Ruffled petals of a cattleya bloom (Cattleya sp.)
Ruffled petals of a cattleya bloom (Cattleya sp.)
Almost everything in nature has a scent, and perhaps you’ve wondered why flowers have the fragrances they do. The world of flowers is alive with charismatic, often familiar, yet strangely alluring odors. We should think of floral scents as “private communication channels” between flowers and certain animals. Imagine you are a bee trying to find one kind of bloom among dozens of similarly colored ones in the same meadow. Individualized scents aid flowers in attracting, and keeping, their most faithful pollinators. This promotes cross-pollination and the next generation of seeds.
Humans are also attracted to floral fragrances, but for different reasons. Our hominid ancestors noticed fragrant flowers and may have perfumed themselves and their dwellings with them. Then, there is that expensive substance we call perfume. Before the tenth century, skilled Arab chemists had learned to distill fragrances from fresh flowers, thereby creating the perfume known as rose water. In Egypt, enfleurage, the trapping of scents using animal fat, may be quite ancient. The word perfume has been with Western civilization for thousands of years. It may not mean what you think. The word perfume is derived from the Latin per fumare, which means to “pass through smoke.” This suggests that the earliest perfumes around the Mediterranean were actually forms of incense. However, most incense is made from fragrant plant resins. When a plant takes terpene molecules and links them together, they become a sticky but fragrant resin that dries upon exposure to air, giving us myrrh and frankincense, from Commiphora and Boswellia trees respectively.
The blossoms of Catasetum or Stanhopea orchids smell like cloves or Vicks VapoRub. Truly, we’ve stolen some of nature’s finest advertising, the scents released into the air by flowers. Now, we use those floral essences to lure and seduce our own potential mates by changing how our bodies smell, forsaking our own bawdy odors. We also use floral scents to alter how our homes and other environments smell. A multibillion-dollar global industry has developed around making and selling human perfumes and colognes, along with myriad other scented modern products used daily, right under our noses. Scent sells.
Nearly all animals rely upon their sense of smell to navigate and interpret the world around them, with the exception of most birds. Olfaction is also one of the most basic and primitive ways animals interact with each other and navigate within their preferred environments. Insects are especially attuned to the fragrant landscape of flowers, plants, and other animals. Their specialized olfactory abilities have been finely honed by natural selection for more than 400 million years. Some of the most primitive flowering-plant species are strongly scented, leading us to conclude that among the very first flowers of 120 million years ago, floral scent likely played an important role in communications between the first flowering plants, their earliest pollinators, and enemies.
Few flowers are truly scentless. This is true whether we think of a native wildflower growing in a remote location or a favorite garden rose. Most flowers release fragrance molecules from their petals or other floral structures. These “volatiles” have low molecular weights, so they disperse rapidly from a flower’s skin at moderate temperatures. These molecules linger above and around all blossoms until carried away by the breeze. They make up the “headspace” above a flower, the characteristic scent of that species. When these scent molecules are released, they become mixed into currents of air, the way smoke rises and is then turbulently dispersed from a chimney. When fragrance molecules leave the surface of a flower, bees and other insects use them to find the flower, aided by vision, memory, and learning. These animals have a lot to memorize as the scent of a flower is often composed of dozens of distinct molecules. For example, for thousands of years women in tropical Asian countries have worn the fresh flowers of the joy perfume tree (Magnolia champaca) to add an alluring aroma to their hair. This medium-size, yellow flower emits no less than fifty-two different molecules.
Back in the 1960s chemistry professors Calaway Dodson and Harold “Hal” Hills first studied the chemistry of orchid fragrances after discovering that males of many species of metallic orchid bees (euglossines) scraped orchid petals to collect their scents and then turned them into their own sexual attractants. Floral fragrances have been isolated and analyzed from both rare and common flowers in almost every habitat. Biochemists and floral biologists have cataloged more than one thousand seven hundred volatile compounds from almost a thousand plant species in a hundred families of flowering plants. Some flowers produce only one or two kinds of scent molecules. The flower of another species may have up to two dozen fragrance components. Plant species that are no more closely related than we are to goldfish may employ the exact same molecules but in different concentrations. Sometimes the blending is so similar that a damask rose in your garden can smell just like a blue sun orchid (Thelymitra macrophylla) in Australia.
Floral scents have much in common with birdsongs, as noted by evolutionary biologist and flower chemist Robert Raguso. Both are highly evolved signals, and both are difficult to understand without advanced technology and expertise. Not until 1958, however, was the sound spectrograph (sonogram) invented. Then, for the first time, ornithologists could visualize birdcalls, understanding how they were organized into frequency patterns with passing time. Likewise, in 1966, Dodson and Hills used gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers to understand, visualize, and identify orchid floral scents.
