Authors: Mandy Aftel

Essence and Alchemy (19 page)

BOOK: Essence and Alchemy

13.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

My own method of composition is much more intuitive and evolutionary. As in cooking, I like to be able to “taste” and adjust as I go. In fact, when I design a custom perfume for a client, we begin by selecting potential ingredients in a process much like going to the market and choosing whatever produce seems freshest and most appealing. Beginning with the top notes and working my way down to the earthy base notes, I have the client sample the scents directly, either straight from the bottle or, for the more intense scents, on a blotter.

Alchemical processes, from the
Mutus liber,
1677

I smell each essence before I present it to the client, to reimmerse myself in the world of scent and to remind myself of the nuances of nature's palate. I jot down the names of the essences that inspire intense attraction; ambivalence has no place here. I look for a pattern of likes and dislikes, using it to guide me as to which additional essences to present and which to avoid. For example, to someone who really likes Moroccan rose, I will also present Bulgarian and Egyptian rose. If she didn't like labdanum, I'd stay away from oakmoss. I have more than two hundred essences in my collection, but I usually limit the number we sample so that olfactory fatigue doesn't set in, and we pause from time to time to inhale from my wool scarf.

When we have finished with the top notes, I present the favorites again, this time ranking them from one to five according to the degree of passion they evoke. We repeat this process with the five favorite middle notes and then the five favorite base notes, until we have a ranked list of choices based on the customer's actual olfactory experience and aesthetic. Usually I am able to create a perfume that uses at least two of her favorite essences in each chord; the rest depends upon how difficult or strong are the personalities of these favorites.

The next step is trickier: to narrow the range of potential ingredients to arrive at an original creation, harmonious but exciting. On a given day, a perfumer might be inspired by a new crop of orange blossoms or a vintage patchouli. But why, in addition, the ambergris of the whale, the anal secretions of the civet cat, the oils of some flowers and the leaves of others?

Commercial perfumers tend to categorize perfumes in families, and you will stumble over the same terms repeatedly if you read any of the contemporary literature of perfume. The chief groupings are floral, Oriental, chypre, green, and citrus.

Florals,
characterized by the dominance of rose and jasmine backed by ylang ylang and tuberose, are exemplified by ChloÃ©, Giorgio,
Joy, Fracas, White Shoulders, and Eternity. Within the florals are three major subgroups:
green
(a woody-powdery base with a green top of grasses and leaves, often including lavender, basil, chamomile, or galbanum),
fresh
(citrus top notes), and
ambery
(a sweet, powdery, amber base and a fruity and/or spicy top).

Orientals
include the heaviest and some of the oldest perfumes available today. They are composed of the most intense spices, coupled with resins and exotic flowers.
Ambery
Orientals, such as Obsession, Angel, Shalimar, and Jicky, have a citrus top with an amber or vanilla base.
Spicy
Orientals have a dry, woody base with a spicy top made from clove, ginger, cardamom, coriander, and/or pepper, as in Opium, Youth Dew, and Bal a Versailles.

Chypres
are based on the contrast between bergamot and oakmoss and often include patchouli, with generous top notes of citrus. Also included in this family are Annick Goutal's Eau D'Hadrian, Private Collection, Paloma Picasso, Aromatics Elixir, Cristalle, and Mitsouko.

Green
scents are sharper than the florals, more outdoorsy and sporty, calling to mind meadows, green grasses, and leaves. The dominant notes include pine, juniper, and fir, blended with herbs like basil, sage, and rosemary.

Citrus
blends date to the earliest eaux de cologne. They are made from tangerine, orange, lemon, grapefruit, and bergamot, with a sprinkling of light herbs.

It is impossible to avoid thinking in categories when you compose perfume; indeed, it is quite helpful to do so. When composing, I find it more useful, however, to think in categories of the essences themselves, based on their common aromatic properties, and I use a wider range of classification to do so:

CLASSIFICATION OF FRAGRANCE GROUPS

(Top notes appear in roman, middle notes are italicized, and base notes are in small caps.)

