Essence and Alchemy

by Mandy Aftel

  Needless to say, rose is an aphrodisiac. It is also felt to drive away melancholy and lift the heart.

  Geranium is distilled from the leaves and stems of the plant. The best geranium is known as geranium Bourbon and comes from the tiny island of La Reunion (formerly called Bourbon), near Madagascar. This potent greenish-colored oil has a rosy and minty top note that fades to a rich, long-lasting, sweet-rosy dryout. It is lighter than some of the white-flowered middle notes and can lend a rosy tone that does not dominate a blend. I find it rather boring and don’t use it much, but it does work well with other florals, especially the various rose absolutes, and can extend their scent without overextending your pocketbook. It also blends well with bergamot, patchouli, clove, lime, and sandalwood. Geranium is considered to be a pick-me-up for general fatigue and helps to reduce stress.

  Geranium

  Narcotic essences have a hypnotic quality to them that is sultry and calming. I include among them jasmine concrete, jasmine absolute, tuberose, ylang ylang absolute, and ylang ylang concrete.

  Jasmine is probably the most important perfume material. Its blossoms exhale a scent so peculiar as to be incomparable. Synthetics do not even come close to approximating it. Rich and warm, heavy and fruity, intensely floral, it is nearly narcotic in its ability to seize the senses and the imagination. Its almost cloying sweetness gives way to a drier note as it evolves, but it has considerable tenacity, and it retains its warmth and depth all the way down to the dryout.

  There is almost no essence with which jasmine does not blend beautifully, and no perfume that is not improved by its presence. As Edmond Roudnitska puts it, “It is the natural product par excellence”—pliable, versatile, universal. “Despite all the crises77, all the economic challenges, all the competition from synthetic products,” echoes Grasse chemist Jean Garnero, “the perfume of the jasmine flower remains one of the essential elements, and sometimes the main pillar in the structure of the greatest perfumes.”

  As with many flowers, jasmine blossoms continue to emit scent after they have been detached from the plant, and its character continues to develop until the blossoms fade and deteriorate. It takes more78 than two thousand pounds of flowers to produce a little over three pounds of jasmine absolute. I prefer jasmine concrete, a solid reddish-orange wax whose sweet, mellow tone lends a particular smoothness to any blend. My favorite is grandiflorum jasmine concrete. I use a tiny bamboo scoop that I buy in San Francisco’s Chinatown to add jasmine concrete to my perfumes. (Its designated purpose is to clean ears.) I have used jasmine absolute as well, but I miss the rich sweetness and complexity of the concrete, and many of the absolutes I have smelled still carry the scent of the chemicals used in processing them. Another variety is jasmine sambac, which is spicier, deeper, and more tenacious.

  Jasmine

  Powerful as it is, jasmine refreshes rather than oppresses, possessing both antidepressant and aphrodisiacal properties.

  Ylang ylang “flower of flowers,” has been dubbed a poor man’s jasmine. To me it is the definition of a good buy, inexpensive and beautiful. The blossoms are distilled when they are freshly gathered. As with olive oil, there are first, second, and third renderings of the oil, with the first labeled “extra,” connoting the highest grade, and a creamy, sweet note that is suave, soft, and persistent. Ylang ylang absolute is readily available and a joy to work with, being slightly more tenacious than the extra. My personal favorite is ylang ylang concrete, which is so multilayered it is perfume on its own.

  Ylang ylang

  Ylang ylang is one of the most important raw materials used in perfume. Dosed with discretion, it produces remarkable effects, imparting floral top notes as well as middle notes. It blends well with jasmine and rose, bergamot and vanilla. Ylang ylang is an aphrodisiac that relieves tension and imparts joy.

  Tuberose, a white, waxy, insignificant-looking bloom, comes to life after dark, when its heady odor intensifies, earning it the nickname “Mistress of the Night.” Its odor has been compared to that of a well-stocked flower garden at evening’s close. (There is, however, no rose in tuberose.) The absolute, with its high intensity, is a rich, brown, viscous liquid with a sweet, heavy, sensuous, almost nauseating scent. Among the most expensive perfume ingredients, it imparts an alluring heaviness to any floral blend. I like the way it mixes with a vanilla base—sweet on top of sweeter, but still very appealing.

