To answer your questions, gentlemen...
I am doing colognes as a potential business because working on subliminals all the time is a huge investment in mental energy in a specific direction, and as the complexity grows so does the exhaustion. I know 6G development is going slowly. Believe me I know, I'm the one banging my head against the wall for more than a year now wondering, "What the hell is it I am still missing?" Every week or two I adjust the script to deal with a new thing, and every week or two it gets significantly more effective, and every week or two I realize... it needs more work. BUT! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and the end goal is beginning to be realized in the results at this point, just within the last 2 versions. The last four experiments have been VERY satisfactory, although they are pale versions of what the final will do.
Back to colognes, though, I am interested in them for the following reasons:
1. I need to do something besides subliminals so I can maintain interest and be productive given the ridiculous mountain I am climbing with 6G development. Who else would you find who can develop it for over a year, with only minor improvements every month (relative to the end goal), and still keep going? It gets depressing to try so hard and make so much effort and still have to take baby steps. For a long time, I wasn't even sure the end goal was reachable. So since I don't watch TV much, or do the sports thing or gym or whatnot, when Andrew introduced me to the idea of perfumery, and my personal cologne creation was so popular that it began to sell without me doing anything but wearing it, I realized... here is a way for me to decompress, express my creative side, and make money all at the same time.
Don't get me wrong, some of these colognes are starting to really piss me off trying to get them right. (I'm looking at you, Paradise!) But I'm teaching myself perfumery here. Do you realize that from what I am told, it usually takes around 10 years and at least $75k to become a decent perfumer? And that's with formal training. I am teaching myself, and within 2 years will have produced a handful of high end colognes that are so good that people are asking for them before I'm even finished making them! Just this morning, at breakfast, I had a bottle of one such that I don't have a name for yet and I had Formula #43 and #44. It's a unisex. My waitress loved #43 so much that she asked me how much to buy the sample vial. I personally can't wait to make a bottle for myself. And I haven't even finished adding and tweaking all the ingredients yet! And she wasn't the only one there who said they really loved it. This is something I have been working on off and on for a few months, with a very small budget and around 2 years of self training.
I have concluded that the perfumery thing is a result of BAMM.
Yes, it's a physical product. Yes, it's got a lot of issues we originally didn't want to deal with. But while there is a lot of competition in perfumery and the advertising and marketing and shipping and packaging is ridiculously expensive for the sort of stuff you see big companies doing (it can be a multi-million dollar budget just to launch a single scent for them), we are not locked in to doing it "their way". I can make a batch and offer it to you on a website and it doesn't have to have a multi-million dollar budget, because it doesn't have to sell a million bottles to satisfy a million shareholders. What it does have to do is make me happy enough with it to offer it to you, and you happy enough to pay us for it and consider it a fair exchange. Actually, what I have in mind is to make these so good that you'll conclude that we are slightly under-charging, but that depends on factors I may not be able to control, like the price of really rare and hard to get natural ingredients this season.
What I have in mind is something like a vintage system. Each year, we'll produce a batch of each and that's all we make. Maybe the 2015 batch of X is perhaps 5 gallons, or maybe 200 bottles. Each one is individually numbered and stamped with the year of vintage and therefore becomes a rare and valuable collector's item, on top of being a great scent. Maybe the next year we increase production a bit. Maybe not. And it won't be cheap, but whenever possible we'll try to find, like I said, a price point at which the value exceeds the price. We want every batch to sell out. Unlike for big companies, it's not about profits here and noting else. We're going to be an artisinal perfume house, and mass production isn't necessarily the goal. My goal, and Andrew's goal, is a product so good you really value and appreciate it. So doing things this way, we don't have to spend all of our time on it. And then I can still work on subs, and everybody wins.
In other words, just because the big guys are doing it, doesn't mean we have to. Oh, and if I have my way, we will be proudly IRFA non-compliant, too. That means that instead of trying to force the formulas to match and fit into restrictions that lab techs come up with for making perfumes as hypo-allergenic as possible, we will be producing perfumes and colognes that smell as good as possible, last as long as possible and are as worthy of their price as possible. In my opinion, the IRFA is killing the perfumery industry. Instead of making perfumes to be hypo-allergeneic when less than 1% of the populace is having allergic reactions, how about we focus on making them the best they can be and then ask people to take personal responsibility for their use of them instead? And this is coming from someone who happens to be allergic to some of the components he is formulating with! (Paradise has one, and the unnamed one I mentioned has one too.) If you wear a cologne that triggers an allergy in someone else, then you have the responsibility to not wear it around them or to work out how you can find a workable compromise with them. And those of us (me included) who are allergic to certain things in colognes and perfumes) need to be reasonable in our responses and demands of those who wear them, too.
When we have a small selection of exceptional fragrances ready, we'll set up a store that's linked here to offer them and let you know.
6G is taking so long because I am basically blazing new ground in the field. It's very challenging for even someone as knowledgeable and skilled as I am, and it's about the equivalent of me teaching myself a graduate or postgraduate degree in the subject. It's going to take time. But even if I was to stop now, the results would amaze you once they filtered down to products you could use. In fact most of the technologies in 6G are going to be stuff I can't even tell you about because I don't want competitors trying to copy my work! But there are literally dozens of them. And you'll see how well they work for yourself.