Plants, and their blooms, are chemists par excellence. Flowering plants have had a long 120 million years of evolutionary history, experimenting diversely, adapting, and modifying their fragrance chemistries. Human efforts pale by comparison with what flowering plants have done for millions of years. We are comparative newcomers to this scented game.
There is a fun way to play chemist, to find out if your favorite blossom has a scent, and what kind of fragrance it releases to the world. Go into a garden or any natural area and select one or more flowers you want to investigate. Perhaps it is an old favorite, or heirloom variety, or something entirely new. Bring the flowers home in a plastic bag inside a chest cooler. Select a small, thoroughly washed and dried glass jar with a tight-fitting lid. Place just one type of flower in the jar. Set your jar in a warm, sunny place such as a windowsill and come back in an hour or two.
Carefully open the lid and sniff. Inhale deeply, without guilt. Can you smell anything? If you’ve selected a blossom with even the faintest scent, you should be able to smell it now, since the fragrance molecules have concentrated inside the jar. You are an experiential chemist, doing headspace analysis using your nose and brain as chemical laboratory instruments! Try the jar with different flowers, especially ones you believe are unscented. Use leaves or stems from the same plant. Do they smell the same or different? Try crushing a leaf. This is a simple yet powerful way to become a citizen scientist, a chemical ecologist exploring the sensual and aromatic world of flowers. Let other family members sniff the jar to determine if their reactions are the same as yours. Again, smell the flower within the odor chamber, writing down the names of familiar things your flower reminds you of. Does it smell like cloves or wintergreen mints or almond or vanilla extract? Think about how you swirled, smelled, tasted, and compared different wines at your last wine tasting. Interestingly, many of the same things can be done with flowers and a few old jam jars. Why not host your own sniffing party over the season when your garden flowers are in peak bloom? You can always include honey and wine tasting to your event.
As nature’s foremost chemists (along with insects), flowers make, store, and dispense a scented universe of diverse chemicals, using simple to complex biochemical pathways. The exact details aren’t important to our story. What matters is an appreciation for how unrelated kinds of flowers lure their pollinators, often narrowly focused animal specialists, enticing them to feed, drink, and gather nest-building materials or mate, rest, or sleep within their scented floral embrace. We’ll look at a few examples of the many potential fragrant stories that could be told.
Some flowers smell bad, downright awful, to us. Because these blooms don’t show up in Valentine’s or Mother’s Day bouquets, we don’t usually think of them, but they are an important part of nature. You may have a potted starfish plant (Stapelia spp.) growing on your kitchen-window ledge. When it finally blooms, you begin searching earnestly for the putrefying mouse corpse under the cupboards or behind the refrigerator as mentioned previously. Or, perhaps you are familiar with blooming skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) worming its way up through a spring snowfall. As in man-made perfumes, concentration matters. The daffodils in our gardens we think of as sweet-smelling, but bring a bunch indoors and suddenly they are not nearly so pleasant. Indole, one of the chemicals in their fragrance, is a common floral volatile. It smells somewhat fecal and repulsive to most people at higher concentrations. However, when greatly diluted, indole is perceived as floral and nice. It finds its way into many perfumes.
You may recall my travel account of the giant carrion flower of Borneo (Rafflesia arnoldii). All of these blooms have characteristic scents, tuned to attract blowflies or dung beetles. Normally, you find these flies dining and laying their eggs on mammalian feces or the bodies of dead mammals and birds or rotting fish along a shoreline. These specialist flowers have tapped into the smell of death to attract pollinating flies, using chemical mimicry and deceit. The female flies show up, duped into laying their eggs on the faux meat, then carry away pollen to the next foul-smelling blossom.
Flowers pollinated by bats usually do not smell much nicer. The pollination literature is being kind when the aroma of bat flowers is described as “fermented, fruity, or garlicky.” In fact, bat-pollinated flowers such as those of kapok trees, some wild bananas, and others often release sulfur-containing molecules reminiscent of rotting eggs and rancid butter. In Arizona and northern Mexico, some giant Agave (century plants) have flowers that smell like yummy coconut, while the saguaro has creamy-white blooms that remind me of the scent of a ripe honeydew melon. Both agaves and saguaros are visited by bats at night, and bees early the following morning.
We humans enjoy the natural perfumes of flowers pollinated by bees or night moths and even some pollen-eating beetles. As mammals, shouldn’t we like the odors of bat-pollinated blossoms? Swiss biochemist Roman Kaiser compared the sweet natural scents preferred by people. He concluded that we like those flowers that can be grouped into four basic categories. We have already described the spicy scents made by tropical American orchids and some wild European carnations. They smell like incense because they contain the same molecules that link together to form resins. Kaiser then added the rosy scent from many pink and purple flowers, such as old breeds of roses, cyclamens, and sweet peas. Curiously, they are based on the breakdown of hidden yellow pigments giving us phenyl ethyl alcohols (more on this sweet note later) and their cousins, geraniol and linalool.