  Tuberose

  Fruity essences include Roman chamomile, lemon verbena, litsea cubeba, and tagetes, a kind of marigold from South Africa which has an intense herbal and fruity note.

  Roman chamomile (Anthemis nobilis) yields the tea of which Peter Rabbit was so fond. Its flowers also yield a pale blue oil that turns yellow as it ages. It has a sweet, fruity, applelike top note that grows warmer, drier, and more herbal as it evolves. It gives a perfume a fresh note and natural depth. It is extremely diffusive, and it blends well with bergamot, labdanum, neroli, clary sage, and oakmoss. It has a fairly high odor intensity, and when too enthusiastically dosed, it overpowers.

  Chamomile, in all its forms, is one of the most popular scents in aromatherapy. Its uses for skin and body are legion, and its calming and relaxing properties are palpable.

  Litsea cubeba has a fresh, sweet, but intense lemony fragrance as appealing as its name. It is my favorite lemony essence, including expressed lemon peel itself. It comes from the fruits of the may chang tree, a Chinese member of the laurel family known for its fragrant flowers, fruit, and leaves. Its pale yellow (but intensely fragrant) oil is derived from the small, pepperlike fruits. Litsea cubeba blends well with all the citrus oils as well as with petitgrain, rosemary, and lavender. Unlike lemon oil itself, it never goes rancid, and it is particularly useful as a substitute for lemon verbena, which is very expensive and often adulterated. And unlike true lemon oil, which must be a top note, it allows the possibility of introducing a lemon scent in the middle note of a perfume.

  Precious florals possess a depth, harmony, and full-bodied quality, while at the same time their restrained richness lends an elegance and suavity. They are all extremely expensive. They include boronia, orange flower absolute, champa, and orris butter.

  Orange flower absolute is one of the most expensive perfumery ingredients. It is extracted from the flowers of the bitter orange tree, that veritable cottage industry for the perfumer. (The flowers, when distilled, yield neroli oil, and when extracted with solvents, yield orange flower absolute; bitter orange oil is expressed from the peels; and the leaves and twigs are distilled to yield petitgrain oil.) Dark orange in color and fairly viscous, it has an intensely floral scent that smells at once heavy and delicate, rich and fresh.

  Orange flower

  Despite its cost, finding a beautiful orange flower absolute can be an elusive process. I have sampled many that smelled so rank or medicinal, I wondered what all the fuss and expense were about. But the real thing is a remarkable experience. Cool, elegant, and intense, it imparts a freshness to floral blends along with a great tenacity. It is used in heavy Oriental perfumes as well as in citrus colognes, chypres, and florals. Its suave strength and understated sexuality make it a wonderful heart note for a man’s fragrance.

  Champa absolute (or champaca absolute) comes from the flowers of Michelia champaca, a slender, medium-size tree related to the magnolia. The flowers range from pale yellow to deep orange and resemble a double narcissus. Indian women on special occasions adorn their heads with the closed buds. Over the course of the evening, the buds open, providing an elegant contrast with the women’s black hair and releasing a scent which is reminiscent of tea, orange blossoms, and ylang ylang. The absolute derived from champa is a brownish-orange liquid with a fresh, grassy top note that evolves into a delicately sweet, tealike fragrance with leafy undertones. It lends a floral, leafy note to perfume compositions and cries out for pairing with rich but weak-smelling oils like sandalwood. A little champa goes a long way.

