FLASH DRAWING WINNER

The winner of the Incense Flash drawing is:

SUN MI

To claim your prize, please e-mail olympicorchids at gmail dot com or leave a message on the Olympic Orchids Facebook page.

[Flash image from Wikimedia]

WINNER OF VANILLA FIELDS DRAWING

The winner of the Vanilla Fields and cumulative jackpot drawing is

ANNE

To claim your prize, please send an e-mail with your shipping address to olympicorchids at gmail dot com, or PM me on Facebook within a week. Otherwise your items will go back into the jackpot.

[Vanilla flower photo from Wikimedia]

GRASSROOTS SCENTS: VETIVER

The weather here has been warm and sunny for the past week or so. Whenever I go outside I smell flowers, especially jasmine, which is all over campus,  and roses, which are right down the street in abundance. The grass is starting to dry out and turn brown, but due to the long break from writing this spring I haven’t finished with the “green” perfume materials for my Wednesday posts. In keeping with the theme of grass and green, I’ll push on with the ever-popular grassy material, vetiver.

Chrysopogon (formerly called Vetiveria) zizanioides is a large, clumping grass native to India, where it is known as khus. If you ever see “khus” listed as a perfume ingredient or note, it’s just vetiver. Because of its extensive, deep-reaching root system it is used in some places for erosion control. I have read that it can also be used for pest control when planted around other crops because it attracts a stem borer that lays eggs on the vetiver plant, but when the larvae hatch they are so impeded by the hairs on the vetiver leaves that they cannot move and feed, so they die. This is yet another example of how amazing plants’ defense mechanisms are.

Vetiver is one of the most renewable of the natural base perfumery materials. Like any grass, it grows quickly, spreads, and is propagated via offshoots. The roots are distilled for oil that is used in food flavorings and perfumery, but the green tops can be used as feed for livestock, so the entire plant is useful. Vetiver is also used for water purification, especially for removal of industrial chemicals and heavy metals. The leaves can be used to weave mats and other textile products.

DNA tests have shown that almost all of the vetiver grown throughout the world is from the same source in India, but growing and distilling conditions result in a variety of different nuances. Indonesian vetiver has a smoky note, but Hatian vetiver has a cleaner, purer scent, as does the Indian ruh khus. Most vetiver oil is fairly viscous and light golden to amber or brown in color, but vetiver from India is typically green, supposedly because it is distilled in copper, but I wonder if artificial color is sometimes added, especially to the low-end versions. Although attars are traditionally distilled into a base of sandalwood, some distillers have started to use vetiver oil as a base. It seems to work quite well, and is a better choice than the phthalates that are often used to make cheap attars.

Vetiver essential oil is one of those materials that improves with age, so I like to buy in bulk well in advance and keep the oil for some time before using it. Vetiver oil has an earthy, greenish, slightly sweet, rooty scent that makes an excellent base ingredient for any green and/or earthy fragrance. It fits well in a variety of blends – in fact, it can blend pleasantly with just about anything, which is probably one of the reasons why it makes a good base for modern natural attars. Compared to some of its relatives, it is fairly subtle, so won’t hijack a blend, but rather acts as a fixative and provides an earth-toned background. I’ve used it in quite a few of my perfumes.

Vetiveryl acetate is a derivative of vetiver, with a softer, crisper, drier, and purer scent than the complete oil. It is extremely tenacious, drying down to a minerally-woody scent that is really beautiful. A little bit goes a long way. To date, I’ve used it in one of my perfumes, but now that I have a supply, will probably use it more in future.

Just as the plant has a multitude of uses, so the essential oil of vetiver has a multitude of uses in perfumery.

What is your favorite fragrance that contains a clearly detectable vetiver note?

[Vetiver plant photos from Wikimedia; vetiver mat and "ruh khus" photos from retailers' websites.] 

PRIVET BLOOM WINNER

Finally I have gotten around to shaking up the names of those who entered the last drawing, for the Hampton Sun Privet Bloom.

The winner is PORTIA!

Please send me an e-mail or FB message with your current address. I think my last package to you went to the wrong place.

[Photo from Wikimedia]

BLOGGER REHABILITATION

The hamster-wheel of life spins round again, and here I am back at my blogger desk until the inevitable next round of disruptions. This spring has brought a rapid-fire series of travels, all of which have involved a lot of moving of goods to a destination and back again, as well as a certain amount of grubby heavy lifting, either physically or mentally. The most recent disruption involved three days of setting up, manning, and breaking down a display at the AIX Scent Fair at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, crowned by a few minutes of glamour when Victor Wong and I received the Institute for Art and Olfaction Award for Bat, the fragrance I made for his company, Zoologist. Traveling is always a little surreal, but receiving an award is even more surreal, in a good way.

