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Rose Oxide: The materials I use to make perfume No 3

Rose Oxide: the scent of shiny metal roses

The things I use to make scents: number 3

Rose oxide, also known as Tetrahydro-4-methyl-2-(2-methylprop-1-enyl)-pyran, is one of the natural chemicals* that make roses smell the way they do.
 
Somes roses have no scent and are bred merely for visual beauty. That seems a shame to me. The ones bred for scent are picked by the million and turned into rose absolute - which is expensive - and rose essential oil - which is even more expensive.

Natural rose oil and absolute are made up of hundreds of different molecules.  Some smell and some don't. Some do other things, like giving you a feeling of calm and peace Rose oxide is one with a very distinctive scent.

The rose oxide I use is synthetic. It's the same molecule with the same smell as the one that comes from rose petals, but it's made in a factory, and it exists on its own. And it really does smell like metal roses would, if you could grow them. You just have to use your imagination.

Each variety of rose contains different amounts of the molecules that make it smell, including geraniol, linalool, citronellol and natural adlehydes.
 
So in modern commercial perfumery, where scents are made by the 100s of litres, natural rose can be too unpredictable. Batches of rose absolute from different countries, fields, levels of sunshine or rainfall, or years, will all smell slightly different from each other. It's the task of a skilled perfumer to reformulate final fragrances so they smell identical to the previous batches. This all takes far too long for many of the high street brands. The top dogs like Chanel and Guerlain do go to the trouble. Others can't afford it.

That's one good reason why perfumers will choose synthetic materials and recreate the smell of roses from its individual parts. Once they have a formula they can use it forever (regulations permitting) and it will always smell the same.

Rose oxide has a shiny brightness to it. Add a little to a boring flower blend and it will wake up; it brings some life to the olfactory party.

I use it in a light airy rose blend of my own. I also use it in an accord I call Shiny Bicyles. Inspired by the 2012 Tour de France, I developed a scent called Time to Draw the Raffle Numbers, to celebrate the moment Bradley Wiggins (Sir Wiggo) led the peloton into the Champs Elysees to help Cav win the final sprint. I used rose oxide and an essential oil that I think smells like wax polish to give me the scent of racing bikes. 

Next we'll have to make a Tour of Britain scent, the scent of a cloudy day on London's Embankment, the Thames in full tide. It could be called Just Glad It's All Over Really. That's a joke for anyone who was watching ITV4.

*Natural chemicals:
Roses are made of chemicals, as are human beings, everything we eat, drink and use. Some chemicals are synthetic - made in factories - and some are natural - found in nature. They are still chemicals, and as a science geek and proud of it, I'm not going to pretend otherwise. More on this later...

Making perfume - the materials I use: 2 Raspberry Ketone

Want to smell of raspberries?

The perfumery materials I use, and why I use them

AKA Hydroxyphenyl butanone, frambinone 

What's the point of being a perfumer if you can't make things smell the way you want, creating scents which remind you of the things you love? That's why I started anyway. Then I got distracted by making things that smell of other people's favourites, but that's a story you can read elsewhere.

One hot summer, our family spent a holiday afternoon in a Scottish wood where we found the biggest wild raspberry patch in the universe - probably - and ate the delicious pink fruits one by one until we had to go home. My favourite food, free. Only a stream of liquid chocolate would have improved that afternoon. 

So to the scent of raspberries. If you buy the fragrance oil from cosmetics suppliers, it won't have come from raspberries. In my early years I used a bottle of that stuff for dabbling and experiments, but before I felt I deserved to call myself a perfumer, I really needed to know exactly what I was using in my formulas. It's not just for the regulations (although that's important too) but more of an intellectual pursuit, the satisfaction that I'd got to the bottom of the issue, identified what was really going on, and in. I put on my metaphorical Sherlock deerstalker and set off on the trail of raspberry scent.

I'm going to write about raspberry leaf absolute later, by the way. That's a natural material that smells of raspberry jam. Gorgeous, expensive and difficult to work with, so very rarely found in commercial perfumes.

Perfumer, illustrator, writer and wondergeek Pia Long, told me that she thinks of raspberry ketone as the scent of the dried berries. For me it's the smell you get when you snap open a bar of Divine's dark chocolate with raspberry crunchy bits.

