Pillowtalk - Our journey of creating the botanical perfume

I really want this text to be as complete with our years long journey creating our new botanical perfume, Pillowtalk, as possible. So it is both our shared memories but of course, as I am the one writing this article it will be heavier on my own personal ones too. By the way, for those who don’t know who „we” are, it is Zita Gyurokovics & Lőrinc Szendeff, who together created the Pillowtalk perfume from the beginning of just playing with a few new ingredients I got back then, through ideas, design, the perfume name and more.

We started working on what’s now became our Pillowtalk perfume in 2019. We regularly play with ingredients, creating some fun and interesting combinations as well as some less interesting ones. I had just got some new extracts, quite a few tea related ones, so first we just smelled what is new and what we think about them. We came to the jasmine tea extract and it reminded Lőrinc of someone he knew and who liked jasmine tea and I was not sure if its a good or bad memory so I thought that we will not likely to use that one. But as we started playing with mixing and pairing, he wanted to go for the jasmine tea. And so, it all started with the jasmine tea and I would say we were heavy handed with it at first as it is quite a subtle scent and at the very beginning we wanted it to really shine so we were very careful with what we added to it and how much. After our very first session, that started with the jasmine tea, we liked very much where it was heading and added notes to maybe continue working with it. You see, we got plenty of ideas, notes and scent sketches but very few that we decided to develop fully. Well, so far only this one, our Pillowtalk. Before our next playful scent creating session, I started tinkering with the sketch based on our notes and conversations. I did not do or add a lot but the scent was getting more and more exciting, so we continued working on it. At the beginning it was more wild in nature, closer to the first two Mar Galliti perfume, Dusk and Dawn. And yes, it is me who tend to lean toward the wilder side of things but together with Lőrinc came more balance and sophistication, softness. This softness did not come easy to the composition, we played with lots of different ingredients and many of them did not work, but after numerous sessions and falling in love with this scent more and more, we arrived to the final result that is now our Pillowtalk perfume. As the scent developed so did the story. From the beginning of a mental image of a bee hive at a mill (that was our very first visual feeling, impression after our first session), it became a story of soul baring intimacy, still set in a wider landscape of nature, garden etc. but focusing on the inside, the home, the souls.

„Light is painting shadows on the walls. The warm afternoon breeze is gently moving the curtains. Outside everything is waiting and tempting, with dusty dirt roads and views to remember. The gardens and trees are offering heady scented flowers for the bees and juicy peaches. While somewhere in the distance smoke is filling the air from a campfire.

Fresh and smoky, like aged wood & beeswax. The juice of the peach dripping down the fingers. Deep, a bit dusty and humid at the same time.

But we want to lie like this forever. On the pillows, softly curled up to each other’s soul. Your hand fits perfectly in mine. Talking, listening & softening more, trusting, holding, going bare and soul deep. Everything is whispering, we are home.”

For this we needed packaging that reflected beautifully the scent and its story. We already had the signature Mar Galliti ceramic bottle shape developed by Tünde Ruzicska ceramic artist, but it needed a new glaze.  So we put together a mood-board for Tünde to help her work with the new glaze. And the experiments started. We went through many options and iterations with the glazes guided by the artistic hands of Tünde.

In the story from the beginning there was both a quiet calm in the intimacy of the room and the busyness from outside filtering in, in-between, the soft movement of the curtains is a light but recognisable separation that I wanted to capture. For this Tünde suggested pouring the glaze instead of dipping it, like she did with the previous perfume bottle. As she explained the gesture of pouring has a deeper, more ancient meaning. On the Pillowtalk ceramic bottles the two glazes join and unite on the surface. While the gesture of pouring carries the meaning of giving, gifting. In this way the deep intimacy of the perfume becomes visible on the bottles.

We loved the bottle and the new glaze for the Pillowtalk perfume but now we were faced with a bigger challenge of the boxes. Although our previous box (for Dusk and Dawn, the first Mar Galliti perfumes) was nice and well-made, we felt that it was not inharmony with the brand like the bottle was from the very beginning. We were experimenting with different materials, not insisting on using paper box necessarily and that’s how the natural, cloudlike softness of raw wool came into the picture. Finally, we handpicked two whole, unwashed raw fleece of Helsinge wool from two ewe living on an island on the Swedish west coast. We had much more freedom in texture, length, colour when going for unwashed raw fleece but this also meant that I had to learn how to clean & wash them properly as well as doing the light felting that we needed. I really fell in love with handling and working with raw wool. It is a beautiful material. At the end we used their cloudy softness both inside the box and in the paper for the box.

I hoped that we will be able to carry the local artisan touch into the boxes too and it will finally also be in harmony with Mar Galliti and with us. For this, we asked for the help of Petra Füzes, the head of the paper mill at the Orfűi Malmok. The Orfűi Malmok (Orfűi Mills) is about an hour drive to south from the Mar Galliti studio and located at one of the most magical places at the edge of the forest in the Mecsek Mountain, next to a lovely lake. Luckily, she loved our project and the challenge. Petra is a kind, creative soul, who has an enormous amount of knowledge and deep love for her craft. So she was excited about the challenge of our box project. At our first meeting we already came up with the idea of adding wool to the paper too. The wool with its softness is adding extra texture and meaning. The whole box with the custom mould made paper, the embossed logo on the top and the screen-printed little card were all beautifully hand-made by Petra.  Also, we finally love our boxes as much as we love our bottles and feel that they are all in harmony with our new perfume, Pillowtalk, the brand and with us.

All of the Mar Galliti photos are taken by Lőrinc, so it was not different this time either.  I usually have a graphic designer put the webpage together but for this perfume I wanted to do it myself. So with Lőrinc’s photos, the story we wrote and the videos I dived into to give a lovely home for our Pillowtalk on the Mar Galliti website. And with that we put the final touches on the project and on 15th May 2024 we launched the Pillowtalk botanical perfume.

I hope you love it as much as we do.

Zita