The scent The artist The inspiration This is a 2 ml spray sample. Find the full bottle here. Frangipani—also called plumeria—is one of our favorite floral notes. Frangipani is a tropical white flower with a bright, honeyed scent, and Sarah McCartney's Centrepiece plays up its sweeter aspects with honey and vanilla. She then uses green tea and woods for balance, and in McCartney's careful hands, Centrepiece is a masterpiece. Notes include honey, green tea, vanilla, frangipani, cedarwood, and musk. We've met a lot of people in the perfume world, and Sarah McCartney of 4160 Tuesdays is one of our very favorites. Want to know why? Sarah, in her own words: "As a little girl, I did not make perfumes from rose petals. That was for softies. I made magic spells and wanted to be a witch when I grew up. When I was 16 I bought a bottle of Diorella. I studied maths and sciences, practised music and French, wrote books on brands and their evil twin—counterfeiting—and online marketing, and learned to dance Argentinean tango. For 14 years I was the head writer for Lush while the company grew from four shops—one in Poole and three in London—to 700 worldwide. I was writing 50,000 words every three months for the Lush Times, aiming to encapsulate the products' scents in their descriptions. During that time, I bought and read 200 books on essential oils and herbalism and learned the essential oils the founders gave me to educate myself. At the end of the 14 years, I took some time off to write a novel featuring a problem-solving perfumer. In it, I described the scents that she made and I wanted to have them available for people to smell. So I set off on a quest to see if I could buy them. This turned out to be impossible - and pretty expensive - because no one was making exactly what I wanted, so I started another quest to see of I could make them instead. Of course that turned out to be even more difficult, but once I'd started, I just kept going. 4160 Tuesdays perfumes is the result." When the perfumer is also a writer, you let her tell the story herself. "Making Centrepiece was different from my usual method," says Sarah McCartney of 4160 Tuesdays. "I was working with a friend I first bumped into when I was out for a perfume and cake day with a group of like-minded fragrance fans. We'd just had luxurious ice creams at Fortnum & Mason in London's Piccadilly, and were touring their perfumery. We got chatting and I invited him over to the studio. While I was working on something else I gave him free rein of the materials and he chose a collection of scents he liked, some natural and some accords I'd already created. I took these and blended them with other materials to make a complete fragrance and when we all sat smelling it, we noticed that a feeling of peacefulness washed over us. Playing with the words 'peace' and 'piece,' we named it Centrepiece." And now? People in the UK can buy Centrepiece at Fortnum & Mason. How's that for a happy ending?
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