Perfumery Materials I like - No 5 - Lavender

Lavender, old ladies and The Lion Cupboard

In France, they'll make an ice cream out of almost everything fragrant; lavender does turn into a lovely sorbet. Then again, in France lavender is the default household clearning material scent so that must be a bit like having your desert smell of furniture polish.

In the UK the Elizabethans used lavender to flavour their meals; it was a fashion thing, designed to show off their wealth, but they'd have got the added bonus of its antimicrobial properties so their lavender scented hare stews would have lasted a little longer than normal. And it grew in Surrey, along with violets. Naturally Thinking are supporting a project to bring it back.

In the UK lavender is sometimes seen as an old lady's scent.  In France they see it as a modern masculine, often blended with tobacco fragrance. I'm with the French.

Lavender is in the classic cologne recipe, and you'll find it in fougere scents. (Forgive my blog; it doesn't like accents above French words.) Fougere is French for fern; ferms don't have much by way of a scent. It's another of those perfumery misnomers like amber. This group of scents isn't named after a natural material, but a fantasy concotion from the 1800s. Houbigant kicked it off with his Fougere Royale, mixing lavender with coumarin (and a load of other materials) to make his ideal fern fragrance. 

Coumarin, by the by, was one of the first commercially produced synthetic scents. William Perkin made it right here in sunny Ealing in the 1860s; it's a grassy almondy smell; the chemical is found naturally in tonka beans but Perkin made it affordable. And popular.

Fougeres have been the masculine fragrance of choice ever since.

Myself, I've put it into a whole bunch of scents including The Lion Cupboard. I'd call this one a classic fougere if I had to put it into a well known box. That's not the way it started out, but it's what happened when I used the materials I needed to create the smell I wanted. So a fougere it is.

Lavender for perfumery comes in different forms, there's an essential oil and an absolute, and now we're getting through some light bright CO2 extracts. It's sharper as a perfumery material than the scent you'd get from walking through a field of it. Often people don't recognise it until they're reminded.

Perhaps it's because pure lavender essential oil smells more like a herb than a flower.  When we think of lavender we tend to think floral. That's why we get caught out. With its piercingly clear odour, it hits the olfactory bulb more like freshly harvested rosemary, basil or thyme, than its flowery friends. And the further up it's grown the sharper it gets. High altitude lavender really clears out the nasal packages.

Another reason I like it is that it gets rid of my headaches. So it's one of those materials I'll use not just for its scent but for its magical properties that are undetected by our noses, and felt by our minds and bodies. The herbalist Parkinson said that lavender is:

'of especiall good use for all griefes and pains of the head and brain.'  

Although it was also the favourite scent of the wife of Charles I of England, and her husband got his head cut off in the revolution. It has its limits.

PS If you'd like to make your own lavender scent, you might like to consider one of these.

 True, this is oak, not oakmoss, but I like the pic.

Perfumery materials I like - 4 -

Oakmoss (Evernia prunastri)

And yet more on EU's regulations and restrictions

Oakmoss is the backbone of all the classic chypre fragrances. For perfume fans who aren't familiar with the techie talk, a chypre is a perfume based on the original Chypre by Francois Coty. Chypre is French for Cyprus, the island, not cypress the fir tree. People get mixed up. 

 Back in the day before registered trademarks and intellectual property rights, the entire perfume industry watched Coty's Chypre scent become a best seller and all made one of their own, many of them also called Chypre. (There were loads of perfumes called No 5 until Chanel hammered them with IP lawsuits. The French are the ultimate trademark defenders, so much for liberty and equality and all that. Don't mess with them.)

Chypre fragrances have things in common, usually patchouli and bergamot - sometimes opoponax and other lovely sticky base notes - and always oakmoss. Whether there's a huge biff in the nose of it, or just a smidgen, you'll always find oakmoss. 

Why?

Well it's deep and dark but delicate. (A bit like the picture of the oak tree up there.) It smells like essence of forest. It holds a light fresh perfume together somehow, like grandad sitting calm and smiling at the head of the table while all the children are laughing, playing and exploring the house. Think of Edmond Roudnitska's gems - Miss Dior, Eau Sauvage, Mystere de Rochas, Diorella - and you'll understand. If ever there was a wizard working magic with oakmoss, that was your man.