As close as I am to finishing achieving the goal of 6G's prototype, I am at the point where very little surprises me anymore. I mean literally, anything is going to be possible if I can achieve the goal I set for this. The question, once 6G is developed, is not "can we?" but "what do we need to know to design an instruction set that, in 6G format, will result in the goal?" The more intractable problems require very advanced understanding to make work even in 6G. That's why I picked the goal I did for 6G's prototype, and that's why it's taking me so long to figure out.
If the challenge is a diamond and the goal is a brilliant cut polished stone, I have to basically cut a facet of the gem, and then observe how the light bounces around inside it, determine where it's going that I don't want it going and where it's not going that I do, calculate a solution, and then cut another single facet and repeat. I can't just sit down and mathematically calculate the final shape because this is not a hard science we're dealing with. We're also not dealing with a group of people who all have the same properties. Gemcutters can learn the properties of a diamond, and then those properties are the same even if the diamond is flawed. I have to figure out the properties of a dynamic system with an infinite potential for uniqueness and then design a dynamic system to account for all possible variations. You try it sometime and see if it doesn't take a while.
As for pheromones, I'm not planning to be working directly with pheromones in my colognes. That I think I can safely leave to our good friend and very competent PheroMaster, Steve Osborne. That's not to say that I might not include one or two special components in special editions of a scent which might act as aphrodisiacs. But they won't be pheromones.
I'm actually planning to formulate my stuff to take advantage of the natural aphrodisiac effects of the components, such that the ratios, components and doses amplifies them to a useful and appreciable degree without pheromones. That I believe I can do, and that is part of why I am getting the results I am with people responding to the stuff I have made so far.
I believe that the reason things smell good to us always boils down to one of two reasons:
1. You can eat it.
2. You can have sex with it.
The primal brain responds to those two things, but in being so primitive, makes mistakes and responds to things we cannot eat or have sex with. But with a twist. For example:
A. Some flowers smell good. We certainly don't have sex with flowers, and we also we don't eat most flowers. The ones we do (artichokes, broccoli, cauliflower) don't smell good. What gives? This can be explained by the fact that of what a flower is. Basically, a flower is a plant's blatant public display of it's sex organs. It's saying, "Hey, anyone who will notice, dome and help me get it on! Get that pollen all over me baby!" So the primitive brain smells sex, and responds with attraction, even though it's not a signal we can actually respond to with sex - but notice how effective certain flowers are as aphrodisiacs? Rose, jasmine, gardenia, tuberose, ylang-ylang, lavender and others are all known to be aphrodisiac, and when blended properly, will help trigger arousal in humans!
B. Fresh, clean laundry smells good. But you obviously don't have sex with it, and you obviously don't eat it. How can my idea be correct if that's true? Well, consider WHY it smells good: the detergents and dryer sheets have in them not only flower scents, but musks. That "fresh clean laundry scent" is really the result of certain types of musk, such as one called "galaxolide" which is famous for this. And what is musk? Natural musk is a signal that one gender (often male) of a species is ready to reproduce. In other words, musk is a sex signal, an aphrodisiac, and humans respond to it for that reason. We may not always respond with sexual arousal - a lot of synthetic musks are attractive but not erogenic to us, but they're attractive ultimately because they trigger that "I smell someone ready for sex!" part of the brain. And yes, there are some musks that do actually act as an aphrodisiac for humans, too.
By the way, I'd like to point out, here, that in my perfumery, I won't be using anything that requires harm to an animal to acquire. If I use musks, they'll be lab synthesized. If I use civet, it'll be lab synthesized. If I use castoreum, it will either be lab synthesized or come from animals that were killed for another reason and which would otherwise be thrown away. And of course ambergris does not come from whales that were harmed to get it, because it requires years and perhaps decades of floating around in the ocean to develop the chemistry that makes it worthy of use in perfumery. (I also use lab synthesized ambergris molecules, and these come from plant sources in most cases.) Any real ambergris I use will come from certified beach-found sources.
I am not going to worry about making my stuff hypo-allergenic in most cases. If you're allergic, I apologize. But I have found that allergies to the stuff I use are really rare and unusual. For example, I am allergic to what I use in a couple of my colognes not because they are typical allergens, but because I went through chemotherapy and during that they gave me a chemical called "bleomycin", which means my lungs are screwy as a result. The result is that I'm allergic to things like... rum. Eucalyptus. Marijuana. Eggplant. Cigarette smoke. The vast majority of people are actually not allergic to the things I use. I prefer natural sources whenever possible, even though it is harder to make last, harder to make consistent from batch to batch, and more expensive by far. So allergies will not be a serious concern for perhaps 99.99% of the population, just as they never have been before.
And as for competition being fierce in the perfume industry? Sure, it's incredibly fierce - but a top quality product at a reasonable price is always going to gain attention and interest. And it will have the least expensive and best marketing of all: word of mouth.
My goal for what I create is to trigger an addiction response when you smell it. Not because it is actually addictive, but because it smells SO good that you want to smell it again and again. That no matter how much you smell it, you still want to smell it more. When I achieve that, I know I have something good. And it's really hard to do that. Really hard. But that's my goal, and that's why some of these are driving me nuts. Paradise is on revision #174 and still isn't right yet. I'm a lot closer, and the use of the sweet lime is really helping... it's gorgeously rich, complex, full bodied and sexy. But the balance isn't all there yet for the whole thing, and I can't release it knowing it's not right yet. Even if I have people telling me, "You're nuts, it's been sellable since #66!" Maybe. But has it been able to make me happy? Until it does that, I don't care if it's "good enough". "Good enough" isn't what I'm trying to create.
That`s all from me. Cool! 