  Boronia absolute is as close to heaven as we on
earth are likely to get. It is derived from the flowers of Boronia megastigma, which permeate the air from a great distance with a ravishing aroma of lemon and rose. There are two kinds of boronia absolute available. The green is a viscous liquid with a rich, fresh, fruity but tealike scent. I prefer the bright yellow-orange absolute from Tasmania, which has a powerful, distinctive, lasting odor suggestive of cassis, violet, apricot, and, above all, yellow freesia. It can be procured in bottles of 100 grams (about 3 ounces) for a mere five hundred dollars. Boronia blends well with clary sage, bergamot, costus, and sandalwood.

  Following are three sets of middle notes to purchase, the first in order to get started, the others as you wish and can afford to. Those with an asterisk before them are expensive.

  Basic set of middle notes:

  Clary sage

  Geranium The best is “Bourbon.”

  Ylang ylang Buy the absolute or the “extra.”

  Second set of middle notes:

  *Jasmine absolute I love grandiflorum best. Some prefer jasmine sambac. The cheaper concretes are heady and magnificent.

  *Neroli Great variety—look for one that is sweet but tart and complicated.

  *Rose absolute Many varieties—Bulgarian, Turkish, Moroccan, Indian, Russian, Egyptian. Get tiny amounts of each and find your favorite; you can never have too much. The concretes are softer and cheaper than the absolutes but require straining.

  *Tuberose absolute Tuberose usually comes from India or France. The French smells a bit better but costs a lot more.

  Very special third set of middle notes:

  *Boronia absolute

  *Champa absolute

  Lavender absolute

  Litsea cubeba

  *Orange flower absolute

  Styrax

  CREATING MIDDLE CHORDS

  When you create a middle chord, you must remember that you will be adding it to a base chord, where it will contribute another layer of depth and complexity to the perfume. As in any other art form, it is important to practice restraint in the selection of elements. The bouquet must not only be pleasing in itself but also work in harmony with the perfume as a whole.

  To construct a middle note for Alchemy, the perfume we began in the last chapter, we need to bear in mind the composition of its base chord, which contains amber, benzoin, and vanilla. These three base notes are very congenial and do not present much potential difficulty when choosing among the heart notes; we would have to select more carefully if we were building upon a base containing intense or sharp notes like patchouli, vetiver, costus, angelica root, or ambrette. It is important as well to begin to imagine the top notes as you choose the middle ones. Complicated or charismatic top notes will require more restraint at this point than easygoing ones will.

  For Alchemy, we’ll continue with some compatible notes that almost everyone likes—rose absolute, jasmine, and ylang ylang—and that will add a beautiful floral heart to our powdery base. We will need about eighteen drops of this middle chord:

  8 drops rose absolute

  7 drops jasmine absolute

  3 drops ylang ylang extra

  Add each ingredient to the base chord drop by drop, making sure to smell after each new scent is added in order to take in the evolving changes in the blend.

  Here are some more middle chords to try, again with dominant note first.

  Rosy, fruity: rose geranium, litsea cubeba, Roman chamomile, rose

  Classic: rose, jasmine, neroli

  Exotic: ylang ylang, jasmine concrete, kewda

  Radiant: orange flower absolute, lemon verbena, lavender absolute

  White blossoms: tuberose, jasmine, champa

  Cool: violet leaf, clary sage, orris butter

  5

  The Sublime and the Volatile Head Notes

  There all is ordered loveliness,

  Luxuriously calm, voluptuous.

  Gleaming beds and chairs,

  Polished by the years,

  Such would decorate our chamber;

  And the rarest blooms

  Mix their soft perfumes.

  —Charles Baudelaire, “Invitation to the Voyage”

  79 WHEN YOU SMELL PERFUME, you absent yourself from habitual life and go on a journey. Scents materialize, one after the other, volatilizing and disappearing as if out of the mists on the horizon. There is a vitality to this carefully orchestrated unfolding, what we might call the movement of scent. This movement, this evolving of scented experience, is not a mere metaphor; we really feel it within ourselves. Smelling perfume is a meditation on what Gaston Bachelard calls “the fluid state80 of the imagining psyche.”

