An Interview with Will Carius from Barrister & Mann

Will Carius is a master perfumer and soap maker and the founder of Barrister & Mann. His company has created iconic scents such as Seville, Le Grand Chypre, and Waves, and his Omnibus soap base is renowned for its density and slickness. ShaveSplash was lucky enough to get the opportunity to dive inside his creative mind. Without further ado…Will Carius…

What do you love about the study and creation of fragrances?

I’m not a particularly visual person. I’m only a passable photographer, horrendous with any kind of drawing implement, brush, or chisel, and have never been moved by a static visual work of art in my life (films being a different category). It’s just not how I’m wired. But the attraction of perfumery is twofold: a) I get to study something that very few people understand, which is a fun way of “looking under the hood” of reality in a way that not many people get to do, and b) fragrance has the power to move us in unexpected ways, ways that don’t necessarily occur to people when they generally consider “art.” And I love having the ability and opportunity to work with an unexpected medium and create things that people love.

Can you remember the first fragrance you fell in love with? What made you fall in love with it?

I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I didn’t see my father a lot when I was a kid. He commuted back and forth between Northern New Jersey and Upstate New York, either working for the Home Depot (it was a very different company in the early 90s) or working on private contracting jobs. As a result, he basically lived out of a duffle bag, and I remember the bars of Irish Spring that he used to carry in the plastic soap caddy in that bag. I grew very attached to the fragrance, though I’ve since developed an allergy to it, and they’ve reformulated it several times, so it’s not the same as it once was.

For you, what is the hallmark of a well-constructed fragrance?

Jean Carles famously said, “Above all, a perfume must smell good.” I don’t entirely agree with this from an artistic point of view, but, from a commercial standpoint, he was absolutely correct. So I generally consider three things when evaluating a fragrance: 1) Does it smell good? 2) If it doesn’t smell good, is it at least interesting or original in some way? 3) Is it linear? Or does it develop and change based on its evaporation? I hold linear fragrances to a higher standard when it comes to the “smelling good” rule; if it’s not going to change at all, it has to be worth the monotony. A few are. Most are not.

Are there specific scent notes or ingredients that you love to use when making a fragrance? Are there some that you consider “no-no’s”?

I consider my work to be fairly smoke-heavy, which I attribute to having grown up with a wood-burning stove as nearly the only heat source in our house. Curiously, I have grown to loathe wood stoves themselves for the smoke and ash and dirt that they produce, but the underlying presence of woodsmoke in everything has left with me the sensation that light touches of smoke can improve quite a number of fragrances. As a result, I incorporate a lot of that thinking into my own work, even if not using materials that are considered traditionally smoky.

For those that are verboten, I’ve learned the hard way to avoid things like mandarin aldehyde (the notorious “cilantro” note in War), too much smoke (as in Rome), and filthy musks like Tonquitone and Shangralide, which I love, but which the shaving community as a whole rejects (see Night Music). If I were making perfume exclusively, I might be less averse to that last category, but so many shavers have such a problem with it that I’ve simply laid them aside except in the most gentle of cases (such as the small amount of civet base in Lavender, Interrupted).

What is it you are going for when you design a new fragrance? What is your objective and where do you draw inspiration?

It depends very much on what I’m trying to accomplish. With the Four Horsemen, for example, there was a lot of thematic overlay: each fragrance was built on the central structure that made up Death, but each one had to epitomize the other three Horsemen without allowing the set to smell too similar. But I’m typically trying to evoke an impression of some kind. I know that I said above that I’m not particularly visual, but I am very interested in and fond of color, and consider many of my fragrances to represent one or more colors.

As for inspiration, I draw it from everywhere. If something interests me, I consider the possibility of how it might be rendered in fragrance. It can come from historical figures, mythology, Golden Age classics, film, literature, music, places, whatever.

When it comes to fragrances, how would you describe your “signature style’?

"Weird.” Some people seem to think that that’s a result of incompetence, but I’ve always been up-front about the fact that I am very much trying to push the bounds of what we think of when we think of scent. Much though I love and have an affinity for Golden Age perfumery and the great masterpieces, when I work on my own, I’m trying to put together something that has never been done before, or, if it has, that has never been done in the specific manner in which I want to do it.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you personally use fragrances in your everyday life? Do you frequently wear aftershave or cologne? How do you choose what to wear and when?

