The My Gardenia project

Well, it's finally finished. And it worked!!! Yay yay yay!!!!!!
It's been a 2 year project of experimentation and fails....it all started a few years ago after my one and only supplier for natural Gardenia absolute stopped making the stuff...which meant that one of my best selling perfumes was suddenly missing it's main ingredient!
After searching for some time, and being told time after time that no one out there was making it any more because all of the big perfume companies were now using artificial gardenia fragrance notes as they were easier to use and cheaper,  I realized the only way I was going to get any natural Gardenia was to make it myself!
So I dug out some of my antique perfumery books and started to experiment with the traditional technique of "enfleurage". My boyfriend at the time lives out in the hills inland from Byron Bay, and had a number of large gardenia bushes on his property, so I had lots of blossoms to experiment with.
Enfleurage is a technique that used to be used to extract delicate floral fragrances from delicate flowers that could not be distilled. Such as rose and jasmine, and also gardenia. You are basically soaking the flowers in or on a base oil or fat to let the scent soak into it, and changing the spent flowers for new ones over and over again until the base you are using is saturated with the scent. Sounds simple huh? The first technique I tried was useing fluid oil. This was incredibly tricky as it turned out. You have to soak the fresh flowers in oil for a certain amount of time, and keep swapping them for new flowers when the old ones start to wilt. The first problem I ran into is that the perfume manuals I had were from France. And Australia is a LOT hotter. So the first batches I made, leaving the flowers in for the recommended time, let to a brown cloudy fermented MESS instead of the silky soft perfumed oil I was hoping for! We threw that lot out, and started again, keeping the bottles in a cool shady spot inside the house and changing the flowers more and more frequently....Now the Gardenia plants only flower for a short time, so it was a real run against time, with batch after batch fermenting just when it had been recharged for the 10th or so time! And it looked as if the project was going to fail...But we finally managed to work out the timing and we ended up with a small amount of softly sweet floral Gardenia scented oil just as the last flowers blossomed... it is lovely stuff, but not really strong enough to be a perfume in it's own right...but it makes a beautiful body oil!
This year I was determined to try again, this time using a different technique. This time I decided to use a more traditional approach using a solid oil so the flowers would have less chance of turning into a fermented mess. Traditionally, they used to use lard and other animal fats, but I thought I could improve on this and find a nice botanical alternative, so I made up batches of macadamia oil, mango butter and various botanical waxes to what I thought would be a good consistency. I started right at the beginning of the gardenia flowering season this time, and soon had every surface covered with containers coated with solid oil and wax blends, full of white fragrant gardenia flowers. And for the next weeks it was a constant job of collecting the flowers in the morning and evening (trying to avoid the jumping ants

that seem to love to live at the base of the plants and which seem to rejoice in finding interesting places to bite you while you are reaching for those last high up blossoms at the top of the bush!), changing the wilted flowers for fresh ones and keeping an eye on the process. The trouble with fresh flowers is that they contain lots of water. And water provides a wonderful environment for mold. So we realized pretty quickly (and after tossing out a number of batches) that we needed to provide enough air circulation around the containers to stop this from happening, but not so much that the scent from the gardenias would evaporate instead of soaking into the oil and wax layers... I changed layer after layer of old flowers for new, worrying that the scent wouldn't be strong enough before I ran out of flowers as the season came to an end. I can remember sitting in the workshop and holding up a container to a friend who'd wandered in and asking "Does this smell strong enough?". He answered "honey, you can smell it from out on the street! The whole workshop smells of Gardenia!"

In the end, all the hard work paid off. It really and truly actually worked! Deep heady sultry honest to goodness Gardenia in a solid base! So the next step was melting all the individual batches down together, adding more wax to make it solid enough to package and use, and adding the other essential oils from my original "My Gardenia" recipe to turn it into an actual perfume!
The Gardenia enfleurage makes a wonderful base...but I added some green light topnotes and a musky wood base to re-create the feeling of the fresh flowers on the plant... while keeping the Gardenia as dominant as possible to basically recreate the feeling of sitting  amongst the Gardenia bushes at dusk when the scent it strongest.....
And now on my shelf there is a pile of beautiful tiny little jars of exquisite one of a kind truly authentic "My Gardenia" perfume pots!

Want to know what it smells like?

Go to my store

Adventures in Gardenia Enfleurage

Gardenia Macadamia oil Enfleurage

One of my experimental projects this year was in the making of Gardenia Enfluerage. As some of you know, a few years back I managed to track down a small amount of real Gardenia absolute, and made a small batch of a perfume I called "My Gardenia". Which sold out. And to my horror, the supply I had for the absolute dried up and there has been no more to be found ever since!
And I was living out in the bush in Nimbin, norther NSW Australia near a rather large crop of organic gardenias...
So I thought I'd have a go at seeing if I could actually extract the scent myself.
And not wanting to muck around with toxic solvents out in the bush, I decided to try "Enfleurage".
This technique was developed in France a century or so ago, and it involves covering glass plates with a solid oil or fat and laying the petals on them over and over again...each time waiting for up to 24 hours till the scent from the flowers has infused into the fat, and then replacing them with new flowers until the fat has become thoroughly saturated with scent.

