4160 tuesdays the dark heart of old havana

So I'm throwing open the perfumery doors and inviting you all over for tea. As well as the final fragrances from many different houses - brands from Madonna to Frederic Malle, Guerlain to SJP - I've got several hundred raw materials. In the last decade I've aquired quite a few bottles of scent, and now I'm sharing. Or there's the opposite end of the scale, the perfume sales person who doesn't really know anything about their range, and will just point us in the direction of whatever is new, or Chanel No 5. Or maybe we'll be carried away and buy something only to find out that it doesn't smell quite as good on our skins as it did on the paper, or the touches, as some people insist on calling them. Perhaps the sales staff will use language they don't understand - drydown, sillage, chypres - or talking about oudh, tuberose, and opoponax as if we all ought to know what they smell like. It seems that we're all slightly nervous that we'll be bamboozled into buying something we don't want or need.

Petrified of perfumeries? Or why otherwise able and confident people run in fear from sales staff holding atomisers I've had a few chats recently with professional, educated people with good jobs, who happened to mention that they daren't set foot inside a perfumery. Just a few of the many sniffable scents at 4160 HQ

4160 tuesdays the dark heart of old havana