Materials
What a fragrance is actually made of
Roughly two hundred materials are in regular use in the atelier. Around a third are naturals, a third isolates taken out of naturals, and a third made outright. None of those three categories is the good one.
Natural is not a synonym for good
A natural extract is a mixture of several hundred molecules whose proportions change with the harvest. That complexity is exactly why naturals are worth their price, and it is also why no composition can be built out of them alone: a formula that drifts with the weather cannot be made twice.
An aroma chemical is one molecule, identical in every batch. It is not a cheaper imitation of a natural — many of them smell of nothing that grows — and several of the most restricted materials in perfumery are naturals, not synthetics. Oakmoss was restricted because of what is in the lichen. Bergamot is phototoxic unless the furocoumarins are taken out of it.
The question is never whether a material was grown. It is whether the composition needs what it does.
Some materials are declined outright. Natural musk, civet and castoreum are animal products and are not bought in any form; where a composition asks for that register it is built from macrocyclic musks and a labdanum-styrax base. Sandalwood is bought only from plantation Santalum album on a fifteen-year rotation, never from wild Mysore stock. Rosewood is not used at all.
Naturals
Everything distilled, expressed or extracted from a plant. A natural is not one substance but several hundred, in proportions that move with the season, the soil and the year — which is why a house buys by lot and keeps the lot number.
Orris butterIris pallida
Distilled from the rhizome, never the flower. The rhizome is dug, peeled and stored for three years while the irones develop; a kilogram of butter takes roughly a tonne of root and that calendar. It reads powdery, cold and faintly of raw carrot.
Chianti, Tuscany · three-year cure
Oakmoss absoluteEvernia prunastri
A lichen, gathered from fallen oak branches. The classical material was restricted because of two sensitisers, atranol and chloroatranol; the depleted extract keeps the inky, wet-bark character and is the reason a chypre can still be built.
Massif Central, France · atranol depleted
VetiverChrysopogon zizanioides
Roots, cured for six weeks and then distilled for the best part of a day. Haitian material is smoky and slightly nutty; Javanese is drier and more earthen. The two are not interchangeable and the collection uses both.
Les Cayes, Haiti · twenty-hour distillation
Osmanthus absoluteOsmanthus fragrans
The flower opens for about two weeks in October and smells of apricot skin and leather at once. The flowers are shaken onto sheets rather than picked; a tree gives perhaps two kilograms of usable flower in a season.
Guilin, Guangxi · late October harvest
Labdanum absoluteCistus ladanifer
A gum combed off the leaves of a shrub that grows on ground too poor for anything else, then washed in alcohol. Dark, leathery and faintly salty; it is the floor of most amber accords, including ours.
Sierra de Andújar, Andalusia · summer collection
FrankincenseBoswellia carterii
Resin tapped by hand from a wounded tree and steam distilled. We buy the second tapping: the resin runs cleaner later in the season and the oil carries less of the turpentine edge that makes cheap incense smell like paint.
Sanaag, Somaliland · second tapping
Isolates
A single molecule separated out of a natural. An isolate is not a synthetic substitute for the plant; it is one voice taken out of the choir, at a purity and a consistency the whole extract cannot offer.
Coumarin, ex tonkaDipteryx odorata
Crystallises on the outside of the cured bean as a white bloom. Hay, almond and new-mown grass; the material that made the fougère possible in 1882 and still the axis every fougère turns on.
Isolated from bean, Orinoco basin
SafranalCrocus sativus
The metallic, hay-like facet of saffron. It is what makes a leather accord read as leather before anybody can name why, and it works at concentrations measured in parts per thousand.
Isolated from stigma, Khorasan
CedrolJuniperus virginiana
The dry, pencil-shaving heart of cedarwood, taken out of the oil and used where the full oil would be too resinous. Almost odourless on its own until it is in something.
Isolated from cedarwood oil
Aroma chemicals
Made rather than gathered. Some do not exist in nature at all; some do but cannot be extracted at any sane price or without taking the species with them. They are used here for the same reason as everything else on this page: because the composition needs what they do.
Ambrettolide
A large-ring musk with the same skin-warm, slightly powdery character as ambrette seed, at a fraction of the cost and with none of the batch variation. It is what gives a cologne structure a tail it would not otherwise have.
Macrocyclic musk
Gamma-decalactone
Apricot and peach skin. Present in the fruit itself, and used here to hold the fruited side of osmanthus in place without adding the sugar that a fruit note usually brings with it.
Lactone
Aldehyde C-11 undecylenic
Waxy, metallic, faintly citrus. Aldehydes are the reason a composition can smell lit rather than lying flat, and they are almost impossible to use in moderation.
Aliphatic aldehyde
Quinoline leather accord
There is no leather oil and there never was. What perfumery calls leather is an accord built from birch tar, styrax and a small quantity of substituted quinolines, and every house builds its own.
House accord, built in-atelier