Artist Residency Day Four
Activate: analysis!
It took some frowning and lip biting but I finally worked out how to “test" ingredients for ‘ethical soundness.'
Ladies and gentlemen, behold! You can tell that in my other life I'm a data person because I developed an entire framework before lunchtime.
Behold! The binary logic pathway.
This is the one for synthetic or lab-derived ingredients. I'll turn it into a nice digital diagram later. I did natural ingredients first and admittedly it's a little rougher…
Trust the process (and the author, I beg you). I have with me 120+ ingredients to test (HUGE sigh) and that's only because, in order to save myself from bringing my library of 300+ scents, I've grouped some families together (for example, mango/pineapple/berry myrtles are all from the same farm up near Byron Bay - so likely they'll all score the same, being of the same genus, location, and business). And there will be some immediate fails (hello, Oakmoss, and you too, Agarwood) but I think some things that we would consider controversial may in fact pass the logical framework.
Castoreum, for example, is pulled from dead beavers. Were the beavers going to die anyway? Yes. But should we be profiting from beaver culls? Probably not. But does it make the death less wasteful if we can make something beautiful out of the whole sordid affair? Perhaps. Culling aside, is it actually unethical to take a faeces pellet from a dead animal? The framework may tell us. Ethics are, of course, a grey area beyond the obvious, and when applied by individuals they turn into morals. So whilst an ingredient may pass the ethical test, you may not consider it ethical yourself, and therefore the use of it would be against your morals. Inversely, you may think that something which fails immediately should not have done so - let me overdose my hyssop, I beg you! It only bothers the skin of a select unfortunate few! you say - but again, those are your morals. Ethics are much stricter in their application.
All this to say, I am trying not to bring my person morals into this task. I am not an authority on ethics, and so I have chosen to take the most rigid analytical approach and create a one-wrong-move-and-you're-out ethical model. If I disagree with the outcome, so be it; the model is always right and I am not.
Over the weekend I'll be testing out my representative batch so we'll see which ingredients can pass the tri-wizard tournament of Nadia's brain.
