Glassblowers contribute to artist’s musty musk

By Laura Wood

American artist Daniel Peltz’s idea for a new perfume sounds like it really stinks.

Peltz, an artist-in-residence at Rejmyre Art LAB in Sweden, has turned his many hours of glassblower-observing into the next hopeful perfume line — made with the craftsmen’s sweat. He has spent the last six years at Reijmyre Glass Factory watching glassblowers diligently work on their masterpieces and drip sweat on their projects, and he decided to collect the perspiration and use it to create his perfume, called Eau de Reijmyre.

Though his wife designed it, Peltz’s first sweat collectors crafted the device that gathers the perspiration, he said in an interview with examiner.com. It’s sharp at the top so the artists can run the tip along their damp skin, and the sweat travels down the neck and into the bulbous reservoir at the bottom.

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He then lets the water evaporate and uses the remaining materials such as sodium, chloride and potassium. The exact formula remains undisclosed — just as any uniquely pungent perfume should — but Peltz told examiner.com his perfume smells like hints of musk, salt and sugar.

This is just gross.

As incredibly unsellable as this sounds, there is actually a factory somewhere in the world that bottles this stuff up. Peltz said production moves slowly, though, because glassblowers are few and far between in Sweden and their capacity to produce sweat is limited — just like everyone else’s.

Peltz told examiner.com that creating a perfume from the craftsmen’s sweat captured a different aspect of glassblowing other than what people observe and experience.

“They (glassblowers) are in almost contact with this untouchable thing of molten glass. Their sweat is the residue of this almost contact,” he said in the article. “To me, the creation of Eau de Reijmyre was a logical step; it felt like something that should be on sale in the store, alongside the other products of their labor.”

He said in a WeirdWeirdNews article that he noticed every piece of produced glass in glass factories contains sweat from the piece’s creator.

“The glass blower’s sweat and work is something that tourists appreciate when they come here and look, so to me there isn’t such a huge difference in selling the glassblower’s sweat and the finished glass,” he said in the article.

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I would much rather look at a pretty glass bottle and think about the few drops of sweat in it than wear a beauty product that is made of the stuff. Sometimes it’s better to just leave things alone, and this is one of those times.

We should all just let people sweat and let them do their work.

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