Kaiser’s white-flower form, indicative of jasmine, honeysuckle, and orange blossoms, is similar to the rosy-scent form but activated by the loss of light, as the sun sets and temperatures fall. Finally, in the fourth category are the rich and complicated ionones (io or ion is an old Greek word for “scented violets”). Flowers make them as their beta-carotene molecules degrade and link up with aromatic alcohols. Examples of this floral-scent class include the previously mentioned joy perfume tree, the freesias, the aptly named fragrant olive (Osmanthus), and the amazing brown boronia flower (Boronia megastigma) of Western Australia.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, chemists had learned that nature is its own copycat. The components of pure rose oil were identical to molecules found in other plants and plant products. Linalool, found in flowers, is also known from cinnamon sticks and muscatel wine. Geraniol, also found in roses, is released when you bruise the stems of lemongrass. Since that innocent era of biochemical exploration, industrial chemists have created a multitude of commercial products containing man-made duplicates of natural molecules to lure us into liking and buying them.
Today, a global multibillion-dollar industry develops new fragrance molecules, blends them into products, and aggressively markets them. Many companies are dedicated solely to the production and wholesale of commercial fragrances that go into essentially everything we use, whether or not we are consciously aware of their presence. Unless you shop carefully for unscented products, you cannot easily escape scented detergents, hand soaps, shampoos, shower gels, hair gels, aftershaves, baby wipes, hand lotions and creams, air fresheners, facial and bathroom tissues, paper towels, furniture polishes, cleaning solutions, candles, incenses, and myriad others. A modern supermarket or pharmacy sells hundreds of packaged products containing eugenol, limonene, menthol, and all the aforementioned molecules. Many of these synthetic add-on fragrances in products are floral or at least meant to mimic the pleasant fragrances of garden favorites.
Manufacturers purposely add a generic “outdoor fresh” or floral-like scent to their laundry detergents, fabric softeners, and soaps. I’m not sure if the “fresh” component is due to just one compound or many. Perhaps they are adding oil of wintergreen (methyl salicylate) to some of their creations. I wonder if we couldn’t do without four-ply, scented bathroom tissue printed in a floral motif? Intense marketing advertisements blast at us across all media channels suggesting that we cannot live without these products. Industry chemists, psychologists, and numerous test panels all aid in new-product formulations and customer-appeal decisions, the subtle but powerful olfactory nuances that play a major role in our product selection and buying decisions. Perfuming a bathroom or kitchen is one thing, but changing the scent of the human body has a far older, more glorious, and sexier history.
Incense, especially frankincense and myrrh, was ranked with gold and jewels among the most precious of all possessions. When burned, incense provided a way to communicate with various deities via the smoke rising to the heavens. In the Middle East, the ancient Assyrians perfumed their long and ornately coiffed beards. Perhaps apocryphally, King Sardanapalus, a sybarite of the seventh century BC, reputedly said that his ultimate pleasure would be to die lying amid his wives and his perfumes. From the profane to the sacred, we have the Song of Songs from the Bible, in which a man’s bearded cheeks “are like a bed of spices yielding perfume.” The female figure in this poem is described as “a lily among thorns,” and it is said of her, “Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfume.” This is the only biblical passage to mention saffron and the sweet rush (Acorus calamus).
The Greeks grew flowers specifically for the scent trade. The Roman Empire expanded on the earlier Grecian practice, and upper-class Romans wore perfume-scented togas and shoes with scented soles. Roman baths were sometimes perfumed using precious rose water. Roman emperors also bathed in rose wine. At banquets, servants or slaves sprinkled fragrant rose petals on dinner guests from upper galleries, so plentiful in one case that they reputedly suffocated a guest. Romans, so unfettered by moral rectitude, lavished rich perfumes on themselves, often with different scents for various parts of the body. Elite Roman women had a group of slaves (the ornatrices) who were in charge of their daily toilettes, and for massaging and applying their precious unguents and other perfumes. Pliny criticized such extravagance as wasteful. He also observed that after a time the perfumes could only delight others but not the wearer. Today, we know this effect as nose fatigue, and modern perfumes gradually become less noticeable to those wearing them. This is why it’s best to try only three or four new perfumes during the same perfume counter visit. It’s no surprise then that the Romans gave us the earliest form of attar, the fragrant essential oil distilled from petals of roses. They made it by allowing fresh rose petals to dry upon a screen placed over a pail of lard. The pork fat was now contaminated with the rose scent molecules, which could easily be applied to the skin.
