Scent and Subversion (40 page)

Immortelle
(or everasting flower, Helichrysum): A floral note that smells savory sweet. Immortelle is often described as smelling like a combination between ham and maple syrup.

Indole, indolic:
A molecule found in decomposing organic matter and feces, in lower concentrations, indole has a floral aspect. Many white flowers, including jasmine and orange blossom are described as indolic because of the disquieting, ripe, animalic, and almost excremental facet of their scents.

Ionones:
Violet is an expensive perfume to extract, so ionones, discovered in 1893, step in to provide the powdery-sweet aspect of the flower.

Isobutyl quinoline:
A synthetic perfume note used in chypre, leather, and woody perfumes. It provides dry, green, wood, leather, and tobacco aspects. Overdosed in Germaine Cellier’s Robert Piguet fragrance, Bandit.

Labdanum (Cistus):
The resin from the rockrose bush. Said to be the plant ingredient whose scent closest resembles ambergris.

Leather:
A perfume accord and category of perfume constructed from various notes, including birch tar, styrax, castoreum, and a variety of synthetic notes.

Limbic system:
A component of an ancient part of the brain that processes emotions, memories, and instinctual responses related to fear and sex, and contains the olfactory cortex, which receives and processes information from the olfactory bulb. When deployed to talk about perfume, it’s often used less in a scientific manner (although certainly scent, emotion, and memory are connected in the brain) than to discuss perfume’s power to effect deep, visceral, often memory-tinged, near-automatic responses in people.

Magnolia oil:
Extracted from the magnolia flower, its scent has a fresh, lemony, diluted rose scent with subtle fruit notes’ warmth in the drydown.

Maté absolute:
On its own, this green tea absolute has green, earthy, complex, smoky, tobacco qualities. In Bulgari’s Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée.

Methyl ionone:
Discovered in 1893, methyl ionone is a synthetic note that recalls the woody and orris aspects of the violet flower. Used in L’Origan and L’Heure Bleue.

Mimosa, cassie
(Acacia farnesiana):
The flowers of
A. farnesiana,
or cassie, yield an absolute that, according to Steffen Arctander, author of
Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin,
is a warm, powdery-spicy, herbaceous, and floral odor with a balsamic and cinnamon undertone. Amarige highlighted the sweet aspects of mimosa; in Caron’s Farnesiana, the more herbaceous, balsamic aspects.

Muguet:
French word for lily of the valley.

Musk:
Musk is produced by the musk deer and excreted by the male during mating season. Musk deer were killed almost to extinction for their valuable musk glands, which were dried, and whose musk “seeds” were removed and steeped in alcohol to create tinctures for perfume. The scent of real musk is warm, with depth and a dark animalic aroma. Many synthetics now can mimic musk scent, but one of the most superior musk synthetics, nitro-musks, which were in Chanel No. 5 and countless other vintages, has been banned due to toxicity concerns. Musk can also be substituted with plant ingredients including ambrette seed and angelica.

Myrrh:
A dried gum-resin from a number of closely related, small, thorny trees (genus
Commiphora)
. Woody and sweet, myrrh oil, made from steam-distilling the gum resin, is used in many Oriental perfume bases. See Opopanax, or sweet myrrh.

Narcissus:
An intoxicating green floral note.

Neroli:
The essential oil from steam-distilling the orange flowers from the inedible bitter orange tree, also known as the Seville orange,
Citrus aurantium.
Orange blossom comes from the same flowers, but its method of production, solvent extraction, creates a slightly different fragrance. Other fragrance materials can be obtained from this tree: petit grain (from the twigs and leaves) and bergamot from the rind/peel.

Note:
A term in perfumery borrowed from the world of music. A perfume note is essentially a musical metaphor for an ingredient (e.g., rose or civet). Three notes can form a unique scent impression that exceeds each individual note’s scent, resulting in an accord.

Oakmoss
(
Evernia prunastri
): A type of lichen growing on oak trees that is a crucial perfume note for chypre perfumes. In chypres, a mossy base contrasts with the sparkling, citrusy,
bergamot top note. Earthy, phenolic, woodsy, and, of course mossy, oakmoss has been severely regulated by the IFRA to the point that some perfumers and perfume experts believe that no true chypres can any longer be made.

Opopanax:
Also known as sweet myrrh, opopanax is an herb that grows up to three feet, with yellow flowers. A balsamic note, that is warm, sweet, and creamy, it also has bitter and smoky facets. Also spelled opoponax.

Oriental:
The Oriental category of perfume is distinguished by the use of balsamic resins, woody notes, and rich, sometimes sweet notes like amber, vanilla, and tonka. The Haarmann & Reimer guide divides Oriental into two types: fragrances that are structured around amber, and fragrances whose predominant notes are spicy.

Orris:
Usually when “iris” is mentioned in perfume notes, what’s actually being referred to is orris, the dried roots of the iris flower which are turned to “orris butter,” a prized (and expensive) ingredient in perfumery that creates a rich, woody, powdery effect that has worked wonders in fragrances like Jacques Fath’s Iris Gris (Grey Iris) and Chanel No. 19. The process of extracting orris is complicated, painstaking, and yields very little orris; hence, its high cost.

Osmanthus:
This sweet, apricot-faceted flower, also called “sweet olive” or “tea olive,” is used in perfumery and in some Chinese teas.

Oud/Agarwood:
Made from the resin of the aquilaria tree, which exudes the resins when it’s attacked by pathogens, this perfume note has a haunting, earthy, woody scent that has been the breakout perfume note in niche and mainstream scents alike for several years.

