied each one, then return to it.

Smell less. Return more.

A crowded table of blotters quickly becomes one indistinct atmosphere. Work with a few. Step into fresh air when they begin to blur. Write the time on each strip and keep it; the most revealing part may arrive after you have left the room.

Number the blotter before spraying.

Take one short smell rather than a long inhalation.

Write sensation first; possible materials second.

Return at twenty minutes, two hours and the next morning.]]></content:encoded>
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      <title>How a fragrance changes on skin.</title>
      <link>https://benjawi.com/field-notes/a-perfume-is-not-a-pyramid/</link>
      <guid isPermaLink="true">https://benjawi.com/field-notes/a-perfume-is-not-a-pyramid/</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Composition</category>
      <description>A fragrance changes as you wear it. Learn what top, heart and base tell you, and why the experience is less orderly than the diagram.</description>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[The formula arrives together.

The familiar fragrance pyramid sorts an experience into three moments: top, heart and base. It helps us talk about what appears early, what becomes central and what remains. But the perfume itself is not stacked in layers. The whole formula arrives together.

What changes is the balance you perceive. Materials evaporate at different rates, and their strength and interactions affect what you notice. A base note can be apparent from the first spray. Top, heart and base describe tendencies; they are not three separate phases with fixed start and finish times.

A note is not necessarily an ingredient.

A note is a word for something the composition makes you smell. Rose may contain rose oil—or it may be an accord assembled from several unrelated materials. Sea air, paper, stone and smoke can all be legible notes without existing as pourable ingredients.

Think of colour mixing: the name describes the perception. A useful fragrance description distinguishes the impression from the material, especially when it makes a claim about natural origin or rarity. A list of notes is a guide to the scent, not the complete formula.

A note names a perception. An ingredient names a material in the formula.

Read fragrance as a sequence, not a list.

Smell once at the beginning, again when the first brightness has moved, and once more hours later. At each point, notice temperature, texture, distance and movement before trying to name ingredients.

At first: what arrives before you can think?

After about twenty minutes: what has become the centre?

A few hours later: what remains close to skin or paper? These are observation points, not deadlines for a perfume to change.]]></content:encoded>
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      <title>Nutmeg and mace: one fruit, two spices.</title>
      <link>https://benjawi.com/field-notes/one-fruit-two-spices/</link>
      <guid isPermaLink="true">https://benjawi.com/field-notes/one-fruit-two-spices/</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Spice history</category>
      <description>Nutmeg is the kernel of a seed. Mace is the scarlet aril around that seed. For centuries, both came from one small archipelago—and the world moved violently towards their source.</description>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[One kernel. One scarlet aril.

A ripe nutmeg fruit splits on the tree. Inside is a dark seed wrapped in a bright, branching covering called an aril. The dried kernel inside the seed is nutmeg. The dried aril is mace. One fruit provides both spices; the fleshy outer fruit is a third, separate part.

Compare the two spices and notice the family resemblance. Nutmeg can suggest warm wood; mace can feel lighter, drier and more peppery. These are useful impressions to test for yourself. Variety, processing and freshness all affect what you smell.

Why did the world come to Banda?

The native range of Myristica fragrans is Maluku, specifically the Banda Islands. Before the tree was carried elsewhere, that botanical fact made a scatter of volcanic islands the sole source of two commodities coveted across Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

In Banda, nutmeg is grown beneath taller shade trees, including kenari. The islands supported a trade of extraordinary reach. Dutch attempts to control it culminated in the 1621 campaign: killings, enslavement and displacement, followed by a plantation system.

What the Manhattan shorthand leaves out.

The familiar ‘Run for Manhattan’ story compresses the lives and agency of the Bandanese into a neat exchange. The history of Run follows the trade, conquest and treaty in full.

The more useful question is not which island was worth more. It is who was permitted to set the price of what grew there—and who was removed when they refused to surrender that choice.

The treaty left the Dutch holding Run and England holding New Netherland. It did not contain a literal island-for-island exchange.]]></content:encoded>
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