  The radiant top notes are the invitation to this scented journey. They reach our noses first, establishing the scent’s initial impression before they dissipate into the ether—literally; the oils of which they are composed vaporize more rapidly than those of heart or base notes. Their evanescence makes them seem superficial, and in a sense they are, yet a perfume that contains no head notes seems flat. As Bachelard puts it, “With air81, movement takes precedence over matter.” Just as movement is “an integral part of our inner lives,” top notes are an indispensable element in perfume.

  Top notes are easy to like, familiar, uncomplicated, strong but not heavy. They are sharp, penetrating, and extreme; either hot or cold, never warm. Many of them are familiar from cooking: herbs and spices such as coriander, spearmint, cardamom, juniper; citruses such as lime, bitter orange, blood orange, tangerine, pink grapefruit. Black pepper functions in perfume much as it does in cooking: at home in any blend, but only in small quantities, it offers pungency and definition. Sociable bergamot, used for flavoring Earl Grey tea, is comfortable in any company. Like your favorite clothing that forgives the extra desserts and lack of exercise, it never lets you look bad.

  Top notes are inexpensive, easy to use, superficial, and spontaneous. Above all, they embody the experience of lightness, in the sense that Milan Kundera used it in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The absolute absence82 of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.” They entice us into reacting, require us to be utterly in the present, seduce us out of our usual patterns of response. “Habit83,” Bachelard writes, “is the inertia of psychic development … the exact antithesis of the creative imagination. The habitual image obstructs imaginative powers.” Because they last for such a brief time, top notes allow us to leave our ordinary course. The shifting nuances of scent that we experience with them can be imagined as the experience of change itself, grasped in the transition from one scent shape to another.

  Being the most highly volatile, top notes are the least material of the perfume ingredients, straddling the physical and metaphysical worlds. It is no accident that they are called essences or spirits. Their role in perfume corresponds to the alchemical process of sublimatio. Like the word sublimation, sublimatio derives from the Latin sublimis, meaning “high.” The distinguishing feature of sublimatio is elevation, the translation of a low substance into a higher form by an ascending movement.

  Sublimatio is a culminating process, the final transformation of the spirit from what has been created in time. A fixed body rises up, free of entanglements, and is volatilized. The spiritual is raised from the corporeal, the pure separated from the impure. So sublimatio describes the human effort at spiritual development as well, the attempt to discover a higher, better self. From above, we see more truly and completely.

  The image derives, of course, from the chemical process of distillation, in which a solid is heated, passes into a gaseous state, and ascends to the top of the vessel, where, in a cooler atmosphere, it condenses. All top notes are essential oils and are rendered that way. They govern the mysterious process of diffusion—the dissemination of molecules until a fragrance is evenly distributed within the available space. A diffusive perfume is one that quickly becomes apparent in the air.


  The role of the top note, then, is both to lend definition to the perfume and to give it a starting point in the imagination of the smeller. From the standpoint of the perfumer, it finishes off the shape of the creation. A dull and powdery base note, for example, needs to be balanced with a sharp and shapely top note. As Edmond Roudnitska notes, “It is no mere chance84 that our forebears called the list of constituents of a perfume and their proportions a ‘formula.’ They must have felt, as they mixed their ingredients in the set proportions, that they were forming a shape and that this shape raised their mixture to the level of aesthetics.”

  But while the top note marks the end of the journey of making the perfume, it also heralds the beginning of the journey of smelling it. As the perfumer consummates her creation, she looks at it from above, from the point of view of the wearer. Seen from this perspective, the top note has an introductory relationship to the other elements. It is the first to come out and greet the person who opens the bottle of perfume. The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end in the dual processes of creation and experience.

  Alchemy has a symbol for this sort of circular process: the ouroboros—the image of the serpent that devours itself and gives birth to itself. It stands for the unity that underlies the diversity of the cosmos, and the self-contained nature of the transformative process. Integration and assimilation lead to unification and creation—the serpent eats its tail only to be reborn—and opposites are reconciled. In alchemy as in perfumery, what is heavy becomes light, what is light becomes fixed, what is above is below.

  The ouroboros