PARTY’S AFTERMATH, RED LILIES, AND OTHER RANDOM THINGS

The Blackbird party on Saturday night was a huge success. Nicole, the owner, and Liz, her assistant, did an amazing job of decorating the place with all kinds of vegetation, flowering orchids, and bell-jars full of blackberries and hydrangea flowers. The perfumes were beautifully displayed, there was wine sponsored by Wine World, champagne, vodka, lots of snacks, and best of all a wonderful mix of people from the Seattle perfume community. It was a real pleasure to see those I’ve met before and to meet new people. I am dismayed that I forgot to bring my camera, and was too busy and distracted during the event to even think of using my phone to take some pictures. If anyone reading this has any photos, I would love to see them! Surely someone took a photo or two? Why is it that taking photos at social gatherings is always somewhere at the bottom of my priority list? I seem to be hopelessly bad at documenting events of this sort.

Last weekend was strange in a number of ways. Saturday night was the launch party at Blackbird, and Sunday was the memorial service for my mother-in-law who died about two weeks ago. There’s no need to go into details about that, but there is one spin-off that’s of interest from a perfume point of view. After the reception, several family members divided up a huge bouquet of roses and lilies that were still in bud. The poor flowers were sprinkled with little dabs of silver glitter. I suppose some florist felt a need to gild the lily. Because Michael’s sister doesn’t like the smell of lilies, she took the roses and I took all of the lily buds. In the car on the way home, I smelled something phenolic, very much like guaiacol. It was the lilies. I don’t know whether these lilies had been bred to eliminate the powerful floral smell that most lilies have, or whether they were just an odd variety, but the fragrance continues to be bizarre and phenolic even now that they’re opened up fully. They have a little bit of the normal floral smell, but it’s minimal.

If you haven’t ever smelled guaiacol (why on earth would you?) it has a slightly smoky phenolic-medicinal smell that’s quite disgusting in large amounts. Now I’m beginning to wonder if all lilies have this phenolic note, but that it’s usually masked by other things?  Could the phenolic note be the reason why some people dislike the smell of lilies so much? Have the breeders who seek to eliminate flowers’ fragrances inadvertently eliminated everything except the note that people dislike?

Another random observation is that the “voodoo lily” bulbs that were given to me last fall are finally sprouting. I have no idea what will develop, but it’s always a surprise to find plants that I had completely forgotten about showing up in the garden.

Two of my orchids are blooming for the first time, putting on a surprise flower display. The first is Bulbophyllum lasiochilum (photo at beginning of post), which has wonderful red-spotted flowers accented with dark red, and nearly black petals and sepals. It smells a lot like cloves, at least at this stage of flower development. The second surprise was a little Cadetia taylori (photo at left), with tiny white flowers only a few millimeters in diameter. The lip is yellow and fuzzy like velvet, the petals are thin and curved, looking exactly like an insect’s antennae, and the fragrance is a strong anise-like scent. 

THE SMELL OF SMOKE

For certain perfumes, a smoky note is needed - the smell of a campfire sticking to clothing, a burning cigarette in the cold air, Indian cooking fires made from burning cow dung, a driftwood bonfire on the beach, old paper love letters being burnt, the smell of meat barbecuing, the burning of incense for worship, the burning of incense for pleasure, the burning of wax candles or a petroleum lantern for light, the smell of burnt sugar, the burning of logs in a fireplace, … for better or worse, the smell of smoke is emotionally evocative.

I’m continuing to explore the materials that provide a smoky note both by themselves and in combination with other things. All of the smoky materials are made by “destructive distillation” of wood or other organic materials, which just means that the original material is converted to charcoal as it is distilled. i.e., slowly burned. It is not surprising that materials produced by this process smell like smoke along with traces of the original material.

Choya loban is one of my favorite smoky scents. Made from burned olibanum wood, it gives a strong impression of a campfire or the smoke hanging over an Indian village, but it also has an incense note. I used it for the smoky note in Gujarat. Choya ral is made from burnt Shorea robusta, a tree that is harvested for timber in India. It’s similar to choya loban, but sharper and even more like a campfire. Choya Nakh is made from burnt seashells, and it smells exactly like burnt seashells - a smoky scent with a definite sea-animalic note.

Other natural smoky materials are cade, which is made by distilling burnt wood of Juniperus oxycedrus, a Mediterranean juniper tree, and birch tar, which is made from burned birch wood and leaf buds and is a gentler smoke than the others. The cade and birch tar used in perfumery are “rectified”, which means that they are distilled a second time to remove impurities.

I have recently been exploring a smoky aromachemical called guaiacol, which smells like smoke with phenolic and clove-like notes. It’s a very “clean” smoke smell without the primitive campfire associations. I’ve been reading a little about guaiacol, and have learned that it actually occurs naturally and is one of the molecules that contribute to the flavor of whiskey and coffee, among other things. It is one of the many products of “destructive distillation” of wood, so is probably a component of the other, more complex smoky fragrance materials. I think I may try mixing guaiacol with one or more of the natural materials for the smoky note in Alyssum, since it may be just what is needed to bridge the gap between flowers and smoke.

[All photos from Wikimedia]