Citrus	bergamot, grapefruit, lime
Orange	bitter orange, blood orange, eau de brouts, mandarin, neroli, orange flower absolute, petitgrain, sweet orange, tangerine
Lemon	lemon, lemongrass, lemon verbena, litsea cubeba, melissa
Spicy	allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, clove absolute, coriander, ginger, ginger absolute , juniper, nutmeg, nutmeg absolute , black and green pepper, black pepper absolute
Herbal	ARMOISE, bay, clary sage , CLARY SAGE CONCRETE, lavender, lavender absolute , LAVENDER CONCRETE, marjoram, oregano, rosemary, thyme, wormwood
Anise	anise, basil , fennel, tarragon, TARRAGON ABSOLUTE
Mint	pennyroyal, peppermint, spearmint, wintergreen
Floral	boronia, carnation, CASSIE, champa, helichrysum, jasmine absolute, jasmine concrete, jonquil, kewda, linden blossom, magnolia , mimosa, orris, osmantbus, tuberose, violet leaf, ylang ylang, ylang ylang concrete
Rose	Bulgarian, Egyptian, Indian, Moroccan, Russian, and Turkish rose; geranium; palmarosa; rose concrete; rose geranium
Woody	bois de rose, cedarwood, cypress, fir, guaiacwood, pine, SANDALWOOD
Foresty	BLACK SPRUCE ABSOLUTE, FIR ABSOLUTE, WHITE SPRUCE ABSOLUTE
Earthy	ANGELICA, carrot seed, FLOUVE, LABDANUM, lovage, OAKMOSS, PATCHOULI, VETIVER
Edible	BLACK TEA, cilantro, COCOA, coffee , COGNAC, GREEN TEA, Roman chamomile , VANILLA
Balsamic	BENZOIN, COPAIBA, PERU BALSAM, styrax , TOLU BALSAM, TONKA
Resinous	FRANKINCENSE, GALBANUM, MYRRH, OPOPONAX
Animal	AMBRETTE, CIVET, COSTUS, DEERTONGUE, HAY, TOBACCO

Some essences, like tagetes, davana, cabreuva, blue chamomile, and beeswax, are so complex or unusual that they are difficult to categorize. They usually possess such strong odor intensity that they evoke only their own odor.

Notice that the citrus and mint families are all top notes. The floral and rose families are mostly middle notes. The foresty, resinous, and animal families are all base notes. The orange, spicy, and lemon families are a mixture of top and middle notes. Herbal, edible, anise, earthy, and woody span all three notes. This is useful to know when, say, you need a lemon note in the middle of a blend or are looking for a woody note as a top.

But how do you know when you need a lemon note in the middle or a woody note on top? How, in other words, do you learn to compose perfume?

Once I have decided to build an essence around one or two scents (the client's favorites or my own selections), my next consideration is how the scents will interact with those I have already chosen. Like the cook who can picture in his head the bright orange of the butternut squash highlighted by the gray-green of the sage leaves and the ivory of the pasta, and can savor in anticipation how the succulence of the squash will be brought out by the pungency of the herb and the bland nuttiness of the starch, the experienced perfumer develops the capacity to conceive how different odors will work together, his imagination based on a thorough knowledge of the idiosyncratic nature of the individual ingredients.

A simple way to construct a perfume is by building each chord upon a favorite ingredient. You can form chords around these dominant notes, devoting half the volume of each to the dominant note and dividing the other half evenly between two supporting ingredients. The relegation of roles defines the ratio of the blend.

If you want to play it safe, you can compose each chord within the confines of a given fragrance family. For example, if your dominant base note is vanilla, you can complement it with tolu balsam and benzoin. This will make a very vanilla-y base chord that will appeal to most people. The overall effect of such chords is subtle, but not necessarily without depth. As the late-nineteenth-century perfume and cosmetic historian Arnold Cooley observed, “Odors that produce
⁹³similar or allied effects, coalesce or enforce each other; and in some cases, these effects so blend as to lose their individual distinctness, and to affect the sense of smell with the same apparent unity of perception as a simple odor; just as notes of an harmonic chord affect an ordinary ear, not singly but as one sound.”

Or you can make riskier choices, putting together essences that might fight like cats and dogs but also might couple passionately, like two intense people. With risky choices, the blend you're building will become either dramatically better or dramatically worseâthere will be no middle ground. Again, the perfumer's attention should not be on creating something merely beautiful so much as on bringing out unexpected qualities with the addition of new ingredients to those she has already chosen. For example, patchouli does wonderful things
to rose, deepening and layering it so that it gives the impression of petals opening and unfurling infinitely. Wormwood has a similarly spectacular effect upon tuberose, and blond tobacco on lime.

