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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…