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Scents: Menlo Park's Jane Cate and Sarah Lubin creates fragrances based on the evocative scents of their favorite cities

by Jessica Fromm on Jan 20, 2010
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MENLO PARK, Napa, Carmel, Berkeley, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Orange County: to most people, these are just places. But to Jane Cate and Sarah Lubin, the mother/daughter team behind Menlo Park–based fragrance company A Wing & a Prayer Perfumes, they are aromas all their own.

Inspired by the local culture and flora of individual California cities, Cate and Lubin have developed a line of natural-oil perfumes named after the olfactory offerings of these civic muses.

A Wing & a Prayer’s Carmel perfume, for instance, a scent made up of oak moss and juniper berry, is meant to invoke the wind and surf of the small beach town. Napa, a mix of lavender, chamomile and other essential oils, was inspired by Cate’s wedding and honeymoon in the wine country. Berkeley, a light concoction of jasmine, frankincense and patchouli, is a throwback to the city’s hippie roots.

Menlo, a blend of ylang-ylang, lemon grass and tangerine, is a citrus scent that simulates their tree-lined city. “It’s our hometown, and we have a lot of lemon trees around town, and there is a lot of citrus,” Cate says. “It’s the tree city, so that’s how I came up with the scent for Menlo; it smells like a lemon gum drop,” Cate says.

Cate, a self-professed “perfume junkie,” started mixing essential oils and ingredients seven years ago and fell in love with discovering and blending new natural and organic fragrances. She and her daughter, Sarah Lubin, started their small company out of her Menlo Park home in 2008. Besides their California Scents line, they also hand-make and sell solid perfumes and home diffusers in scents like Dusk, Lemon Ice, Filoli Rose, Pink Pamplemousse and Sunday.

Cate handles the creative end of creating and combining scents, while Lubin, a laid-off tech worker, takes care of the business aspects of the small perfume company.

“Cooks have a way of creating a recipe. Some people think in color. I think in olfactory fragrances,” Cate says. “One of our big sellers is called Sabra Coco, which is a mixture of orange and chocolate. That one was from my childhood. Sabra was something my parents used to serve on special occasions. It was a liqueur, and I thought it just brought back really fond memories.”

Cate and Lubin stress that they do not test their fragrances on animals, and Cate says her dog even helps her when she’s mixing up new scents. “My little dog Mackenzie, he’s my biggest critic,” Cate says with a laugh. “When I’m mixing, and things don’t smell too well, he walks out of the room. But, when I was creating the Sabra Coco and trying to get the ingredients right, he stayed around all day. He thought it was something to eat.”

A Wing & a Prayer Perfumes, a vegan company, is currently available at Tangerine Gifts and Accessories in Sunnyvale, and at the Sam’s Chowder House gift shop in Half Moon Bay. Their line can also be bought at their online shop at www.etsy.com/shop/wingandprayerperfume.



by Jessica Fromm on Jan 20, 2010
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