Perfumes from Nature 

Choose Quality and Trust Your Nose

A good quality perfume should seamlessly evolve over hours on the skin after the perfumer has carefully calculated the volatility of each oil and woven together an interesting scent tapestry, leaving no blank spaces. Some perfumers build accords and join them together with modifier notes - these have properties that mix well with both the accords, and so can bridge them together. Some perfumers, myself included, work steadily from the base up or the top down or the heart outwards. We build the whole, note by note, using hundred of compounds, ranging from the darkest base notes up to fleeting top note. Early mistakes are made when a beautiful lemony rose, turns out to be a slow starter and actually a mingles with the heart note and not as expected, in the opening accord. 

The Plague of Pre-Mixed Accords 

The recent influx of perfumes, put together from a tsunami of available pre-mixed accords has meant, sadly, that there are fewer truly artistic endeavours to discover now. A ubiquitous scent of rose or orange blossom smells less and less like the actual flowers and yet more people accept that it is the true and only scent that is called ‘rose’! A current trend for a particularly heavy floral to be described simply as ‘orchid’ is only confusing, yet many profess to know and love it. Of all the flower species, orchid is possibly the most varied. A few smell floral, pretty even, but more emit a pungent, rotting meat scent, others smell of damp earth, urine, rubber or wet dog and Stanhopea tigrina manages to smell of musky chocolate, mint and goat! 

Appreciate What You Have

90% of people recently polled on which sense they would do without, were they forced to choose, picked smell (which of course means taste too…) So maybe we under appreciate our clever olfactory protuberances! Instead of trying to find all the mysterious notes apparently in a perfume, ask your nose, give it time and then, trust its answer. It isn’t trying to sell you a fantasy world, it’s working hard to make sense out of what it detects. And if you train it, (by it, I mean the bit you see, but more your olfactory bulbs working hard, out of sight). Just be aware of what it picks up throughout the day, and it will reward you. For the rest of your life, it will give you back fabulous scent memories that have been kept pristine, ready to reappear whenever you revisit them.

The Floral Family:

• The most popular perfume type, incorporates a wide palate: from soft narcissus, to heady jasmine. Some emit the scent of just one flower, from start to end, and these are the soliflores. More commonly, one flower is prominent, but with complementary companion flowers. Alternatively, a whole bouquet can open at once, or gradually unfold. Then there are the fruit/florals or even gourmand and woody scents that have a floral element: Ballure Allure has a rose and woody mix; Sheean has jasmine and rose in amongst the gourmand desserts.
• Interpretation

Any floral scent will be a perfumer’s interpretation of that flower, especially as not all plants produce an oil we can extract, (like lily or freesia). In which case we use a mass spectrometer to analyse the constituents and to get an approximation. In natural perfumery, we use the constituents to build a scent outline, then add our scent impression of the whole flower. A single essential oil, although made up of sometimes hundreds of compounds, would be very one dimensional if worn as a perfume. 

Chypre & Fruit/Floral Families:

• This group includes florals with a distinctly fruity element, like Aroma Borealis, with citrus, peach and nectarine swirling around the central flowers. Dhoon Glen has a bold central theme of wild strawberries and fresh woodland plants, whilst TT has a wide gamut of citrus fruits: yuzu, lime, grapefruit and lemon set the scene, whilst glimpses of fennel and basil tease out the sweeter floral notes. Honeysuckle is a soliflore, which closely matches the scent of a freshly picked honeysuckle flower: a warm orange citrus is paired with clean floral elements. Little Fig Tree is much cleaner than typical synthetic fig fragrances. The opening is bright, not sweet and it is only in the heart notes that a vanilla and fruit sweeten the scent.

The Fruity/Gourmands Families: Ballure Allure, Blue Moon, Elderberry, Godred, Sheean

 Why what you smell may not be what I smell

Gender in Perfumes and Perfume Types

Andrea is an experienced, fully qualified, natural perfumer and formulator, working with natural materials, trained in natural and synthetic perfumery. 

Perfumery and Formulating questions are answered by email, on Quora or Instagram.

When Natural means Natural and when it means Man-made.

What goes into perfume can be rather ‘cloaks and daggers’, ‘natural’ can simply mean that the perfumer has decided the end result smell natural! The industry is improving and putting more pressure on manufacturers to be honest about how they work and what they use. If they buy in ready made accords to combine, (like soap or candle-makers) this should be clear along with which materials are used. One area of particular confusion is Nature Identicals…

The perfumery terms: Natural, Niche and Artisan Perfumers tend to refer to similar methods of productions - small, usually independent perfumers who have been trained to work with oils, resins, absolutes, concretes and extract from nature. Their palate often includes “nature identicals”(NI) these are compounds found in flowers and plants and can also be man-made. Most non-perfumers would notice little difference between most, when sniffing them on a scent strip, others are quite markedly different. We use naturally derived NIs as they usually last longer, they can have a better synergistic effect on other materials and may simply smell more like the natural compound. As they are usually double the cost, or more, there needs to be a good reason. We do so if the naturally occurring chemical comes from a plant that in endangered or the extraction is undesirable for the ecosystem or the people working with them. In these situations, we will use laboratory-made nature identicals. (These are not the same as aroma chemicals!)

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Samples

Choose from 20 perfumes, made with hundreds of beautiful natural ingredients. If you can’t decide, our 5 Scent boxes contain one of each in a particular style, so you can try before committing to a full bottle. 

Please click the link for: Perfume Concentration

Animal Testing: We have never worked with suppliers based in countries where testing on animals is legal. We are vehemently against any cruelty to animals and have lobbied for a ban in the past. It is now illegal to test on animals in most countries - in the UK and USA all perfumes are 'cruelty free' - it is not a choice, it is a legal requirement.

However, manufacturing sustainably is still a choice. We have always chosen to do it this way. We leave the lightest footprint we can and examine our practice and process regularly. First and foremost is the quality of our products and how to produce them using sustainable crops.