Here is a list of essences and other scents with which they marry well:

ANGELICA ROOT:
clary sage
, OAKMOSS, PATCHOULI, VETIVER

Basil
: bergamot,
clary sage
, grapefruit

BENZOIN: OAKMOSS, PERU BALSAM,
styrax

Bois de rose: coriander,
geranium,
OLIBANUM, SANDALWOOD, tangerine, VETIVER

Boronia:
bergamot, bitter orange,
clary sage
, COSTUS, SANDALWOOD

Cabreuva:
rose
, SANDALWOOD

Cardamom: bergamot, LABDANUM, OLIBANUM,
ylang ylang

Chamomile, Roman
: bergamot,
clary sage, jasmine
, LABDANUM,
neroli,
OAKMOSS

Champa:
grapefruit, LAVENDER CONCRETE, lime, OAKMOSS, SANDALWOOD

Clary sage
: cardamom, cedarwood,
geranium
, LABDANUM, lavender, SANDALWOOD

COGNAC: AMBRETTE, bergamot,
clary sage
, coriander, GALBANUM, lavender,
ylang ylang

Coriander: bergamot, black pepper, cardamom,
clary sage, jasmine,
nutmeg

COSTUS: OAKMOSS, OPOPONAX, PATCHOULI

Fir: citruses, juniper berry, LABDANUM, OAKMOSS, PATCHOULI, rosemary

Geranium
: bergamot, clove,
jasmine
, lime,
neroli
, orange, PATCHOULI,
rose
, SANDALWOOD

Ginger: bois de rose, cedarwood, coriander,
neroli, rose

Grapefruit, pink:
basil
, cedarwood, lavender,
ylang ylang

Guaiacwood
: OAKMOSS,
orris, rose

Juniper berry: BENZOIN, LABDANUM,
lovage
, OAKMOSS

LABDANUM: bergamot,
clary sage, lavender absolute
, OAKMOSS, OPOPONAX

Lavender absolute: clary sage
, LABDANUM, OAKMOSS, PATCHOULI, pine, VETIVER

Litsea cubeba
: lavender, petitgrain, rosemary

Nutmeg: coriander, GALBANUM, OLIBANUM, black pepper

OAKMOSS: BENZOIN,
lavender absolute,
VANILLA,
violet leaf

PATCHOULI: cedarwood,
clary sage, clove,
LABDANUM, lavender,
rose
, VETIVER

Spearmint:
basil
, grapefruit,
jasmine,
VETIVER

Tarragon: ANGELICA ROOT,
clary sage
, fir, GALBANUM, juniper, lavender, lime, OAKMOSS, bois de rose

TOBACCO, BLOND: bergamot,
clary sage
, COSTUS, LABDANUM,
orange flower absolute
, SANDALWOOD, VETIVER

Tuberose: neroli,
black pepper, VANILLA, wormwood

VETIVER:
clary sage
, lavender, OAKMOSS, SANDALWOOD

Threesomes (dominant note first):

LABDANUM, PATCHOULI, bergamot

OAKMOSS, VANILLA,
tuberose

Ylang ylang,
black pepper, COGNAC

BLACK SPRUCE ABSOLUTE, COSTUS, PERU BALSAM

SANDALWOOD, OLIBANUM, cinnamon

And remember:

Rose, jasmine
, and bergamot blend with everything. VANILLA, bitter orange, lime, tangerine, and pink grapefruit go with almost everything.

Perhaps because I am a counselor as well as a perfumer, I tend to
see
analogies between the dynamics of personality and the dynamics of working with aromatic materials. I think of the essences as having personalitiesâsome difficult, others congenial, some attractive but without depth, others turgid and tenacious. Some ingredients have to be wrestled into submission before they will surrender themselves to the common good. Others need to be coaxed drop by drop until a flawless symbiosis is achieved.

Pharmacist's boy compounding a perfume, 1512

There are some essences that I think of as particularly hard to get along with but worth the effort for the unmistakable shapeliness and texture they contribute to a fragrance. Often from exotic substancesâambrette seed, civet, wormwood, champa, patchouli, ginger, ambergris, cognac, muskâthey reward the perfumer's imagination as no other oils can. Not only do they add their own pronounced scent to a fragrance, they also interact unpredictably with the other ingredients. They are a risk, with the power to utterly transform or destroy a blend.

These essences can function as
accessory notes
, to use the term coined by Jean Carles. An accessory note is a head, heart, or base note that, by virtue of its character and intensity, cannot fit into a chord but can add something definitive to a fragrance, giving it originality, the way a scarf or belt can transform an outfit into a striking and unique fashion statement. Like anchovies used in cooking, accessory notes lend a depth and pungency to the composition, but they need not dominate itâindeed, the unsuspecting may not even know that they are there.

NATURAL ESSENCES, CLASSIFIED BY VOLATILITY