Ingredients
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Plant Names – Books
On my birthday I received Perfumed Botany by Jean-Claude Ellena and a book on Plant Words by Kew. I am looking forward to reading them. I also bought the book by Dominique Roques In Search of Perfumes, and the book Nose Dive by Harold McGee. I particularly like to look up words and Latin names – it is good to know for example, the Latin name for the garden privet, Ligustrum ovalifolium, was the inspiration for one of the names of the powerful, green scented raw material 2,4-dimethylcyclohex-3-ene-1-carbaldehyde (CAS no: 68039-49-6). The Summer of 2024 was particularly good for smelling the privet flower, too, which has a green and watery…
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Lactonic Scents
peach; coconut; milky; nutty (various); osmanthus; fig; musk; jasmine; tuberose; solar; waxy. I’m smelling very “lactonic” today! This was a question asked on Bluesky which set me thinking. What makes a “lactonic” note or perfume? Initially, perfumes made of the notes of peach and coconut come to mind, gamma decalactone, gamma undecalactone, gamma nonalactone.Delve into this a little more, lactones are often described as “milky”. To make an osmanthus perfume, or a tuberose, one would use lactones too. Then as I put my perfumes on today, I thought, well, quite a few musks are lactones (e.g. cyclopentadecanolide, and ambrettolide), and fig notes can be made using gamma octalactone, so I…
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Rosa damascena trigintipetala
The pink shrub roses used to make rose oil and rose absolute for perfumery are from two main varieties, the Centifolia rose, and the Damask rose, or Rosa damascena trigintipetala. These grow in Bulgaria, Turkey and Morocco, and I was lucky enough to visit the rose growing areas in El Kelaa des M’Gouna, Morocco, in 1997. There, the rose bushes are actually the side crop, used as hedges to assist and protect the wheat that is also being grown. The town of El Kelaa and nearby growing areas are part of a large oasis in the Sahara Desert. This week I had cause to look again at my journal from…