Essence and Alchemy

by Mandy Aftel

  For Becky

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1 - The Spirit of the Alchemist A Natural History of Perfume

  2 - Prima Materia Perfume Basics

  ESSENTIAL OILS

  RESINS AND BALSAMS

  CONCRETES AND ABSOLUTES

  STORAGE

  HOW TO SMELL

  CARRIERS

  EQUIPMENT

  A NOTE ABOUT SAFETY

  3 - The Calculus of Fixation Base Notes

  BLENDING CHORDS

  4 - Aromatic Stangas Heart Notes

  CREATING MIDDLE CHORDS

  5 - The Sublime and the Volatile Head Notes

  CREATING FOR CHORDS

  6 - An Octave of Odors The Art of Composition

  CLASSIFICATION OF FRAGRANCE GROUPS

  7 - Hacon de Seduction Perfume and the Boudoir

  8 - Perfumed Haters The Reverie of the Bath

  9 - Aromatics of the Gods Perfume and the Soul

  ALSO BY MANDY AFTEL

  Supplies for the Beginning Perfumer

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  One finds an ancient flask, and from its spout

  A spirit, now restored and much alive, pours out.

  A thousand slumbering thoughts, dismal chrysalids

  Within the shadows trembling like new butterflies,

  Which set themselves to fly, as crumpled wings unfold

  In tints of azure, frosts of rose, and flakes of gold.

  —Charles Baudelaire, “The Flask”

  1 PERFUME—the heady and elusive marriage of the essences of herbs and spices, wild grasses and flowers, bark and animal and tree—is an engine of the universe. From earliest times, people have taken pleasure in rubbing fragrant substances into their skin. Timeless and universal, scent has been a powerful force in ritual, medicine, myth, and conquest. Perfume has helped people to pray, to heal, to make love and war, to prepare for death, to create. To inspire, after all, is literally “to breathe in.”

  Aromatics were highly prized articles of luxury and refinement in the ancient world, and trade routes developed in part around the relentless pursuit of perfume ingredients. From remote civilizations, caravans and ships brought cinnamon from Africa; spikenard and cardamom from India; ginger, nutmeg, saffron, and cloves from Indonesia. Too precious to eat, these materials were coveted components of the fragrant mixtures used in religious rituals, as physical remedies, and to scent the body. It has been said, with some justice, that the world was discovered in perfume’s wake.

  Perfume was not just a product, but a way of being in the world that for centuries retained an aura of magic and mystery. An exclusive but idiosyncratic fraternity, largely self-taught, perfumers were the practical and philosophical heirs to the traditions of alchemy, which had as its aim the transformation of physical matter into divine essence. They kept their formulas a secret and proffered their potions in magnificent flasks to a select few, for great sums of money. As the rise in world trade and the development of distillation and other techniques (some of them originated by the alchemists themselves) made an ever-wider variety of high-quality essences available, perfumers were spurred to new levels of creativity. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the technique known as enfleurage bestowed upon them the essences of jasmine, orange blossom, and tuberose, bringing the art of perfumery to full flower.

  Colorful, unstable, quirky, and expensive, natural essences were a difficult mistress who demanded rapt attention and a willingness to abandon the rules. They never offered the ease of a predictable relationship, and their complexity inspired many of those who worked with them to think philosophically about the relationship of perfume to other aspects of life. The literature that grew up around perfumery, especially in its golden age at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, reveals a world of eccentric artisans who were passionate about scent, intoxicated with the romance of faraway places, and drawn to the bonds of their craft with ancient and mystical traditions.

  Those bonds were soon shattered. In 1905, as legend has it, François Coty catapulted his fledgling fragrance business into the world by dropping a bottle of his perfume on the floor of an exclusive department store that had just declined to carry it. Lured by the commotion and the scent he had released, customers rushed over and bought his supply. Legend or no, it was certainly Coty who had the bright idea to package fragrance in small bottles. More crucially, he was among the first perfumers to use synthetics along with natural essences, the decisive factor in making perfume an affordable luxury for the masses.

  Distillation, from the Destillirbücher by Hieronymus Brunschwig, early sixteenth century

  Because of their low price and stability, the synthetics were vigorously promoted and soon replaced natural essences in the manufacture of perfume, except for the precious florals, which were difficult to replicate. Synthetics offered all the reliability—and uniformity—of Wonder bread, and being “modern” added to their cachet. They brought about the rise of perfume as a major industry producing brand-name products, and its rapid decline as a craft practiced by artisans. Perfumers still followed the stages of the alchemical process—separation, purification, recombination, and fixation—but perfume-making had moved out of the atelier and into the laboratory, both literally and philosophically. And so it happened that a process once as poetic as its result went into eclipse.