The first records of a culture using true perfumes are from the Persian civilization in what is now modern Iran and Iraq. By AD 810, the ruling caliphs of Baghdad were accepting thirty thousand precious bottles of rose water as part of their annual tribute from the Persian empire. The Persians also commissioned perfumes that became famous across the ancient world. The hero of perfumery was an ethnic Persian known as Ali Ibn Sina (980–1037), or Avicenna, as he was known in the West. One of the great Muslim intellectuals, he was known for his writings on many subjects, including medicine, and this led to his profound interest in concentrating scents from flowers and other substances. The modern production of distilled perfumes starts with this man.
Other ancient kingdoms added much to our lore and literature of perfumes, but Egypt under the pharaohs was a truly scented civilization. They were unusually creative in scent manufacture for a culture that bloomed and collapsed before the first iron or bronze distillation stills were invented. By land and sea, fragrance-trade routes converged on Egypt. Ancient Egyptians were the first to place an emphasis on personal beauty, adornment, and sumptuous fragrances. Theirs was a citizenry of refinement, luxury, and excess. Fragrance routes led to Egypt from the Mycenaean civilizations on Crete and Cypress. Egypt was once the perfumer to the Mediterranean basin. They exploited the natural scents of lilies, irises, roses, and blue water lilies. The Egyptians also used fragrant unguents for their hair, and other cosmetics including the world’s first eyeliner and makeup.
Today an older generation looks wistfully at the stylish ways that the houses of Arden and Rubenstein packaged their products, but the ancient Egyptians understood that artistic containers were preferred for their best cosmetics and perfumes. Egyptian fragrances must have had an aura of exclusiveness, rarity, and often divine use. Scented products were often stored in alabaster jars or fine blue and polychrome glass bottles. A common genre of Egyptian scent containers has whimsically shaped, half-naked girls swimming or floating. In front of them, they push floating animals, often ducks, which are the actual unguent storage boxes. Some alabaster unguent boxes depict young women playing musical instruments in floral settings. Egypt was a finishing house for processing scented wood, roots, leaves, and flowers into the most luxurious and coveted fragrances and beauty products of the ancient world.
Egyptian wall paintings from tombs and temples and bas-reliefs depict flowers known to be fragrant. Paramount among these is the blue water lily (Nymphaea caerulea). The artworks show women and men holding these flowers or their petals to their noses, enjoying the rich smells. Others show how women of the court wore flowers on their heads, often combined with other fragrant leaves and fruits.
Only a few true floral-based perfumes were commonly used by the ancient Egyptians. Rhodinon, or rose perfume, was a popular favorite. It was made from olive oil, rose petals, crocus blossoms, camel grass, sweet flag, honey, wine, and salt. Rhodinon may have been dyed red with alkanet. A surviving recipe for lily perfume called for two thousand lily (Lilium candidum) blossoms, eight pounds of “balanos,” almost five pounds of sweet-flag (Acorus spp.) blossoms, myrrh, and fragrant wine, along with cardamon, saffron crocus, cinnamon, honey, and salt. A perfume known as “the Egyptian” contained cinnamon, myrrh, and sweetened wine. It was aged for up to eight years and sold in perfume shops in Athens during the fourth century BC. Iris perfume, made from a base oil and orrisroot, was known in the classic world, described by Theophrastus and Pliny. Kept in alabaster containers, cool and out of the sun, iris perfume would last for six to twenty years!
The task of an Egyptian, or any, perfumer, is to make these naturally ephemeral scents, especially those from fresh flowers, last as a product that can be applied to one’s body, clothing, hair, or the statue of a god or goddess in a temple. The Egyptians had a unique way of trapping scents. Temple and tomb paintings depict elegant Egyptian ladies wearing something strange on their heads. These are unguent cones, made largely of animal fat, ainu, to hold floral scents and other scented products. The fat melted slowly as the women dined at lavish banquets or attended court, scenting and shining their hair and faces. Surviving recipes call for the fat of oxen, geese, or pigs, with one part of melted animal fat mixed with two parts of chopped scented-plant parts including the flowers of sweet marjoram (Origanum majorana) and the bright yellow blossoms of a number of stiff-branched, erect shrubs in the pea family (Cytisus, Genista, Calicotome) we now call brooms.
The last active pharaoh of Egypt was Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII Philopator, who ruled from 51 to 30 BC), a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty. A great beauty, Cleopatra was reputed to be a mistress of luxury and extravagance. Cleopatra is rumored to have used four hundred denars’ worth (about $800 today) of scented unguents each day solely to perfume and soften her hands and arms. She used perfumes to seduce both Julius Caesar and Marc Antony. At her first meeting with Marc Antony, on the Nile, she commanded that the purple sails of her royal barge be soaked in perfume, so the two could relax, bathed in the luxury of its scent. Ah, love.