The moss itself grows on oak trees and makes them look as if they've got excessive body hair. It's the one thing that gives some of the world's most beautiful perfumes - and almost every single one of my favourites - their certain something, their je ne sais quoi. You don't have to be able to smell it to know it's there; it gives a scent a beauty that starts a spinal shiver, in a good way. And it's in danger.

Nope, it's not because the oak trees are being chopped down to make way for a gated community. Nor because they are threatened by a deadly beetle. It's the deadly bureaucrats who have it in for oakmoss. It might give one in 1000 people a rash. 

You might think that the people who get a rash from perfume might avoid perfume and this would be enough. It's not. It's because it's possible that someone who tried a perfume with oakmoss might become sensitised to it, when they weren't before. The EU wants to help people avoid ever getting a rash at all. That's kind of them. It's generous towards the 0.1% of people who might get a rash from oakmoss. They've restricted its use to 0.1% in the final fragrance. It has a certain pleasing mathematical symmetry to it, but other than that, this figure is very irritating. Far more irritating than oakmoss.

Myself, I can wear it at 20% strength with no problems at all. That's 200 times higher than the official amount I'm allowed to put in a scent.

This restriction is why lots of classic scents have disappeared from the shops, or why you can no longer buy them in anything but Eau de Toilette strength, or why they have been reformulated to smell almost the same, but without the spine tinglyness.

So fingers crossed that it isn't replaced entirely by synthetics which smell very similar but are missing the mysteriousness. You can get it from Hermitage Oils if you want to give it a go. Buying it is fine; it's putting it in perfumes you want to sell that's the issue. And that, boys and girls, is my problem.

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.

 

Making perfume - the things I use: 1 Grapefruit

grapefruit essential oil

perfumery materials and why I use them

I do love making scents, and I like to explain what I do and why I do it. So I decided to share. Here's why I put grapefruit into almost everything I make.

I love eating grapefruits, no sugar, just cut in half. I've developed a method to scoop out the flesh with a slightly pointed teaspoon so nothing gets left behind. I can't bear it when people think they are helping by slicing one up with a knife then handing it to me. Heathens.

Jean-Claude Ellena, that precious being sent to earth to teach us the delights of perfumery, he says that all grapefruit oil smells like oranges in perfume, so he uses a synthetic blend instead. Perhaps it's just because I know it's in there, but when I use it, I smell grapefruits, and when other people ask me what's in my scents, they can smell grapefruit too.

I use both pink and white grapefruit essential oils: pink tends to be a little less sharp, but according to the EU it's all the same. Most of it comes from California these days, a by-product of the juice industry. Which is nice. I hate waste.

As a material, grapefruit oil is fleeting, light and lovely - what traditional and natural perfumers call a top note - a little molecule which will give you a quick hit as it escapes from the bottle, then fade into nothingless. If you want a long lasting grapefruit scent, you do what Jean Claude says and you use synthetics, bigger molecules with similar smells but with longevity.

To make the natural scent hang around a little longer, you add your fixatives then let your finished blend macerate for a few weeks, so the molecules that make grapefruit smell the way it does, attach themselves to the bigger, sticker materials - like vanilla and patchouli. It still floats off first, but less sharply.

Grapefruit oil is restricted in the world of self-regulated perfume so I keep an eye on the levels I use. I've never had to reduce the amount I need for the effect I want just to complay with the regs, so it's not been an issue. (Some people ignore the regulations, particularly those perfumers who mistakenly hold that nothing natural can harm you - to which I say nettles, belladonna and poison ivy - but the regs have been introduced to prevent sore skin so ignoring them is disingenuous at least and potentially dangerous.)

As well as smelling lovely, what else?

It's stimulating, uplifting and reviving  so it's used as an anti-depressant. Just smelling it cheers me up, don't know about you. People use it to treat SAD, depression caused by lack of sunshine. It's squeezed or distilled from the peel, so perhaps the hours and days worth of sunshine in each drop really do reach us as the benefits of the light it absorbed to come into being.

It's supposed to be good for stimulating the body to get rid of cellulite, and for athletes and dancers to remove lactic acid from their tired muscles. It calms stress. 

Can things be calming and stimulating at the same time? Yes. Like a good yoga class, a decent sniff of grapefruit and the other citrus oils wake you up but don't tip you over the edge. It's all about balance.

