The last few posts have been pretty heavy, so I thought I’d
go to some lighter fare today. For the past two weeks Phalaenopsis deliciosa
(aka Kingidium deliciosum) has been blooming. It’s a cute little Asian species
that just loves to bloom. In fact, it loves blooming so much that one of its
children, not yet a year out of flask, is also blooming with two large spikes,
and is bigger than its parent. There are many small flowers to a spike, creamy
yellow with red on the lip. Flower color seems to vary a lot with
conditions, being lighter when it blooms in winter or early spring.
The flowers may be small, but they make up for it with a
lovely fragrance that is mainly emitted in the mid-morning. It’s citrusy and
floral in the way that perfumes are floral. At times it seems heavy, like a
vintage perfume, but at other times it seems light, like a cologne. It reminds
me a lot of the original Phalaenopsis javanica flower that I used as an
inspiration for Javanica, and also of some citrusy hybrids using Phalaenopsis
gigantea.
What’s interesting is that many people seem to be anosmic to
these Phalaenopsis fragrances. I offered the Phalaenopsis deliciosa to Michael
to sniff, at the peak of its fragrance puffing, and he couldn’t smell anything.
When I had some fragrant hybrid Phalaenopsis at a show, about half of the
people who smelled them couldn’t detect any fragrance and the other half loved
them. I guess the bottom line is that these flowers are delicious if you can
smell them, but if you can’t, they’re just another pretty flower.
These examples of anosmia to a strong (to me) flower fragrance points to the difficulty of evaluating perfumes given how much variability there is in human olfactory perception. If I were to synthesize a perfect Phalaenopsis deliciosa fragrance, half of the people who tried it wouldn't be able to smell anything. Now that I think about it, that might be the perfect solution to "perfume-free" environments - a fragrance designed to be perceptible to the wearer but not everyone else, sort of like the high-frequency "teenager ringtones" mentioned in one of the recent comments.
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