Nothing can compare with the sensory experience of walking through blooming fields, acres of lavender, jasmine, or roses, at harvest time. I recently visited the Red Rock Lavender farm in Arizona during their annual open-house celebrations, when their fields had turned to purple and bees foraged among the blooms. Yes, lavender is grown for its scented leaves, not flowers, but scent distillers prefer stems cut when the flowers are in full bloom to add additional floral molecules absent from the vegetation. Perfumes have aptly been called “the breath of flowers” by Cathy Newman, a perfume-book author. Getting scents into a bottle involves a bit of magic, luck, skill, and the ability to learn from one’s predecessors. It takes specialized knowledge, just the right terroir, and good farming practices to raise a crop of flowers, the first step in getting ingredients inside a fancy bottle of perfume.
Like recognizable, individual estate-bottled cabernet sauvignons from a favorite Napa Valley vineyard and vintage, or coffees or cheeses from special locations, flowers grown in different countries or regions often smell different. Lavender farmers in France proclaim that they can distinguish lavender oils from one another even when their originating stems bloomed only a few miles apart. We all know that crops grown for favorite foods originated in many different parts of the world. Chocolate, for example, came from a small tree in southern Mexico and farther south, but African countries now produce most of the world’s cocoa beans. Likewise, the favorite flowers used by the perfume industries grow a long way from their homeland forests and meadows.
The ylang-ylang flower (Cananga odorata) comes from orchards in the Comoros Islands of the Indian Ocean, but the species is native to the Philippines. Roses, grown for their petal oils, from Turkey, Morocco, and Bulgaria are based on bushes native to warmer parts of Western Europe. The mimosa perfumes of France started as fluffy, yellow blossoms in Provence, France, but are nothing more than acacia species from Africa and Australia.
This area of Provence from Grasse to Cannes has been famous for its fields and orchards of perfume flowers for centuries. Francophile tourists continue to come and fantasize about the meadows of perfume. Grasse celebrated its sixty-fifth jasmine festival in 2014 during the first weekend in August. The French insist that Spanish navigators introduced this night-blooming wonder to Provence in 1560. This may be an illusion. Sadly, little jasmine is grown in France now. Many of the flower fields have moved to other countries, mostly places with cheaper labor, including Bulgaria, Morocco, Turkey, and India.
Many legends surround the development of the perfume industry at Grasse, including a number about the much-despised queen Catherine de Médicis (1519–89). She brought high styles of dress, cuisine, and cosmetics to a relatively barbaric France. She patronized the artisans of Grasse for their perfumed leather gloves. (It’s also said that she had the linings of those gloves poisoned and gave them as gifts to her enemies.) The perfume flowers of Grasse increased in diversity with the great age of European exploration. Unlike the British, French explorers preferred to bring live plants or viable seeds back with them. Australian acacias made their debuts at the home of the Empress Josephine before their virtues as perfume flowers brought them to Grasse.
A visit to the rose-growing area near Grasse reveals roses grown for their fragrance molecules. Here you find the pale pink rose de mai, the rose of May (Rosa gallica var. centifolia), grown for its highly fragrant petals. Harvesting the blooms by hand, a worker could pick (before the labor moved to Bulgaria) about twenty-one hundred blooms in an hour. The harvesting is done early in the morning, when the blooms are the most fragrant. By 10:00 a.m., the flowers begin to wilt and the harvest ends for the day. It takes 1,763 pounds of rose petals to make a mere 2.2 pounds of concentrated rose de mai absolute. The Bulgarian absolute, considered one of the world’s best, sells for about $2,150 a pound. Most of the French rose absolutes are purchased by Chanel and only used in their finest perfumes. Such natural rose scents are used as main ingredients in three-fourths of the world’s prestige perfumes (e.g., Chanel No. 5, Eternity, Joy, L’Air du Temps, and Trésor).
Commercial jasmine (Jasminum grandiflorum) culture may have declined in Grasse, but it is alive and vigorous near the village of Virapandi, India. There, women and girls harvest jasmine flowers individually into wicker baskets carried under their arms. They arrive at the fields by 5:30 a.m. and pick nonstop until 9:30 a.m. By that time, the window of maximum scent production is over. The flowers are night bloomers, adapted as sirens for their moth pollinators. By midmorning, the flowers have lost most of their delicate aroma.