And that's the reason I use grapefruit, the real thing. It might not last through my scents' whole smell cycle, but a quick sniff puts me in the right mood for whatever the day is set to throw at me. It's in Urura's Tokyo Cafe, Says Alice, and The Lion Cupboard, just for starters.

Invisible Ben: 10 Scents' Worth story number six

The story

(Evil) Max and I both work for Ben who runs Afia, a brilliant, creative writing agency full of lovely people.  I do some copywriting for his website and language workshops for his clients. Ben took the team up to Langar Hall in Nottinghamshire for a meeting, and his 40^th birthday dinner. So I thought I’d make him his own special scent. Ben does lots of sporty things, and I’d never known him smell of anything but himself, so I decided to make him a body spray for after sport and showering. I wanted it to smell like extra added Ben, so he could use it to smell just like himself again, after washing it all off in the shower. Does that make some sense?

I like using cedarwood for skin scents, plus a couple of the woody smooth synthetics, and I added citrus fruits because I pictured him having an orange juice before going home. It was light and fresh and I was really fond of it. Using masses of originality, I called it Ben.

Well, he unwrapped it and just looked at me as if I was nuts, then smiled and tried to look happy and said, “Scent, errr, great! Thanks Sarah.” He’s a dreadful liar, but he was being kind. (Max, on the other hand, got really excited about the idea of knowing a perfumer, and Evil Max followed on from our conversations on wicked 80s men’s scents.)

I put it in the development drawer ready for later. Then I took it out and did a bit more work on it for the 10 Scents’ Worth project. I renamed it Invisible Ben for reasons that are probably obvious.

The materials

I’ve had to change it a little since the original. I love anthropogan because it smells like people (maybe that’s why it’s got the anthro prefix) but IFRA have banned it, so I put in copaiba balsam instead. 

Sandalwood, benzoin and opoponax (I love saying that out loud and it smells glorious so I put it in just about everything I make) and a synthetic musky/woody/softy scent give it the clean skin impression. 

Another change was adding a coffee CO₂ extract that Hermitage oils have just brought out, because Ben loves good coffee. I put in cognac absolute – birthday celebration – then orange, lime and litsea cubeba for the citrus fruit top end.

The Great Randello - a fruity toffee chypre

  The Great Randello - the second of 10 Scents' Worth

    The scent story

Not long ago, when I was about to give it up all and turn to watercolours, or something else that isn’t regulated to the point of strangulation by the EU, I was spending another evening attempting to get to grips with the multilevel database bespoke software I use to check that my scents are legal and produce all the paperwork.

I said to Nick Randell (AKA Randello), “Do you think I should just pack it in?” and he said, “If you were going to give up, you’d have given up long before now,” so I kept going, and a couple of sessions later I cracked it: legal labelling and a nice list of EU allergens for the three scents I was about to deliver to Les Senteurs. (Compared to the regulations, making perfumes is a doddle.)

So I thought he deserved a scent. The Great Randello was a Welsh magician, probably related to Nick as that’s where the London Randells came from some generations ago.

In 2012 I went on one of Karen Gilbert’s five day courses, which was wonderful. I needed to work with more synthetic materials - just getting access to them is hard for little perfumers – and this gave me a good crack at sniffing and using a load of things I’d heard of but not experienced. 

One of the scents I made there I called my Friday Afternoon Chypre, a dark woody mossy fruity concoction, and I was pretty happy with it but wanted to do a bit more work. I decided to adapt it for Nick, taking out the blackcurrant base I’d used (because I couldn’t find out exactly what was in it) and adding a load of strawberry-toffee scent instead. The technical term is an ‘overdose’; what this really means is that you accidentally shake the measure a bit too hard and drop in three times what you meant to use.

The Great Randello turned out to be a deep dark chypre inside a sweetshop.

The perfumery materials

The depth comes from oakmoss, opoponax, patchouli and vetivert. In the middle there are clary sage, sandalwood, bergamot, synthetic musk and ambergris. The fruity intensity comes from raspberry leaf absolute – which is darned tricky to work with but I love it – raspberry ketone and a synthetic which has an amazing fruity cinder toffee scent. Then on top there’s a citrus blend I made up which includes lemon myrtle, lavender and tangerine.