gardenia coconut enfleurage

Now the problems I faced were many fold. For starters the Gardenia flowers needed to be picked at exactly the right time of day when the scent was strongest. I started off picking them in the morning, but quickly realized the scent was far stronger in the evening. Which meant making sure I was home at the right time to be able to pick them before it got too dark to see both the flowers and any stray snakes that might be slithering around (remember this was right out in the Australian bush). Then it rained and there was no point picking wet flowers as you need them to be as dry as possible while still young and fresh. Then I found out that the bushes were growing right over the nest of a particularly unfriendly form of jumping ant. But eventually, dressed in jeans tucked into sturdy hiking boots and a long sleeved shirt I managed to harvest enough flowers for the first run (with only a small number of ant bites).
Back in the mountain chalet, I hit the next hurdles. Australia is hot in summer. Very hot. And where I was living there was no air conditioning. So any of the fats I tried simply melted off the glass within about 15 minutes.
So I decided to simply immerse the flowers in the melted oil in jars...
Which worked...but I discovered after the first 4 batches failed that I had to immensely careful about timing. If the flowers were left in the oil for too long, first the water content would begin to seep into the oil, and then the whole melange would begin to ferment in the heat. the french instructions of 24 hours were definitely too long!
It was more like a couple of hours with the jars being left in a nice cool spot of the stone floor!
The first batch I did was in coconut. Which worked...but the smell of the coconut was very strong and tended to over power the gentle delicate gardenia, and I was trying to get a strong pure gardenia note all of it's own for my perfume....
So I ended up using a beautiful scentless locally produced macadamia oil which is light and beautiful, plus being environmentally friendly as it's produced in the same hills.
I ran into the same scent strength versus fermentation timing problem over and over....the oil would go from a lovely clear jar full of glowing white flowers dancing in suspension...to a cloudy yellow tinged mess with a distinct fruity smell overpowering the delicate floral gardenia. Which was particularly heart breaking if it was the 4th of 5th run of new petals in a jar.
In the end I ended up with a mere half 500mls of perfect clear delicately scented Gardenia oil! About half of which I have decided to share with my perfumer friends...the other half will be further transformed into "My Gardenia" perfume oil.
So if you'd like to have your own share in this olfactory adventure:

click to buy some Gardenia Enfleurage

Musings on Gardenia

I think I've had more requests for a natural Gardenia scent than for anything else over the years...and up until now I've had to say "It can't be done".
Gardenia is one of those flowers that seems to hold power over those that love it....for me, it is the smell that always evokes meomories of my grandmothers garden. My grandmother had an amzingly green thumb, and a deep love of scented flowers. And she had gardenias growing all the way along one of the paths in her garden....
I can remember as a kid, coming home from somewhere and walking along this path one evening, brushing cobwebs out of my face as I walked (it being summer and Australia and all), and being totally mesmerized by the scent of the gardenias. I had been out in the garden that morning, and hadn't really noticed that much of a scent coming from these white flowers with their elegant dark green leaves...but now suddenly, the falling darkseemed to have brought them to life, like some kind of magical spell that awakened only at dusk!
It's such an amazing scent, deep, fresh, tangy, musky and with something else that is totally mysterious there in the background as well. The Gardenia flower has a potent hypnotic magic about it that is impossible to copy.
There are many gardenia perfumes on the market, and each of them focuses on a different aspect of this magic. But none (to my nose anyway) come anywhere near the real thing. (Of course, few, if any of them actually contain real gardenia, so I suppose it's not really that surprising)...Then, a few months ago, I got hold of some real Gardenia absolute from a lovely supplier in Europe. It takes literally thousands of kilos of Gardenia petals to create just one kilo of Gardenia absolute. And since most perfume companies are happy to use artificial Gardenia scents made from chemicals that mimic it's mysterious and magical scent, the traditional production of this ingredient had just withered away....
But finally, it's being made again!
The absolute itself arrived and I excitedly opened the bottle:
The first impression was dissapointing. It's undeniably Gardenia, but somethow in the extraction process, the deep,  sexy, sultry and musky flower scent comes through, but the magical fresh top notes that make sniffing a freshly picked gardenia flower so mesmerizing, went astray.
I put it on the backshelf for a while, and then (after yet another request for a Gardenia perfume...) I pulled it back out and set out to recreate the elusive top notes I remembered so well from my Grandmothers garden....
I experimented with a number of related flowers, and discovered that many of the white flowers have similar notes to them! Mother Nature seems to marry the creamy white colur in nature to specific scent notes, so by carefully adding just touches of a variety of these, plus some fresh leafy green notes to give the feeling of that newly picked fresheness you get from the crushed stem and leaves and oh my goodness, there it was, the scent I so remembered from early dew covered mornings in my grandmothers garden in Australia....
My mother was the first to try it...she's an avid Gardenia lover with a very accute sense of smell and one of my hardest critics...I sprayed some on her wrist when she popped by that afternoon without telling her what it was and "Oh my, Gardenia! How beautiful!"
The only problem was that the scent faded quickly, just like the natural scent of the flowers will once you bring them indoors....
So from there I spent some further months finding a gentle base note that would hold and extend the glorious fragrance without distracting from the gardenia accord itself....
Have I managed?
Smell for yourself and find out!

I'm giving away a free deluxe mini spray sample of "My Gardenia" with all perfume orders this month (excluding sample collections, but I will add a normal size sample if you ask me nicely and order at least 4 other samples!)