Ozonic:
A perfume accord that attempts to create the smell of fresh air after a thunderstorm. Big in the 1990s, and often paired with the Calone-produced oceanic accord (for example, in Cool Water).

Peau d’Espagne (Spanish leather):
A style of perfume popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that based its scent on the cured Spanish leather saddles that were once perfumed with spices and perfume oils. Psychologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) claimed in
Studies on the Psychology of Sex
that Peau d’Espagne perfumes were “often the favorite of sensuous persons,” and more mysteriously, that “Peau d’Espagne is of all perfumes that which most nearly approaches the odor of a woman’s skin.”

Perfume pyramid:
Unlike recipes in cookbooks, perfume pyramids are often a truncated, shorthand list of a perfume’s prominent notes and accords. (A complete perfume
formula can have upwards of 100 ingredients, whereas a perfume pyramid’s list of top, heart, and base notes tends to only list around 15 to 20.)

Petit grain:
The essential oil from the leaves and twigs of the
Citrus aurantium
bitter orange tree. It provides a bracing, herbaceous, green effect to fragrances.

Pimento:
Pimento essential oil is obtained by distillation from the dried, full-grown, unripe fruit of the
Pimenta officinalis
plant. Its scent is warm, with a touch of subdued spice, sweetness, and clove. Found in Poison and Opium.

Resins:
The term for the exudation from the bark of bushes and trees such as Tolu balsam, Peru balsam, and labdanum. Sometimes called “tears.”

Russian leather:
A leather accord in perfumes such as Cuir de Russie by L.T. Piver, Chanel, and others that re-creates the scent of animalic, leather hides tanned with birch tar, with the addition of soft balsamic and floral notes.

Sandalwood:
An oil extracted from the sandalwood tree once abundant in India and now more likely to be sourced from Australia, or synthesized. With a rich, buttery, warm and woody scent prized in perfumery. Found in Guerlain’s Samsara.

Sillage:
The French word for “trail” or “wake,” as in the mark a ship makes on the water that trails behind it. In perfume language, this describes how far a perfume travels after it’s put on the skin, and if it has minimal sillage, it can be described as a “skin scent.”

Skank:
Perfume slang for any scent that has an animalic or “dirty” aspect evoking unwashed bodies. The perfume world is indebted to “Miss March” (real name March Moore), perfume writer for PerfumePosse.com, for adding this most important—and humorous—perfume term to the lexicon in 2006. Jacques Guerlain once said that perfume “Should smell like the underside of my mistress,” and many twentieth-century perfumes complied, wrapping their pretty, more socially acceptable notes over ingredients with baser instincts—substances from an animals’ nether regions, spices redolent of human sweat, and flowers with excremental facets. Whether skank refers to “sex, and only sex” as Miss March argues, or also, as Perfume Posse’s Patty White adds philosophically, our relation to decay and a reminder that we’re going to die, perfume has had a cyclical relationship to skank. Perfumers in the 1950s embraced animal notes and “skank” perfumes, for example, while the clean scents of the 1990s repudiated it.

Soliflore:
A single-note-themed perfume that may include multiple notes, but whose predominant scent is structured around one floral note, such as lilac, rose, or lily of the valley. Used in contrast to bouquet florals and more-abstract compositions.

Styrax:
Styrax is an interesting note often used to create leather scents. A gum resin from the bark of a styrax tree, it imparts a leathery, smoky, balsamic (powdery-ambery) effect that perfumer Olivier Polge has said can give a chypre-like quality to perfumes.

Tiaré flower
(Gardenia tahitensis)
:
Tahiti’s national symbol, Tiaré is in the gardenia family, and is also known as Tahitian gardenia. Monoi perfume oil is made by soaking Tiaré petals in coconut oil.

Tolu balsam:
A balsamic resin from a South American tree. It has a creamy, vanillic, and cinnamon scent.

Tonka:
Tonka beans are from the seeds of the
Dipteryx odorata,
a legume tree. They have a powerful confectionary vanilla scent with hints of almond and cinnamon. Tonka beans contain a large amount of coumarin, the ingredient crucial to fougères, and they were once considered safe to use in the United States to flavor food and desserts.

Top note:
The lightest, most volatile molecules in a perfume composition, which is why they’re placed at the top of perfume pyramids. They include citrus, fruit, and aromatic notes.

Tuberose:
Buttery, tropical, with an almost rubbery facet with bubblegum sweetness, this white flower is a troublemaker in the world of perfumes. Although it can be dressed in the finest clothes and seem elegant (Frédéric Malle’s Carnal Flower is one of my favorite modern florals, with this “carnal” but supremely chic flower at its heart), its tawdry sexiness is also used to spectacular effect in Poison and Fracas. It is proof that perfumers can “push” certain aspects of the flower, whether syrupy sweetness (Fracas and Poison) or freshness (Carnal Flower). Something in tuberose’s DNA, however, keeps it from ever being an “innocent” flower.

Vetiver:
Steam-distilled from the roots of the tall grass native to Haiti. Woody, peppery, earthy, dusty, sometimes lemony, vetiver is an earthy, comforting scent. In the nineteenth century, no fashionable Creole lady would have been without dried vetiver roots or vetiver sachets in her drawers.

Violet leaf:
In contrast to the violet flower, which is sweet, violet leaf offers a green aspect to fragrances. Violet leaf absolute smells round, fresh, pulpy, wet, and slightly fruity-floral.

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