Natural Isolates chapter one

"Playing with the Dark Side"

Well, I finally got hold of a collection of natural isolates to play with...
(For those of you not in the "know" , natural isolates are the current buzz word amongst botanical /natural perfumes. They are chemicals that have been "isolated" from natural sources, usually useing fractional distilation. Because of their natural origins, these fragrance chemicals are being added to the pallette of many natural perfumes, but some feel that since they are actually isolated chemicals, rather than complex scented simple extractions such as essential oils and tinctures made directly from the plants, that they are no longer "natural" as such. For me they fall into a grey area that I haven't made up my mind about yet, hence my following musings.)
For days, I circled around them, unscrewing the lids and sniffing them suspiciously...
They make me nervous...
Essential oils I understand deeply. I know the herbs and the fruits they come from, their effect on the human body, how much I can use safely, what they do...they are my freinds and my playmates, beloved for so many years that they have become as familiar to me as the food I eat.
But these babies in their sterile little bottles, with strange chemical names i forget as soon as I have read them, are completely unknown. Wierd strangers in my happy friendly workshop full of dried herbs and tree resins.
How do I use them? What will they do to me if I spill them all over the workbench and the workshop fills with their fumes?
I go searching on the Internet, and all I can find is guidelines for the safe dilution percentages in an actual skin contact blend. Nothing more. And it reminds why I've shied away from artificial perfume ingredients for so many years...(beyond my disdain and repulsion by the actual smell of so many of them of course).

This little group of isolates form a pallette of singular scents.
Nothing as unpleasant as some of the artificial blends I have encountered, but they are very different to the essential oils and absolutes I am used to. they seem almost one dimensional, and totally missing the complexity of my usual ingredients.

Some of them are very familiar....the lollies of my childhood were obviously flavoured by "citral" and "ethyl decadionate"...and the bright purple grape flavoured bubble gum we used to beg off American Gi's from the army base next to our school was obviously given it's flourescant ultra grape flavour with the help of "methyl anthranilate".
Others are completely alien and slightly repulsive to my nose, such as "phenyl ethyl alcohol" which to me just smells like plastic, and "bucco leaf" which isn't a leaf, and is one of the notes I have smelt in many noxious plants that to me just sends warning bells of "don't touch!" and "hazardous for consumption" all over the place....

Some again are obvious in their origin. "Eugenol" is the baby cousin of All spice and Cloves and probably an unobtrusive replacemnt for them if you want a weaker, less obvious spice note...and "methyl cinnamate" is actually a weak cinnamon smelling thing.
But I still don't see the reason not to use the real spices in the first place.
If I want to create a perfume that calls up the poison rings of the Italian Gibraldi family, I might find a use for the bitter almond touch of "benzaldehyde".But so far, only 3 of these new toys really tempt me to any kind of olfactory experimentation:
And of course, they are fruit notes. The only family of accords I have found missing in my extensive natural pallette have been fruity notes. I crave juicey strawberries, succulent grapes and sexy figs so much....
and here I see possibilities!

"Raspberry ketone" offers the warm deep note in the base of a fresh raspberry...it lacks the freshness and the juicy citrus aspect of the real fruit, but it is a warm fruity note that you can't find amongst the freely available citruses which form the only freely available fruit essential oils you can get.
"Butyl butyrate"smells of over ripe bananas to me, which gives me all kind of wild ideas of wierd and wonderful blends I may be able to create...
But so far, my cherished favourite amongst the bunch is "Strawberry fuarnone".
This baby to me speaks of caramelized strawberries.You know, the sticky stuff you end up with when you cook strawberry jam on the stove too long and the sugar caramelizes and the whole thing ends up as a rock hard lump at the bottom of the pan, enticing you to chew on it with it's sweet warm toffee smell.....
OK, so there's none of the depth and layers here that you get with strawberry jam of course, but there's enough of the warm caramel edge with a touch of fruitiness to tempt me....
So following my noses inspiriation, i set out to create jam notes, sweet, sugary and deep....
I sloshed around with some flowers and cirtus touches, and lo and behold, a very respectable apricot/peach jam accord appeared in a little bottle of sherry coloured liquid!

What made me uneasy working with it though, was that I had to literally dilute the fuck out of it to get it to a point where it didn't dominate the scent completely. And it's tenacity on the skin was a bit daunting too.
I can see why this is a good thing for conventional perfumers, but for me, it's very indestructability and intensity make me wary of it's actual biological effect on the body, both for those wearing perfumes and for the perfumer working with them.

After a few weeks playing with these things, I feel....well, a bit dirty.
And it feels heady, as if I had been dabbling in forbidden fruits, drinking strong liqour laced with a coctail of heroin and speed instead of my usual organic wine, or even an honest scotch whiskey!

My workshop smells of strange, intense things, no longer just my known and trusted friends, but wierdly intense and fluorescant things.
Will I use them in my perfumes? I don't know.....
I'm tempted for sure.....but will my soul ever be the same?
Will I lose myself down the road of so many perfumers, seeking the cheap thrill of new and intense olfactory effects and end up drowning in the cheap, the artifical world of conventional perfume chemistry...
Or will I find a way to dabble just occasionaly...and give in to the drugged visions of an Ultraviolet Cheshire Cat perfume, a Grape flavoured Grin hovering over a shimmering transparent body?

