REVISITING PAST CREATIONS: JAVANICA

This past week I’ve been engaged in a major operation to restock perfume concentrates, restock packaged perfumes on the shelves, refill stock bottles for sample-filling, and restock samples. I also just completed the IFRA certification for Zoologist Bat, and will be doing it for my own line as well. This effort will continue through next week, and probably well beyond that.

In the process of working with perfumes that I hadn’t refilled for a while, I’ve had the experience of smelling them with a new nose, as if they were someone else’s. The results have been a revelation in some ways. One of the earliest perfumes I made was Javanica, a fragrance based on what I thought was the scent of a Phalaenopsis orchid, but later discovered that it was just the fragrance peculiar to that one plant, not the Phalaenopsis javanica species in general. The plant that’s blooming as I write this has very little fragrance, and what it has is very different, more green than floral. I hadn’t smelled Javanica for a long time because Stacey fills the samples and retail bottles, and we had plenty of concentrate and diluted stock on hand, at least until now, when diluted stock was almost gone. Javanica is not one of our best-sellers, so I was actually thinking of discontinuing it.

However, when I was diluting concentrate yesterday, I realized that I really liked it, enough so that I could even wear it on occasion. Funny. I thought I didn’t like it that much. Javanica is a floral scent with a lot of incense and nutmeg, quite a “happy”-smelling fragrance, probably nice for a sunny day in summer. Someone else once described it as “the scent of being infatuated-in love”. I like that, and now realize that the description sort of fits.

I think I’ll do some sort of special promotion of Javanica this summer, but wonder if the name is off-putting since it doesn’t have much meaning apart from a Phalaenopsis species designation. What do you readers think about re-naming perfumes? Any suggestions for what to do about Javanica? 

[All photos are mine.]

FRAGRANT PHALAENOPSIS: JAVANICA

This week I have a hybrid orchid blooming that has Phalaenopsis gigantea in its ancestry, and for some reason it reminds me of Phalaenopsis javanica, the species that inspired the scent Javanica. The photo on the left shows this hybrid, Phal Perfection Is ‘Chen’. The flowers of both gigantea and javanica are maroon spotted and fragrant. Phal gigantea and its hybrids have large flowers with a light citrus scent, while javanica has tiny flowers with a sweeter and more complex fragrance, although they do have a hint of citrus, too.

When I got my first Phal javanica plant it was growing in a pot of sphagnum moss, and its first flower spike surprised me by burrowing down into the moss as if it were a root. I extricated it and propped it up so that it could bloom, and eventually it produced a small flower like the one in the photo on the right. It didn’t occur to me that it might be fragrant, but one day I noticed a sweet, spicy, almost incense-like fragrance that was exactly like a fine perfume. Eventually I traced it to the little flower hiding under the big shiny leaf. For days I kept sniffing the flower, wishing that I could capture it in a perfume. The plant has bloomed many times since, with new flowers appearing one after another from the same stalks, and the fragrance varies a little from one flowering to another, sometimes more spicy, sometimes more citrus-like. I think it depends on season and weather conditions.

When I started making perfume, one of my first goals was to create a fragrance that epitomized my memory of that first blooming of Phal javanica. I started out with a sweet base of vanilla, resins, balsams and woody notes, added some floral notes including jasmine and rose geranium, put in a good shot of frankincense and nutmeg, and topped it off with the citrus that’s characteristic of fragrant phalaenopsis. Javanica has turned out to be one of my favorite orchid fragrances.