Growing, picking, and distilling flowers into absolutes is costly. Moroccan rose absolute costs $600 per pound. Sweet jasmine (Jasminum humile) from Italy and Egyptian jasmine sell for $500 per pound. The remaining jasmine fields in Grasse possess true snob appeal, and their distilled oils sell for an astounding $12,000 per pound. It is used sparingly, and only in the world’s most valuable perfumes. The damask rose (Rosa x damascena) petals from the fields in the Gouna Valley in southern Morocco provide $1 million to a poor region. The flowers are all harvested during one month of the short growing season and then processed immediately into rose absolute.
Wherever flowers are picked, further processing awaits. Typically, bags or baskets of blooms are carried to cool sorting sheds and processing centers. Women laboriously pluck all the petals from the flowers. Gathered together into giant piles, often weighing a ton or more, the petals are scooped up and immediately distilled or treated with solvents. They are turned into the precious concentrates, the floral absolutes that will be sold by the company owners to the largest perfume houses in Europe and the United States, the only buyers who can afford such expensive raw ingredients.
The three main methods to get scent molecules out of flower petals are steam distillation, solvent extraction, and, as was first practiced by the Romans, enfleurage. Early Arabic chemists discovered how to distill rose petals and make rose water. They found that if fresh roses were plunged into boiling water, the blooms would release their aromatic essential oils into the steam. The steam was then trapped in coiled metal tubes, which were cooled. The rose volatiles condensed and floated to the surface of the rose water that remained below. Around the tenth century, this imaginative floral-distillation process made its way to Spain. The Spanish, along with other Arabic nations, produced rose perfume and used the rose distillates to flavor many of their foods. Today, steam distillation is still a common way that flowers are stripped of their precious scents. The extraction equipment has changed greatly in the intervening centuries, but the underlying process is basically the same as in ancient times. Today, flowers of some rose varieties and lavender are commonly processed using steam distillation. For a few flowers such as jasmine and mimosa, steam distillation is too harsh, and the scents of these blooms are extracted with solvents.
Solvent extraction, using organic solvents such as hexane, is somewhat gentler than distillation, with its high temperatures and potential for chemical degradation. For extraction, flower petals are layered on top of perforated metal plates. Then, the flower-laden plates are lowered into a vat of hexane and gently heated. All the essential oils, surface waxes, and pigments are extracted from the petals. Next, the mixture goes into a pot still, and the concentrated floral essence becomes the final product, called a concrete, which is dissolved in high-proof alcohol and filtered. This purified “breath of flowers” is known in the perfume industry as the floral absolute. The absolute is heavier and thicker than an essential oil.
The gentlest method of all, enfleurage, is no longer used commercially for collecting and concentrating the scents of flowers. The Roman method of making attar of roses was crude but highly effective, and later generations of Europeans similarly took individual flowers, such as jasmine, and laboriously embedded each petal onto glass plates coated with animal fats. Later, the floral-enriched fats were extracted using organic solvents, and the enfleurage product collected. This sounds complex, but is basically the same thing that happens when you put an uncovered stick of butter next to something smelly, such as onions or garlic, in your home refrigerator. The fatty butter absorbs these odors, and you throw the butter out. You can, however, also impart pleasant floral scents to butter by mixing it with fragrant roses, other petals, or lavender, for your dining pleasure. Scientists use an extremely gentle scent extraction method called headspace collection to sample unknown odors from living flowers still attached to their plants.
Commercial perfumers are more like musical composers, ones commissioned by symphony orchestras, than chemists, or perhaps cooks who prepare scented meals for the senses. We can consider fine perfumes like a three-part fugue by Beethoven, Bach, or other baroque composers. Perfumes are likened to a musical metaphor as having three notes (which produce a chord)—three characteristic scents—based on temperature and their volatility. The idea of scented “notes” is largely used in marketing, for describing the attributes of fine perfumes to us, their intended customers. Perfumes, however, are highly individualistic, and their chemical blends react differently depending upon the skin chemistry and the temperature of the wearer.
Modern perfumers consider any perfume to have a top note (or head), a middle or “heart” note, and a base note. The three notes are usually represented diagrammatically as a fragrance pyramid, one with a broad base, a tapering midsection, and a pointed tip. Our fragrance-awareness clock begins ticking immediately after a perfume is applied to human skin. The numerous chemicals within begin to evaporate, drifting away in the air. Only now can they be perceived by the wearer and others as a recognizable perfume.
Perfumery uses as many as two thousand distinctive notes, although many variations are on familiar themes, including rose notes (such as those from Bulgarian, Moroccan, French, or Turkish roses), citrus notes, and exotic, dark, resinous notes such as frankincense (also known as olibanum). We also adore the woody notes of cedar, juniper, pine, or sandalwood. From the garden, we extract bracing herbal notes, including basil and lavender. Consider the downright unpleasant notes of ammonia and decay, skunky ones, or the animal sex pheromones such as musk, which we have adopted for our own sexual purposes. All these find their way into today’s perfumes, toilet waters, and colognes, and ultimately onto your skin.
