WHITE CATTLEYA: THE CHALLENGE OF USING LEMON IN PERFUME

Cattleya orchids with flowers in the white-to-green range often have a citrusy scent that’s heavy on lemon notes, so one of my latest challenges has been trying to recreate the scent of a white hybrid cattleya orchid. I’m getting there, but on the way I’ve struggled with the difficulties of using lemon as a perfume note. Unfortunately lemon has been ruined by its gross overuse in functional fragrances for cleaning supplies, almost to the extent that it evokes a conditioned knee-jerk response of “cleaning product” even if it’s in a context that has nothing to do with cleaning, like lemonade, lemon desserts, lemon candies, or lemony colognes. In fact, there are commercial “lemonade” drinks that taste like they’re flavored with the same aroma chemicals that are used in cleaning supplies, further blurring the lines between fruit, food, beverages, detergents, and perfume.

Instead of the standard lemon rind essential oil, I started with an essential oil made from the whole fruit, which has a gentler and sweeter scent, along with a little citron. Natural lemon on its own is a top note, so I added some other materials like lemonile that enhance it and make it last well into the middle section of the scent, if not the end. The goal is for it so smell something like an orchid, so there’s plenty of vanilla in the base. After looking at published analyses of orchid flower fragrances, which are all over the place even for cattleyas, I chose a few materials that are in a lot of flowers’ fragrances, like citronellol, linalool, nerolidol and others. Citronellol and phenylethyl alcohol in particular helped “floralize” the lemon, so the heart of the perfume is not all that lemony, but includes other fruity-floral orchid-type notes. The base also contains some light, high-end musks. Combining lemon with common “laundry musk” would automatically evoke the image of detergent, so the musk component  had to be done some other way, using materials like cosmone, velvione, muscenone, and others of their type.

In analyses of orchid flower headspaces, one commonly encountered substance is beta-ocimene, a simple terpene-type molecule that until now hasn’t been commercially available, at least not to small-scale perfumers. I finally managed to get some, and added it to the white cattleya. It gives the whole composition a very natural, fresh feeling, adding the same kind of sparkle that aldehydes are known for. I’m still working on the formula, but when I return to Seattle on August 20, I’ll send out samples to my testers so that I can get feedback. It’s not quite finished, but it’s getting there. 

[Lemons and Rhyncholaelia digbyana photos from Wikimedia; white hybrid cattleya photo is mine.]

RECREATING ORCHID SCENTS

The other day a customer contacted me asking me why no one has accurately recreated the scents of some of her favorite hybrids. It should be simple, right? Can’t one just do a chemical analysis of the molecules that are in the orchid fragrance, then put them together? In theory it should be as simple as following a recipe. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. 

Of course it is possible to do a gas chromatography (GC) analysis of any orchid’s fragrance headspace, and this has been done for some species, sometimes multiple times in multiple contexts. Some of these data are available online. However, once that's done, there are several issues that make it difficult or impossible to reconstruct the scent of your favorite orchid plant with complete accuracy:

1. Orchid scents are not uniform across individual plants, even for cloned hybrids. My Cattleya Bob Betts may smell very different from yours. Even the flowers of a single plant can smell dramatically different depending on culture conditions, the weather on any particular day, and how mature the flower is. To further complicate things, the flowers may smell completely different in the morning than they do at night. Which version to use? If I use my morning, young flower, grown in cool sunny conditions version, you may not recognize it.

2. Orchid flowers are continually emitting a complete mix of base notes (large molecules), middle notes (mid-size molecules) and top notes (small, volatile molecules). In a perfume, the top notes evaporate after a while, leaving the heavier molecules, so the scent evolves over the course of wearing it, losing progressively larger molecules until you’re left with only the heaviest ones. To achieve a "live-flower" effect with a perfume, you would have to continually spray yourself, in which case you would quickly overdose with the middle and base notes.

3. Many of the chemical components of orchid fragrances are not available commercially to perfumers. 

4. It is not practical (and maybe not even possible) to distill enough orchid flowers to produce an oil or absolute that could be used in perfumery. In any case, the products of distillation or extraction of any flower do not really smell like the fresh flowers.

These same issues apply to any sort of flower fragrance, but are easier to tackle in flowers like orange blossom or rose that can be cultivated commercially on a large scale and distilled by the ton to produce a natural oil or absolute with many of the characteristics of the original. Because of their huge diversity (over 800 genera and more than 20 thousand species) and the complexity of their scents, orchids are some of the most difficult flowers to try to recreate in perfume form. 

[All photos are mine: Sedirea japonica (top), Phalaenopsis bellina (middle), Stanhopea wardii (bottom)]

THE ORCHIDS OF AUGUST: CATTLEYA BICOLOR AND LAELIA LUCASIANA

CATTLEYA BICOLOR

Two of these beauties are blooming in my greenhouse this month and, although they are the same species, you wouldn’t know it by looking at them. The name bicolor refers to the fact that the lip is a very different color from the petals and sepals. Both of the plants have a spade-shaped neon magenta lip, but that’s where the resemblance ends. One of the plants has wide, bronze colored petals and sepals. Yesterday it smelled like pure indole, but today the indole is fairly well masked by the addition of a sweet, spicy, slightly powdery scent. Lovely.

The other plant has narrow, bright lime green petals and sepals and has no scent as far as I can tell. The contrasting colors of this flower truly make it live up to the bicolor name, but it’s disappointing that it’s not fragrant. I suspect that selective breeding for the green color has eliminated the fragrance, which is generally considered unimportant in orchid judging at shows.

I think many orchid breeders concentrate on the appearance of the flowers and don’t consider fragrance at all. One of the reasons that I like to grow wild-type orchid species is that they are likely to be fragrant, even though they may not be as big and showy as their selectively bred counterparts. They also tend to be hardier than the ones that have been overly manipulated to select for characteristics that humans, as overly visual creatures, find desirable.

LAELIA LUCASIANA

This little cutie is one of my all-time favorites. It belongs to a group of Brazilian orchids that grow on rocks under extreme conditions, and for that reason is referred to as a rupiculous (rock-growing) Laelia. The plant itself is less than 6 inches high, the leaves and pseudobulbs are fat and succulent, and it just loves to bloom. This is the second time it’s bloomed this year. The first time it had two flowers, this time it has four. They’re much brighter in color than the spring flowers were, illustrating the influence that growing conditions can have on the appearance of orchid flowers. The fragrance is the same as before, but this time it seems stronger, probably because of the warmer weather. The flowers have a unique fragrance that's sort of like violets, iris, suede, a note that's vaguely fruity, and black pepper, smooth on the one hand and piquant-spicy on the other. I plan to make a perfume based on this scent. The challenge is going to be to get the black pepper top note pumped up enough to mimic what I smell in the flowers. They do it so well, and keep pumping it out all day. Right now the plant is sitting on my desk as I write, and I keep inhaling the fragrance to try to commit it to memory so that I can in some way reproduce it.