Coming home, there was the usual rush to catch up on pending orders and replenish stock, coordinate deferred orchid plant care, unpack the boxes that I shipped back from LA and store items where I can find them again, grade virtual reams of student papers, and deal with everything else that has a habit of falling through the cracks when I’m gone. A small task, but an annoying one, was clearing out the spam comments that had appeared while the blog was left unattended. Another task will be to deal with the giveaways that are still pending. That will happen this weekend.

Yesterday morning I went outside and ran a little for the first time in weeks. The sun was shining, and it was incredibly refreshing to get out and move. I always walk down our block at the beginning and end of a run, so get to talk to any neighbors who are out and smell whatever is in bloom. Currently the stars of the show are one neighbor’s roses that grow in a strip next to the street and another neighbor’s German irises (aka bearded iris) in a similar position. I know I’ve written about this before, but I’m always astounded by the fact that every variety of rose smells completely different. The pink ones are soft and gourmand, the yellow ones are like flavored tea, the red ones are rich and spicy, and so on. 

Bearded irises are the same. Every color has a different fragrance that has very little to do with perfumery “iris”. Like roses, they all have a recognizable “iris” scent that’s super-moist and cushiony-musky, but the ones down the street, with their bicolor scheme of lavender and purple, have spicy notes as well. The solid color lavender ones have a grape-candy note.

We only have Siberian irises, which are much less showy in every respect. The flowers only last a day or two, although they do bloom sequentially from the same stalk, and they’re not noticeably fragrant. In fact, they’re indestructible weeds whose only business in life is to quickly and stealthily make more and more Siberian irises. I wasn’t aware of this when I collected seeds a few years ago and scattered them around in the garden. I really need to replace or supplement them with some fragrant bearded irises.

What is your favorite variety of fragrant rose or iris?

[All photos are adapted from Wikimedia except for the photo of Victor and me, which is from the Art and Olfaction Awards photo collection.]

WINNERS OF FOUR ROSES AND OUT WITH THE FLOWERS DRAWINGS

Because of the orchid show last weekend I'm running several days late with everything. I just got caught up with shipping orders late last night. Now on to what should have been published on Tuesday.

The winner of the Four Roses draw is AZAR

The winner of the Out With The Flowers draw is TRINITI.

If you are a winner, please contact me by e-mail at olympicorchids at gmail dot com or on Facebook. I will need your full US shipping address.

[I know it's no longer crocus season, but here they are anyway, my photo]

GREEN, GREEN GRASS: LEAF ALCOHOL

Welcome to materials Wednesday as the green lineup continues. 

Most people seem to love the smell of freshly cut grass. I don’t – in fact I find the smell of freshly cut lawn grass slightly disgusting. Maybe it’s because I associate it with the nasty clumps of green slime that I have to remove from the weedeater after I’ve been cutting the jungle of tall grass and other plants that takes over our little farm every summer right at the end of the rainy season, or maybe it’s just because I don’t associate that smell with childhood suburban lawns the way many people in the US do.

Cis-3-hexenol, aka leaf alcohol, is one of the main odorants that occurs naturally in grass, leaves, and other green plants. It’s used in artificial flavorings for food like “watermelon” and “green apple”. By itself, it does a perfectly convincing imitation of “cut green grass”, and is probably the main (or only) fragrance ingredient in those commercial fragrance oils called “fresh-cut grass”, “bamboo”, and the like. If you like the smell of macerated green vegetation, this one’s definitely for you.

As you can tell, I’m not fond of this material, and have used it only in trace amounts in creating green scents of various types. It serves as a powerful top note, but given that it only lasts a few hours neat on paper, it needs other materials to extend longevity and temper the super-grassy smell.

Leaf alcohol is one of the “green leaf volatiles” that is released from wounded leaves when insects like caterpillars feed on them. In some cases the leaf alcohol that’s floating around attracts more pests, but more often than not it repels them, or even attracts the enemies of the pests, which is what the plant wants. There is also some evidence that the most important role of leaf alcohol is to provide a means of communication among plants, triggering preemptive defense mechanisms in intact plants if their neighbor has been attacked. You can read all about it here.

It never ceases to amaze me that the chemical defense mechanisms of plants have produced so many wonderful perfume materials that we, as humans, enjoy. If you want green scents, leaf alcohol is a must-have to achieve that grassy green scent note. Just watch out for that very hungry caterpillar! Or maybe if you wear it while gardening, it will boost the defense mechanisms of your favorite plants.

[All images are from Wikimedia]