Perfumes can be amazingly rich and complex, and today an average perfume contains from sixty to a hundred chemical ingredients. Some contain around three hundred constituents, while Estée Lauder’s perfume Beautiful likely holds the world perfumery record for complexity with around seven hundred!
The top notes of a perfume are the ones we notice first, those that command our immediate attention. They are the lightest, the lowest-molecular-weight chemicals within the mixture. These compounds evaporate first and are used up the fastest, typically lasting only five to thirty minutes following application. These give us our first impression of a perfume, and first impressions in perfumery matter a great deal. Customers usually decide instantly whether they like a perfume or not upon first whiff of the distinctive and powerful top notes. Often these top notes are described by perfumers as having assertive, sharp, or fresh aromas. The scents of gingerroot and citrus rinds are commonly used as top notes by perfumers.
Once the fresh and lighter top notes have nearly evaporated, we begin to take notice of the heart of the perfume, the middle notes. They are due to the heavier molecules, ones more reluctant to launch into the air around the perfume wearer. Perfumers often refer to the middle notes as being more rounded or mellow. They reveal themselves ten to thirty minutes, even one hour, after you first apply a perfume. Chemicals that smell like roses or lavender are most commonly used as middle notes by today’s perfumers.
Finally, the bulk of the perfume reveals itself often an hour or more after it hits the skin. Middle notes mix and cavort with base notes. Together, they are the main and most long-lived fragrance theme, the olfactory essence of any fine perfume. The base and middle notes are onstage together. These compounds are part of the “fixative” of the perfume. Perfume fixatives are oils, alcohol, or extravagantly expensive ingredients such as ambergris used in only the world’s most expensive fragrances. Fixatives help to hold back the lighter top and middle notes of any fragrance. In any perfume, they are the largest, heaviest, and stickiest of the chemicals used. Most often, the base notes are animalistic in nature, rich and complex scents. They may even be somewhat unpleasant and are termed skunky or sexual, like real and synthetic musks. Often, the musk notes are easily perceived on the skin a day or more after the perfume was originally applied. These base notes have staying power.
If we examine a much-beloved perfume, we can understand how the different olfactory notes combine to complete their harmonius scented performance. Coco Mademoiselle by Chanel was released in 2001 with an onslaught of advertising messages aimed at women in their twenties. This fragrance has lots of citrus notes and smells great. Its top notes are bergamot, orange, and grapefruit. A bit later, you perceive the heart notes of jasmine, lychee, and rose. Finally, when your Coco Mademoiselle begins to dry down, the strong base notes kick in. Here are the rich and deep notes of bourbon vanilla, Indonesian patchouli, Haitian vetiver (Chrysopogon zizanioides), and white musk. To some “perfumeophiles” this is liquid sex in a bottle, having more than the usual reputed aphrodisiacal or attractant qualities of many famous perfumes.
Most of the largest perfume and fragrance houses have several highly paid, uniquely talented individuals at the heart of their business. These are the “noses,” the master perfumers, who make everything happen. These individuals are responsible for evaluating new compounds that their company may have synthesized de novo in the laboratory and patented, or created using the slower and more laborious scent-bar mixology of sniffing and sniffing and blending, trying to create the next new designer perfume to edge out the competition. Perfume design is complex and daunting because of the tens of thousands of odorant molecules available.
You can’t easily go to perfume school, for there aren’t many around. One is the famous Institut Supérieur International du Parfum in Versailles, founded in 1970 by perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain. To become a perfumer, not unlike a sommelier, is difficult and challenging. Even if you have the nose for it, it can easily take ten or fifteen years of work to truly excel in the field. Learning to distinguish the various scents singly and in blends is all part of the training, and the perfume business. Fine fragrance perfumers are an elite craft guild, members of the secretive, high-stakes fashion industry. It may cost a million dollars to bring a new fragrance, a single molecule, to market.
Some perfumers have worn their new perfume creations prerelease in taxicabs or while lingering at a shopping-center cosmetics and fragrance counter. What will be the reaction of the men and women who smell the new fragrance? Usually surveys and professional paid sniffers also contribute to the decisions in developing new perfumes. Other perfumers live with their new scents day and night, while others dream or previsualize them, proceeding as if they were conducting a symphony orchestra, directing and bringing in the right molecules for just the right part, and timing, of the performance. They constantly readjust their perfumes, like blending whiskeys or fine wines. Perfumery is a high art.
