Dance of Scents — I
What would be best represent the smell of matrimony?
Imagine you are at an infinite room. Where multiple events betide at the same time and you stay in a wrinkle of the time where at this moment, you are unaffected of whatever happens in other portals. Your job is to choose wisely, which portal are you going to enter, or else, create another portal with a story of your own, like no other.
Done?
Then describe the feeling.
How is the smell of it? Can you trace the white wall behind the curtain of the portal you are about to enter? Is the hieroglyph carved on the wall legible to you?
Wait, did you say you smell frankincense on the rose altar? Makes sense. Every perfumer since ancient Egypt had befriended these two. They smell divine, almost indescribable. While people nowadays have less appreciation towards frankincense, it was one of crucial offerings when you set up an altar for spiritual practices thousands years ago. It smells ancient. Almost warm, not the kind of nurturing, but pushing. I did make one for myself.
Whenever you are ready.
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You are invited to my library of scents.
Where I collect not only essential oils, resin, and absolutes of plants — but also their stories and meanings they bring to life. I call them my new love interest, as I never thought I would fall in love in compounding fragrances and started to find them anywhere I look. It’s like opening the book that’s always been there but somehow I haven’t read that yet. Maybe it’s like falling in love with your own best friend, you never notice, but it always has been there all along.
Other people — following Septimus Piesse — call their beloved as ‘perfume organ’ — therefore they have top, middle, base notes. Despite the respect I have for his beautiful work The Art of Perfumery, I much prefer ‘library of scents’. It’s like you have mind palace but it’s for scents you are about to harmonize. I don’t hear fragrances as melodies, I thread them to a poetry. They might meet as heart notes, but I see them as molecules tying the knot from similarities, even extremities!
As long as they have similar aromatic compound, anything could happen in alignment! Alkaloid meets another alkaloid, aldehyde meets terpenes, alcohol meets ester, and so on. That’s one of my favorite parts working with aromatics and fragrances. You don’t have to know everything, the compound itself guides you to the format they want to achieve.
When rose geranium (Pelargonium graveolens) oil and citronella (Cymbopogon nardus) intertwine, there is some unexpected thing that unfolds, beautifully, strong, lavish, with a little weird, bitterness in the end. Geranium was formerly known as fake rose from Turkiye as told in The Art of Perfumery. Indeed, some species smell similar to rose but you can always notice subtle difference from the real Mother Rose. This flower is native to Africa. On the other hand, citronella is commonly found in tropical countries and used as mosquitoes/insects repellent, herbal oil to warm up the body, but never as perfume. Its smell is totally different from its sister lemongrass, which the masses adore in form of lemongrass tea perfume. Both create a novel scent experience that I think personally deserves its own popularity (through the right, artistry hands & nose).
One thing in common: they’ve got geraniol. I tend to matchmaking natural sources through what compound(s) they have in common. This is inspired by a concept they teach in intermediate level perfumery course, where a student tries to build a citrus-y smell brick-by-brick using (synthetic) individuated compounds such as geraniol, L-limonene, D-limonene, linalool, camphor etc. (more or less, I think it reminds you on the Chemistry experiment in high school lab that involves acetic acid and isopentyl alcohol to synthesize isopentyl acetate (ester) whose smell mimics ripe banana, no? But obviously they are not the same thing) but twisted. Although it does not always guarantee success, I find this method useful in exploring new, exotic scents.
Now back to business. I am in the middle of working two pieces of fragrances for a bride & her groom. In the process, somehow, I witness philosophical teaching from natural isolates.
(continued to part 2)