  A century later, our olfactory sensibility has been marginalized and deadened by the chemicalization of our food and our environment, and the overwhelming proliferation of unnatural smells. The world of natural odors has been co-opted by products; many people cannot smell a lemon without thinking of furniture cleaner. Oversaturation with chemical smells has compromised our ability to appreciate complex and subtle natural odors. Many of my clients have been astonished by a whiff from a vial of rose or jasmine absolute; they have forgotten—or never knew—what real flowers smell like. We are bombarded by department-store perfumes that shout their presence and linger monotonously and pervasively on the body and in the air, but the true magic of perfume eludes us. We have lost touch with what drew our kind to the smell of flowers and herbs in the first place, and with the rich and tangled history of our species and theirs. As Paolo Rovesti writes, in chronicling the lost world of perfumes, “We who are immersed2 in the unnaturalness of modern-day life cannot recall, without nostalgia and sadness, those gifts of nature at man’s disposal, now neglected or in disuse. Among those are the lost paradises of natural perfumes, of the perfumes of the past and of the spirit.”

  Even before I became a perfumer, I loved to work with my hands and to be surrounded by objects made by hand, bearing the peculiar stamp of the maker’s sensibility. I was a textile artist in my twenties, and have long been an avid collector of ethnic crafts. I love to garden for scent with flowers and herbs, and I take great pleasure in filling my house with the fragrances of plants I have tended. And while I have created all-natural perfumes for limited large-scale production, my true passion is creating one-of-a-kind perfumes with gorgeous ingredients.

  From the beginning, I loved working with the pure essences. They were voluptuousness in a bottle, and I was elated just by smelling them, as if I were inhaling worlds of experience along with the scents themselves. Some of their names were familiar from reading or cooking or gardening, others absolutely foreign. I began to read about them all, first in the aromatherapy literature, then following the trail laid down in the bibliographies.

  I began to seek out antique perfume books at rare-book fairs and from dealers. Over the years I bui
lt a library of more than two hundred rare books on scent. Like the essences themselves, they have a complex and eccentric character. Some are filled with fascinating old photographs or woodcuts, others with arcane details about the procurement or use of this oil or that. The authors are wild hares full of opinions and quirks—Eugene Rimmel, for example, who was as much a frustrated hairdresser as a perfumer and who, in his elaborately illustrated Book of Perfumes, published in 1865, tours the ancient civilizations and the “uncivilized nations,” surveying exotic hairdos and customs of perfumery in almost equal measure. Scholarly or self-taught, earthy or cerebral, these writers share a reverence for natural ingredients and a deep and abiding belief in the importance of scented experience.

  Herb garden and distillery, 1516

  My reading often suggested a new oil to experiment with or a way of combining ingredients that I hadn’t thought of. Sometimes just understanding the history of an essence through civilization after civilization brought it to life in my hands. In these ways, discovering the art of natural perfumery was like crossing the threshold of a beautiful old house and finding it utterly intact and splendidly furnished but deserted, as if it had been suddenly abandoned and was waiting to be reclaimed. I felt privileged to have the opportunity to create with these precious essences, and I began to see myself as a custodian of a sacred and vanishing art.

  It is an auspicious moment to step into that role. The popularity of aromatherapy has introduced a new generation to natural essences of excellent quality and has made these materials widely available for purchase. And although existing perfume schools concentrate on synthetic ingredients, natural perfumery is uniquely suited for home study. All that is needed to unlock that beautiful, fragrant house are a basic understanding of methodology, and an appreciation of the history and spirit of the essences themselves.

  The study and practice of perfumery is uniquely apt to satisfy the hunger for authenticity that seems more keen in us now than ever. A spiritual process as well as an aesthetic one, the art of perfumery is at once holy and carnal, spiritual and material, arcane and modern, tangible and intangible, profound and superficial. To take part in it is to touch its most ancient roots, especially the long and secretive traditions of alchemy. Alchemy embodied such dualities, as the psychologist Carl Jung recognized in embracing the alchemical process as a metaphor for the growth of the human soul through conflict, crisis, and change.

  Scent has always provided a direct path to the soul, and no one who becomes immersed in it can fail to be pleasurably changed by the experience. Your curiosity may inspire you to sample a few essences, or perhaps to master a few simple blends that you can use in meditation or in the bath. Or you may decide to throw yourself into the world of essences and the almost narcotic pleasures of working and playing and creating with them. But even if you venture only so far as to read about natural perfume, you are in for an astonishing journey into the grand and exotic past and the hidden, sensual present. To be immersed in a scent world, even temporarily, is to shift your consciousness and to awaken to the moment more fully.

  1

  The Spirit of the Alchemist A Natural History of Perfume

  When from a long-distant past nothing subsists after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

  —Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

  3 FRAGRANCE has the instantaneous and invisible power to penetrate consciousness with pure pleasure. Scent reaches us in ways that elude sight and sound but conjure imagination in all its sensuality, unsealing hidden worlds. A whiff of a once-familiar odor, and memories surge into consciousness on a sea of emotion, transporting us—to a first camping trip, steeped in the smell of pine and burning wood; to the steamy windows and vanilla-laced air of a winter kitchen where cookies are baking; to a classroom where a teacher opens a brand-new box of cedarwood pencils; to a college in the Midwest, evoked by the sweet smell of apple cider and rotting leaves, or by the scent of the first rain of spring, all green grass and wet earth.

