The creative process behind Double Scoop
A journal by Abel founder Frances Shoemack
The vanilla we almost didn't make
Isaac and I have been working together for 15 years now, and in all that time, we’d never attempted a vanilla. Neither of us are ‘vanilla wearers’ so when we set out on the journey to create Double Scoop, it was with the intention to create a vanilla we would love to wear ourselves.
The brief was single minded: A grown up vanilla. Toasted, milky, sophisticated. The kind of scent that earns its indulgence. What we didn't want to create was equally clear: anything cloying, anything that leaned too sweet, anything that didn't have an edge.
Early iterations kept sliding soft, sweet, voluptuous. We continue to pull back, rebalance and experiment with notes we thought not one else was using. Unexpected notes, notes that would surprise and delight. Toasted black sesame was the first real move in the right direction. That deeply nutty, umami warmth gave the fragrance a savouriness that cut through the sweetness and made it genuinely interesting to wear.
But the moment everything shifted came from an unlikely source. Whenever I used to visit Isaac in Paris from New Zealand, I would bring him a rosemary salted caramel from Wellington Chocolatier Baron Hasselhoff's. The moment we leant on this memory and introduced a rosemary top note, the fragrance opened up entirely.
As Isaac puts it - "the rosemary lends a surprising brightness and luminosity to the fragrance, it opens it up like a ray of light."
As the lovely Tahni, one of the guests at our launch event put it “it smells somehow golden”.
Bright, herbal, creamy. The rosemary is not immediately obvious, but it is immediately arresting. Double Scoop is a vanilla built by two people who don't wear vanilla. It’s that friction, we think, what makes it so intoxicating, and from those that have smelt it so far, what makes it so irresistable.