I'll keep you all posted.......

The Rebirth of Natural Perfumery

Our sense of smell is more strongly tied to our emotions than any of our other senses. Smells can evoke crystal clear memories too, like vanilla bringing back the scent of a grandmother baking a favourite cake, or the smokey smell of frankincense the deeply moving feeling of a spiritual ceremony...
Scent has been used for thousands of years to evoke special feelings in us...and the earliest from of perfumery was probably incense, burnt in spiritual ceremonies everywhere from Egyptian temples to North American Indian Sweat lodges to invoke a feeling of religious and spiritual awe and connectedness with tree resins and herbs burned to honour the Gods....

Body perfumes made from plant extracts have also been made for thousands of years....scented oils, hair unguents, waxy cones worn atop of ones head in Egytian high society parties where they slowly melted and spread spread their perfumes through the elaborate wigs they wore...
European perfumery deeloped realtively late in the picture, and took it's inspiration from the far older arabian scent traditions in the wake of the silk and spice trade.

Perfumers in Italy and France began to develop new ways of scenting both the body and the clothing worn by the European Aristocracy, and personalized perfumes developed by the better known perfumers became a much wanted status symbol.
These perfumes, scented leather gloves and pomanders made from exotic and precious ingredients such as true musk pods from the infamous musk ox, exquisite jasmine absolute painstakingly extracted from acres of jasmine flowers etc,  were rather expensive, and really only obtainable by the rich gentry...and as we came closer to our current day, the growth of modern chemistry began to give perfumers cheaper substances to play with.And with these cheap ingredients, and the invention of mechanized packaging and production methods, perfumery slowly became the realm of chemists and factory owners.
Perfume became a everyday item in every suburban household and the wholesale marketing of brand name perfume as a status symbol for everyone had begun.
With time though, people began to realize that a lot of the modern perfumes had sacrificed the magic that traditional perfumes had had, for the sake of a quick profit.

The buzz notes in perfumery became intensity, innovation and above all: price.
The main focus with a new perfume launch nowadays, is what celebrity it will be associated with.
I've seen numerous conventional perfume briefs, and the actual cost of the perfume itse;f is always the smallest part of the budget. Most of the money you pay for even the most expensive french perfumes, goes into packaging design, worldwide advertising campaigns! You'd be lucky to find $5 has been spent on the actual perfume itself!

And then Aromatherapy was born and began to breath a new lease of life into the fast paced plastic world of modern perfumery.

I had first bought essential oils in a conventional chemist in Germany around 1980...natural ingredients never went out of style in German, and conventional chemists still stocked a variety of herbal products and at the time, a limited number of essential oils, such as peppermint and rosemary. But it wasn't until some years later that the term "Aromatherapy" first appeared, along with a much wider range of essential oils.
The first literature on aromatherapy that I ever read was put out by a German company called "Primavera". It was a slim pamphlet listing their oils and the various effects on Mind and Body of each of them. I was fascinated! And spent all of my spare cash on them! I soon began to find other books on Aromatherapy,  and Tisserand and others began to do some serious research nto the subject, which has led to such a wealth of literature on the subject....

From there, Aromatherapy has grown to the point that you can find essential oils in every small town the world over...and increasingly, commericaly available scented products use the popularity of Aromatherapy in their own marketing. (Sometimes they even really use some percentage of actual essential oils in their formulations too!)

This rebirth of the popularity of natural scent ingredients has also led to the rebirth of Natural Perfumery.
Like myself, a small but growing number of independent perfumers started to experiement with the these newly available essential oils, and discovered that they offered a clarity, depth, complexity and beauty that simply wasn't there for them in modern perfumes.

I started to research ancient perfume recipes from all over the world, and looking for the herbs, resins and extracts mentioned in them as I travelled around the world.
And 20 years later, I now have a workshop full of all those lovely ingredients mentioned in the old texts and stories...

And people love them.
Conventional perfumers though will still poo poo this modern rebirth of the idea of useing natural ingredients...I have had countless perfumers tell me that it is impossible to make a great natural perfume...

Personally, I don't really care. My customers seem to disagree, and to my great amusement, the general publics love of Aromatherapy has forced more and more conventional perfumers to scrabble to keep up and start producing their own version of natural scents...
Problem is of course, they simply don't have the know how. Creating perfumes out of traditional natural ingredients isn't really part of a conventional perfumers training, where the focus is far more on chemistry and building notes out of individual chemicals...
And their profit margins lead them to fudge and even lie blatantly about the ingredients they are actually useing.
Which has lead to even health food stores stocking such brands such as "Pacifica" which advertises their "natural" tropical fruit scented wares at prices which real natural perfumes of course cannot compete with....
Then you have the inspired marketing of DKNY's "Pure"...."One drop of Vanilla" supposedly from some poor African village....
What about the rest of the thousands of drops of perfume in the bottle? What's it made of??

Sigh...anyway, getting back to the reality of naturals, and my delightfully messy workshop full of whole jars of REAL vanilla pods, frankincense resin from Omani trees, Essential oils from every possible flower and herb...
THIS is real natural perfumery...complicated, amazing and fascinating!