You can buy natural raspberry ketone, extracted from raspberries, but it costs a blooming fortune, so I buy the synthetic stuff. If you are a dedicated natural perfumer and insist on using (as close as you can get to) 100% natural materials, it's there for you. But to be honest, by the time it reaches a usable form, you can't really claim that it's natural. Some like to call these things "derived from nature" but what isn't? It's a powder, refined from the original fruits using chemistry techniques.


For me, only using natural perfumery materials is cutting off your nose to spite your face and you really need your nose in this business. More of this later.


So I often use raspberry ketone side by side with raspberry leaf absolute so get the deep jammy note and the lighter dry one; they hold hands and support each other. And I get to smell like summer pudding.


You can smell my simple raspberry accord in Urura's Tokyo Cafe, created with both materials, not to the point where the finished scent smells overwhelmingly fruity, but it has this deliciously tasty, jammy background to the gentle flowers, flightly citrus fruits and dark balsams.

I use it in The Great Randello too. 

Our whole range of scents lives here.

 

Wake Up and Smell the Roses

This week I was invited to spend a morning working with business students, pushing them to invent a new product to raise money for a good cause, and create the campaign to go with it. Our two hours were organised chaos, just the way I like it, and by the end of the session we had three decent ideas which I can present to the Lush creative team (if the students remember to email them to me). One man was the bounciest, noisiest and most enthusiastic; he got his idea through by sheer determined but good-humoured domination. When I worked as a lecturer, I was always told to make sure everyone got an equal hearing. In real life, if this had been a Lush recruitment session, he would have been the one who got the job.

That evening, I was in the smart end of Victoria, Belgravia perchance, at the delightful little posh scent shop, Les Senteurs, for their 25th birthday celebrations, Marie- Hélène Rogeon of Les Parfums de Rosine and her expert perfumer, François Robert, came to talk about their range of rose scents. Marie- Hélène has a passion for roses which she grows in her own garden. She also has a perfumery heritage; her great, great grandfather made Eau de Cologne for Napoleon III. When she recreated designer Paul Poiret's 1911 perfumery, she invited François - already a respected 'nose' - to develope fragrances to match the widely varying scents of her own roses. As they talked about their different rose perfumes - one that smells of oranges and lemons (and roses of course), another of mint, then ginger, saffrom and even chocolate - a picture developed of their creative process which goes something like this.

Marie- Hélène: I've a rose that smells of lemons.
François: That's impossible. Roses don't smell of lemons.
Marie- Hélène: No really! I'd like you to create a scent that matches my lemony roses.
François: Roses smell of rose.
Marie- Hélène: I'll send you some of them.
François (as he opens the box of roses): OK, I see what you mean.
Result: Un Zest de Rose, a fresh, light lemony rose fragrance.

After going through a similar process with the ginger scented roses, the sand roses that smell of sea salt, the mint ones, the blackcurrant and the ginger ones, François Robert was convinced. Roses don't just smell of roses.

So, after a couple of glasses of Les Senteurs' delicious champagne, I asked M. Robert if his advanced technical training had shackled his imagination. He laughed kindly and explained that in perfumery, there are two rose scents: absolute and essence. Rose absolute is light and fresh. Rose essence is deeper and heavier. Both are excruciatingly expensive. Working with Marie- Hélène had obliged him to accept that the rose's natural fragrance is rather more intriguing and variable than he had imagined. He's off to visit David Austin's extraordinary garden soon but said that his favourite is the simple rose that grows at the roadside in hedgerows. He also thinks that unscented roses are pointless, no matter how beautiful they look.

Marie- Hélène and François make up a creative team which works beautifully. Passion, inspiration and confidence, matched with technical pefection, skill and even more (but quieter) confidence, Marie-Hélène knows what she wants and François Robert knows how to create it. The result: works of art. (IMHO.)

There are three parts of creativity: ideas, skills and the ability to get it done. Sometimes they exist all in one person. Sometimes it's a duo, sometimes a trio. When it's successful it can turn into a whole company. Occasionally creative people are criticised for not having all three. Don't let that put you off. Spot your strengths and find people you can work with who have the ones you lack. Then things start to happen. What you do need, like Marie-Hélène or my bouncy business student is the determination to go get 'em.

Footnote: If you think that wearing scent is a trivial luxury, bear in mind that the world of fine perfumery fills fields with flowers, bees and birds employs Europe's travellers to pick the petals and changes our mood for the better. Put one one your Christmas list. Don't buy a big bottle of the cheap stuff instead; get a small, precious pot of the real thing.

www.les-parfums-de-rosine.com
www.lessenteurs.co.uk