by Mandy Aftel
In this light, powerful feelings like love and lust can be considered agents of solutio. They can obliterate or obscure other, more delicate feelings with their emotional force, much as the voluptuous, full-bodied base notes can overshadow—or annihilate—the lighter, thinner middle and top notes. The challenge is to fashion them into a containing vessel that will surround the other notes without swamping them or swallowing them up.
Thinking about the correspondences between perfumery and alchemy in this fashion is a way of engaging imaginatively with the deeper aspects of creating with scent. The intense smells and colors and textures of the essences call up intuitive associations as you work with them, and allow you to access other states of consciousness. When I work intensely with scent, I feel myself leave the everyday world behind. The complicated base notes, in particular, transport me to hidden places in my memory and sensuality. They call up the dense, wild aspects of both the external world (rich earth, deep forests, storms, the sea) and the internal world (the unconscious, the dark side, the shadow, chaos). I let myself take in those associations and be moved wherever they carry me as I work.
The base note is the scent that lasts the longest on the skin, and so it mixes most deeply with the wearer’s body chemistry. Individual body chemistries react differently with the same perfume elements. Some bring out the florals, some the spices, some the animal notes. The skin is a base under the base, and thus base notes form the most intimate connection between perfume and wearer. They articulate its lasting character, its final perceptible note after the others have evaporated.
But base notes not only outlast the other notes, they also make those notes themselves last longer, slowing their evaporation and drawing them into the skin so that the notes are released gradually, over the course of hours or even days. This property of anchoring a fragrance in time and prolonging its life on the skin is known as fixation. It is so important that without it there is no perfume; no one wants a perfume that doesn’t last.
Fixation is one of the major challenges facing the natural perfumer. In the world of synthetic perfumes, there are many chemicals that do the job well—sometimes too well, resulting in perfumes that refuse to blend into the atmosphere around the wearer but dominate it instead.
The ideal fixative is one that lengthens the varying rates of evaporation of the perfume’s constituents. Different kinds of base notes appear to tackle the problem in different ways, so fixation is accordingly classified in three varieties, but in fact there is an element of mystery to them all, because the property is not entirely understood or quantifiable.
In the first kind of fixation, the high boiling point and molecular structure of the base notes are thought to retard the evaporation of the other ingredients. These are usually resins and gums, like benzoin and Peru balsam, which possess an adsorptive effect—by virtue of their viscosity, a film is created that traps the other essences and retards their evaporation on the skin. Consequently, the aroma of the perfume changes more gradually as the ingredients fade away.
The second kind of fixation occurs with the addition of base notes that have low volatility, such as oakmoss, labdanum, and vetiver. These evaporate at a very slow rate, lending their distinctive note to the perfume all the while, but they don’t affect the rate of evaporation of the other ingredients.
Exalting fixatives are the third category, and they are among the most mysterious and magical of all perfume ingredients. They are the animal essences: musk, civet, ambergris, and castoreum. Of the four, only civet is still used, a testimony to the perfumer’s capacity to transform the ugly into the beautiful. An exalting fixative is truly alchemical in its effect—or synergistic, as we might say today. It acts by improving, fortifying, or transporting the vapors of the other perfume materials. Exalting fixatives provide life and brilliance, giving what is known as “lift” to the heavier aspects of the perfume and causing it to be more diffusive. The full fragrance of the perfume slowly dissipates from the skin, although just how this effect is achieved is not entirely understood. Indeed, the exalting fixatives are so strong that a drop of civet is enough to work its magic on several ounces of perfume, and a drop too much will ruin an entire blend.
There isn’t a blueprint for fixation—what is useful in one blend could be a disaster in another—and fixation is only one element to be considered when choosing base notes. As Roudnitska remarks, “It would be ridiculous56 to suggest that if a perfume is too fleeting it is enough just to add a lingering product christened ‘fixative’ to take care of the problem. Lingering products do not simply make a perfume last longer, they contribute in the same way as the constituents to the general note of the perfume and to its integrity. Waiting until the desired shape has been achieved before adding them means facing the certitude of unpredictable changes of form, which may even amount to the destruction of the character of the perfume. A perfume that vanishes too quickly is an ill-designed perfume: what it needs is not ‘fixing’ but restructuring.”
Musk deer
Creating fixation in a perfume has an inherent magic to it, requiring the orchestration of unseen forces. There is a paradox in “fixing” something that is, at heart, the essence of change. In conceptual terms, you are creating tangibility out of intangibility, substantiality out of insubstantiality. The medium in which this alchemy occurs is time—time in which beautiful odors ebb and flow into one another. Fixation refers to a perfume’s capacity to remain present in someone’s sensual consciousness, but the presence is not only invisible, it is indefinable, always in transition. It is the embodiment of the phenomenon Henri Bergson called duration. Bergson himself described duration57 as being “of a flowing and of a passage which are sufficient in themselves, the flowing not implying a thing which flows and the passage not presupposing any states by which one passes: the thing and the state are simply snapshots artificially taken of the transition.” In solutio, it is not that a part of the blend disappears but that the blend itself is transformed as other notes are blended in and its duration expands.