I’m in production so frequently these days that I almost never wear fragrance anymore. Anything I wear would be subsumed by the scent of whatever I’m making, and I joke that I carry the smell of a fragrance lab wherever I go. It’s in my skin, my hair, my clothing, etc. But, when I DO wear fragrances, I wear whatever strikes my fancy for that occasion. Every fragrance in my collection has earned the right to be there, and I do not buy or keep things that I consider anything less than exceptional. For example, my favorite modern scents include Zoologist Civet (Shelley Waddington’s buttery-smooth masterpiece), MDCI Invasion Barbare (quite possibly the greatest fougère in current production, and Stefanie Bakouche’s crowning achievement), and Imaginary Authors O, Unknown! (which, when it was released, I declared to be Josh Meyer’s first great work). Each is special, each unique, each utterly peerless. I believe in developing your own tastes and loves, rather than wearing whatever’s the current best-seller, or whatever you think will get you laid, or phoning it in for just some clean, bloodless thing with no personality and no statement. Fragrances reflect who we are in a way that very few other things can. I believe in making a statement.

Out of curiosity, can you tell us a bit about your shaving routine? What kind of razors, blades, balms, and other accessories do you like to use?

These days, my shaving routine is extremely simple. Nine times out of ten, it will be a synthetic brush and whatever Barrister and Mann soap I happen to have on hand (sometimes it’s something I’m testing, sometimes it’s just a jar left over from production), either an Alumigoose V2 with a Feather SoftGuard blade or a Proof razor with a PermaSharp, and whatever splash is currently sitting on my bathroom counter. If I opt to get a little fancier, I might use soap from another artisan (House of Mammoth and Noble Otter remain perennial favorites), or even a mass-produced cream like Speick or Palmolive. In the winter, I apply either my own Unscented balm or Myrsol Emulsion, for which I have retained a certain fondness over the years.

In your mind, what makes a good shave soap?

Lubricity and density. I dislike high-structure soaps like Cella, which I feel have too much coconut oil, and instead favor the slickest, densest soaps I can find. That’s largely how Omnibus got to be what it is: the relentless pursuit of those two qualities to the utmost degree. I generally like to see a true soap (as opposed to synthetic detergents, though there are certain exceptions to this) and dislike pigments like micas and titanium dioxide, which I consider utterly unnecessary.

What was your thought process in designing the Omnibus base? What were you going for? What do you think are some of the standout ingredients that make it special?

As I mentioned previously, it was largely designed based on the relentless pursuit of lubricity and density, though post-shave and latherability played a major role as well. It’s the only shaving soap formula that I have ever put through consumer testing, and it took eight rounds of testing (and, overall, nearly 70 prototypes) to get it to where I wanted it. At the end of the day, the only thing that truly mattered was aggregate shave quality. The testing was done completely blind, and I averaged everything based on average ratings for a number of different factors. If one thing suffered during one test, then I worked to improve it on the next one.

As for materials in particular, there are three that I consider exceptionally special: Cupuaçu butter, which I used to replace lanolin, Hydroxyethylcellulose, which is the same lubricant used in KY Jelly (I’ve shaved with various brands of lube more than I’d like to consider) and Polyacrylamidomethylpropane Sulfonic Acid, sold under the trade name RheoCare HSP 1180, which is a biodegradable anionic polymer that contributes heavily to both the post-shave feel and to the overall lubricity of the lather. Honestly, it was the idea that I could begin adding specific lubricants that really took Omnibus above and beyond what we had done before, and I firmly believe that many soaps fall down on slickness because their makers trust a class of compounds that specifically acts to lessen the presence of oil and other lubricating agents, that being soap molecules themselves, to serve as the primary lubricant.

What do you love most about wet shaving and the wet shaving community? Conversely, if there is one thing you could change, and you had unlimited resources, what would it be?

Wet shaving’s primary benefit for me was always that it improved my skin and the quality of my shaves. That hasn’t changed. And I appreciate that it has gotten men to take better care of their skin, sparked interest in fragrance (including my own such obsession), and try to cut down on their environmental impacts, however minor those may be. But the wet shaving community, like most hobby communities, is rife with politics, cults of personality, infighting, drama, and other such nonsense. Have I, at times, been part and party to this? Absolutely. Would I excise it in a heartbeat if I could? You bet your ass.

Will Carius