  The twentieth-century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed that scent is tantamount to the tracks that mark the passage of solid bodies through the atmosphere, and consequently redolent of memories. An odor can immediately evoke the details and mood of an old experience, as vividly as if no time at all had passed. “Odor, oftener4 than any other sense impression, delivers a memory to consciousness little impaired by lapse of time, stripped of irrelevancies of the moment or of the intervening years, apparently alive and all but convincing,” writes Roy Bedichek in The Sense of Smell. “Not vision, not hearing, touch, nor even taste—so nearly kin to smell—none other, only the nose calls up from the vasty deep with such verity those sham, cinematic materializations we call memories.”

  That scent should have so powerful a link to recollection is not surprising. Smell is one of the first senses that awakens in a baby and guides its movements through its first days in the world. An infant can locate its mother’s milk by the use of its nose alone. Babies smile when they recognize their mother’s odor, preferring it to the smell of any other woman—which, in turn, pleases the mother. This evolving and reciprocal situation built on the sense of smell plays a key part in creating an intimate relationship between mother and child.

  As potent as it can be, however, smell is the most neglected of our senses. We search for visual beauty in art and in nature, and take care to arrange our homes in a way that pleases the eye. We seek out new music and musicians to add to our CD collections; perhaps we have learned to play an instrument ourselves. We spend time and money on sampling new and exotic cuisines, even learn to cook them. We pamper our sense of touch with cashmere sweaters, silk pajamas, and crisp linen shirts—we can hardly help refining it through our constant interaction with an infinitely varied tactile world. Yet most of us take our sense of smell for granted, leaving it to its own devices in a monotonous and oversaturated olfactory environment. We never think about its cultivation or enrichment, even though some of life’s most exquisite pleasures consequently elude us. In a bouquet of mixed roses, most people can distinguish at a glance the delicacy of a tea rose from the voluptuousness of a cabbage rose, but how many could so readily differentiate between the tea rose’s scent of freshly harvested tea and the spicy, honeylike, rich floral scent of the cabbage? As cultural historian Constance Classen observes, “We are often5 unable to recognize even the most familiar odors when these are separated from their source. That is, we know the smell of a rose when the rose itself is there, but if only an odor of roses is present, a large percentage of people would be unable to identify it.”

  Gathering roses at Grasse

  It is easy for us to take our sense of smell for granted, because we exercise it involuntarily: as we breathe, we smell. A dime-size patch of olfactory membrane in each of the upper air passages of the nose contains the nerve endings that give us our sense of smell. Each of the more than 10 million olfactory nerve cells comes equipped with a half dozen to a dozen hairs, or cilia, upon the exposed end, equipped with receptors. Gaseous molecules of fragrance are carried to the receptors. When enough are stimulated, the cell fires, sending a signal to the brain.

  The olfactory membrane is the only place in the human body where the central nervous system comes into direct contact with the environment. All other sensory information initially comes in through the thalamus. The sense of smell, however, is first processed in the limbic lobe, one of the oldest parts of the brain and the seat of sexual and emotional impulses. In other words, before we know we are in contact with a smell, we have already received and reacted to it.

  The physiological configuration of the sense of smell is a reminder of the primacy it once had for our
predecessors, who walked on all fours with their noses close to the ground—and to one another’s behinds. In this way, scientists speculate, we were able to ascertain information about gender, sexual maturity, and availability. Freud postulated that, as we began to walk upright, we lost our proximity to scent trails and to the olfactory information they provide. At the same time, our field of vision expanded, and sight began to take precedence over smell. Over time, our sense of smell lost its acuity.

  This displacement of smell by sight appears to have been a necessary step in the process of human evolution, and perhaps because of that, the status of smell has declined along with its keenness. With the Enlightenment especially, the sense of smell came to be looked upon as a “lower” sense associated with animals and primitive urges, filth and disease. (It didn’t help that the stench of illness was long viewed as the cause of an ailment rather than its symptom.) Immanuel Kant pronounced smell the most unimportant of the senses and unworthy of cultivation. The marginalization of smell became one of the hallmarks of “civilized” man.

  Yet, diminished as it is, the human sense of smell remains capable of extraordinary development. In more “primitive” societies, it continues to play a critical role in hunting, healing, and religious life, and consequently is a much more refined instrument, as Paolo Rovesti documents in In Search of Perfumes Lost, his study of the decline of olfactory sensibilities and the use of natural perfume materials around the world. Among the remote peoples he visited were the Orissa of India, “who lived, completely naked6, in the mountains. They had never been touched by any civilization and continued to live as in the stone age.”