Wordlessly, perfume puts you in touch with this way of experiencing change and time. As Bergson comments, “In our inner life58 we do not measure duration but feel it.” We experience it as “a growth from within, the uninterrupted prolongation of the past into a present which is already blending into the future … We have here the indivisible and therefore substantial continuity of the flow of the inner life.” This evolution of psychic states parallels the experience of smelling a complex scent—one aroma tumbling into another and embracing the particularities of the flesh.
The experience of volatility in perfume is thus a metaphor for the experience of time. Its essence is to flow; it is a continuity that seamlessly unfolds, not one of its elements unchanged when another comes to the fore, and each blending with the others as it ebbs, flowing into nothingness. As Bergson writes, “Our psychic states59 interpenetrate each other; it is not such and such a sensation or such and such an image that urges forward my desire and this desire in turn that moves my will, like so many distinct and dissociated physical forces reacting upon one another. Our inner states are within us like living things constantly becoming … Can you shorten the length of a melody without alternating its nature? The inner life is that very melody.”
To truly experience the phenomenon of duration is to make an effort to engage with perfumery on its most profound levels. It is time-consuming and effortful, just as good cooking is time-consuming and effortful compared to buying fast food. But like cooking, it affords a greater pleasure of discovery, of experience rendered not all at once, but in stages of anticipation, delight, and revelation. Most of the time, we look at change without seeing it. As Bergson puts it, “We speak of change60, but we do not think about it. We say that change exists, that everything changes, that change is the very law of things: yes we say it and we repeat it; but those are only words, and we reason and philosophize as though change did not exist.” But ultimately it is change that is real, and change that is
the essence of sensual and creative experience.
Novice perfumers, especially, find it helpful to think of essences in groups arranged by some salient aromatic characteristic, like with like. The classifications are an aid both to distinguishing the nuances of each and to remembering their general and specific natures. Here are seven groups of base notes, with a few representative examples of each—some common, some rare, some simple, some complex:
Heody essences have a soft, warm note reminiscent of freshly cut aromatic woods. This family includes sandalwood, cedar absolute, black spruce absolute, white spruce absolute, guaiacwood, and fir absolute.
Sandalwood61 (from Santalum album) is a viscous oil, pale yellow to yellow in color, with an extremely soft, sweet-woody odor. It is an aphrodisiac which is also calming and quieting. The best sandalwood comes from plantations in the Mysore region of southern India, and sometimes it is called East Indian sandalwood. You may come across something called West Indian sandalwood; this is amyris oil and not to be substituted for true sandalwood.
The sandalwood tree has a vampirish way of thriving. It is a hemiparasite, which means that it gets some of its nutrients through photosynthesis, but must siphon off the rest from the roots of neighboring trees and plants via octopuslike tentacles, bringing a slow death to the host. The essential oil the perfumer is after does not appear until the tree is at least twenty-five years old, so sandalwood is not harvested before the tree is at least thirty. Even then it cannot simply be chopped down, because the precious oil is in the roots as well as in the trunk and branches. Once the tree is unearthed, loggers enlist the services of the white ant, which eats the sapwood and bark and leaves the heartwood, where the oil is. Then the wood is coarsely powdered and steam-distilled.
Sandalwood has little or no top note, and its scent remains constant on the skin for a considerable length of time, thanks to its outstanding tenacity. It is an excellent fixative for most perfumes, lending a soft, powdery dryout that is compatible with almost any note. Sandalwood is useful with less intense middle notes because it will not envelop or overwhelm them, but will simply support them.
Fir absolute, derived from Abies balsamea, is a fairly new product, and the best of it comes from Canada. I absolutely adore its intense green color, its fragrance of Christmas trees and the forest, and its jamlike sweetness. In my custom work, I find that almost everyone likes it. It is wonderful in bath salts and lends a rich, green outdoorsy note to any blend. You need to heat the essence to make it pourable, which is best done by immersing the bottle in a bowl of extremely hot water for five minutes.
Resinous essences are derived from the viscous liquids secreted through the ducts found in the bark of certain trees. Not surprisingly, they tend to have a rather piney scent. They include galbanum, frankincense, and myrrh.
Frankincense is found in the bark of various small trees of the Boswellia species. In ancient times it was, without a doubt, the most important perfume substance. Pliny, whose Natural History contained much information about perfume and perfume materials, stated that it could be found only in Saba, a remote part of Arabia that was rendered almost inaccessible by mountains. Gathering it was a hereditary privilege limited to the men of certain families, who were considered sacred and were restricted by certain prohibitions. While making incisions in the trees and gathering the frankincense, the men were prohibited from having intercourse with women or attending funerals. The collected frankincense was brought by camel to the town of Sabota, where one gate was open for its reception; to turn from the road was prohibited under penalty of death. Until the priests had taken one-tenth of the lot for the god Sabin, sales were not allowed.