One feature idiosyncratic to the profession is the scent organ. Not a human nose, the traditional scent organ is a special tiered and curved wooden desk with many small niches. A perfumer sits in the middle, at the console of the organ, surrounded by hundreds of bottles and small vials of scent. They dip long, narrow, pointed strips of inert white filter paper into the vials of pure fragrances. They set them on wooden rails or in fan-shaped arrays in small holders to wait for their dry-down changes. They sniff each one immediately and take careful notes. They begin adding top, middle, and base notes into a first blend, a working draft of sorts. They wick up the blend, sniff, and let it rest. Rapidly, the top notes float off, followed by huskier molecules during the next hour or so. They keep sniffing their paper strips at intervals, thinking and recording their observations. They sniff again at the end of the day, and again early the next morning.
Creating a new perfume can take a day, many months, or even years. In the past, it was common to take three to seven years to perfect any new perfume. Famous perfumer Edmond Roudnitska, who died in 1996 at age ninety-one, created only seventeen perfumes in his seven-decade career. Today, a “rushed” perfume for a famous client might be created in as few as eight weeks.
A perhaps apocryphal myth surrounds the 1921 creation of Chanel No. 5 perfume (imbued with jasmine, rose, sandalwood, and vanilla) for fashion designer Coco Chanel. She reputedly picked number five in a series of test perfumes as a lucky number (perhaps an association with Cistus, a five-petaled rose, from her teen years at Aubazine, a convent orphanage), and from her lifelong fascination with mysticism. Chanel was also known to love the smell of soaps and fresh scents and kept herself scrupulously clean. Previous perfumes used citrus notes to achieve this freshness, but they did not last on the skin. Did an unknown Chanel assistant make a serendipitous mistake by adding a higher dose of aldehydes, themselves not used in earlier perfumes, or was it a conscious act by master perfumer Ernst Beaux? Perhaps we’ll never know.
Decorative modern perfume bottles
Every year a hundred or more new perfumes are launched commercially with great fanfare by European and American companies to the buying public. Adding to this buyer sensory overload, the older perfumes are “still in print,” and there are lots of them. Like fashionable clothes, perfumes come and go, in and out of style. A few champions have staying power, such as Chanel No. 5, and amazingly Jicky, from Guerlain, which has been in continuous production since 1889. The majority of perfumes, however, have a shorter half-life, given our short attention spans and fickle allegiances to our favorite brands. If you are shopping for a new perfume for you or your partner, study the mesmerizing and humorous accounts in Perfumes: the A–Z Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, who describe with wit and charm a mere one thousand eight hundred of the world’s most alluring scents.
The classic and highly successful perfumes for women include Angel, Après l’Ondée, Black, Bois de Violette, Boucheron, Homage, Mitsuoko, Rive Gauche, and the classic older perfume Shalimar. Among the best masculine scents are Azzaro pour Homme, Eau de Guerlain, New York, Pour Monsieur, and Timbuktu. Of course, it’s fun to sometimes mix things up. After all, there is nothing wrong with men wearing feminine-branded scents, and vice versa. Go ahead, live dangerously, get out of your perfume comfort zone.
Perfumes have evolved since the days they contained only natural substances. Today, most fine perfumes contain more than 90 percent synthetic chemicals, which makes economic sense when considering the extreme cost of some of raw materials. Orrisroot has sold for as much as $13,605 per pound. With the synthesis of coumarin in 1868, perfumery changed in a monumental way and never looked back. Vanillin, heliotropin, ionones (the smell of violets), and others soon followed. Synthetic chemicals leveled the playing field for perfume companies by adding rich scents that were easy to manufacture and far less expensive than purely natural ingredients. Citral, a common lemon-scented ingredient, can be had for only $12 for twenty-four pounds. Natural sandalwood oil still smells the best, but starting in 1935, a number of synthetic sandalwood scents (santalol and Javanol) hit the market. Similarly, the Himalayan musk deer and the civet cat, both endangered mammals, are no longer threatened in their homelands, at least not by the perfume industry. Numerous synthetic animal musks (musk Baur, musk ketone) followed, some, strangely enough, like musk Baur, the results of research on the high explosive TNT.
I’ve wondered why perfumers haven’t created fragrances that smell exactly like one type of flower, say a rose or lily of the valley. I’d buy them! Or why, when I smelled Queen of the Night, a commercial perfume, it was nothing like the actual floral scent of my beloved queen-of-the-night cactus (Peniocereus greggii), which unfurls its straplike petals but a few nights each year. I suppose that a “soliflores” (single-compound-dominated perfume blend) would be boring to most and wouldn’t have the same slow-release effects of the blended, abstract but sumptuous olfactory creations that we enjoy today.
Indeed, the rich combination of scents in modern perfumes play upon the synergistic mysteries of chemistry, the behavioral associations of memory, and the beauty of the human body—a coded, nonverbal language we all understand in our own way. But flowers also have been used as part of another secret language, and we will explore that next.