Frankincense
Frankincense has a soft, incenselike odor. It remains an important and elegant fixative in spicy, exotic, and flowery perfumes, and it works well with citruses also. Like sandalwood, frankincense is a diffusive lighter base note that can blend with milder notes without dominating them. It has an elevating and soothing effect on the mind.
Galbanum comes from the ferula plant, a large umbellifer. (I am referring here to the resinoid; the essential oil of galbanum is a top note that, although intense, contains none of the resinoid’s heaviness and fixative value.) Galbanum has a rich, green, woody balsamic note with a dry undertone and a soft piney top note. It is a very complicated scent that evolves over time and can be overpowering if not dosed properly. It has strong but mellow fixative qualities that work well in chypres (a classical perfume based on the marriage of oakmoss, patchouli, and bergamot), moss and woody bases, and exotic spicy blends. Galbanum makes its presence known and needs to be blended with essences with which it won’t fight.
Animal essences include not only those derived from animals (civet, musk, ambergris, and castoreum) but also plant essences that have a warm, musky vibrancy, such as costus, ambrette, hay, and tobacco.
Musk has been used almost as long as there has been civilization itself. It is contained in a pouch on the abdomen of the male musk deer (Moschus moschiferus), which lives in the wooded regions of the Himalayan and Atlas ranges. The musk deer is a hardy, solitary creature that is only on rare occasions found in pairs, and never in herds. According to legend, the deer’s acute sense of hearing could be exploited to trap him. The hunter played a tune on his flute from a hidden spot. Curious to know the source of the strange, melodious sound, the deer ventured closer and closer, until it was close enough to be killed.
The musk pouch is an almost spherical sac, about an inch and a half in diameter, smooth on one side and hairy on the other. The musk inside the pod is in the form of irregularly shaped grains. It develops its characteristic scent as it dries.
The diffusiveness of musk—its tendency to permeate everything in its vicinity—is legendary. Because of it, the East India Company banned it from cargoes containing tea. It is said that several famous Eastern mosques were constructed with a mortar that was mixed with musk, and even a thousand years later the interior of these buildings emits a perfume when the sunlight shines on them. I have read that a few centigrams will fill a large hall with the characteristic odor for years without showing an appreciable loss in volume. Yet musk is also known for its ability to fix and accentuate other scents without adding an appreciable odor to blends.
Musk pods
The power of musk as an aphrodisiac is legendary as well. The empress Josephine loved it, and her dressing room was filled with it despite Napoléon’s frequent remonstrances. Forty years after her death (and repeated washings and coats of paint), the scent persisted. Alas, I have never been able to track down a specimen of true musk to sample. In the past, the dried pods were packed in dainty and elaborate boxes or caddies lined with metal and covered with patterned silk. It was always extremely expensive, and often adulterated. In my antique perfume books from the 1860s, the authors already mention the musk deer’s danger of extinction, thanks to overzealous hunters. (According to Steffen Arctander, it is possible to remove the pouch without killing the animal, but I do not know whether this has ever actually been done.) I have heard that real musk is still used in some of the more costly perfumes, but secrecy prevails.
Capture of musk deer, Chinese woodcut
Ambergris62 is another ingredient upon which legends have been built. It was once classed among the most lucrative items of trade, along with slaves and gold. An early-eighteenth-century writer praised it as “the dearest and most valuable commodity in France” and reported a contemporary in England as having been informed that it was a “mass of honeycombs” that “bees make upon the large rocks, which are the Sea Side in the Indies, which heated by the Sun, loosen and fall into the Sea.” There, “whether by property of the sea water or by the Virtue of the Sunbeams,” they were “rendered liquid and floating upon the water.”
In actuality, ambergris is a peculiar morbid growth that is occasionally produced in the stomach or intestine of the now-endangered male sperm whale. The growth is apparently induced by undigested pieces of cuttlefis
h, which set up an intense irritation in the whale’s stomach. Before the growth gets too large, the whale regurgitates it, and the beneficiaries were the sailors who once encountered it with some regularity off the coasts of Africa, the East Indies, China, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.
Stories about ambergris finds rival those of the discovery of the Maltese falcon. A report from the 1930s claimed that some Hawaiian cowboys noticed some masses of what they took to be sponge in the ocean and thought to use them to wipe down their ponies. Discovering that the material was not sponge, they took a sample to a local merchant, who identified it as ambergris. They hurried back to the spot where they had found it and managed to salvage enough to make them all financially independent for life.
Like musk, ambergris in its solid state will retain its odor for centuries. And like musk, it is extraordinarily expensive and difficult to find. I have heard that it is still possible to get, but I have never located any, even simply to smell. Reports suggest that the odor is not easy to define. To some it is earthy or musty, to others a curious mixture of seaweed and roses. Many people find it disagreeable, even offensive, but minute quantities dissolved in alcohol are said to give perfume a velvety quality that clings to woven fabrics after they have been repeatedly washed and dried, becoming ever-sweeter over time.