i never promised you a rose garden {well, maybe i did} :: roses part 1

austrian copper – yellow roses

 

June is right around the corner and so with it brings the big blooming season of my cherished roses in the garden.  The yellow roses are in bloom now as they start early but the others are just beginning to bud.  This may be in reaction to a long, cold but very wet snap we’ve had since mid-April.  The roses are loving the extra moisture and I’m expecting an incredible show in about a week.

It actually couldn’t be better timing as I’m preparing a talk for the Denver Rose Society at the Denver Botanic Gardens on June 10th.  The talk will be all about roses, rose molecules that give the aromatic signature of ‘rosey’ and how this applies to the creation of rose perfumes.  I’m really excited!  I LOVE talking about roses and rose fragrances; especially how they might seem easy to create because there are so many of them and the rose scent is so recognizable.  Of course, it’s really deceptive.  There are a gazillion different roses with as many varying scents and if you’ve started to *smell the roses* you know this is true.  It’s actually true of lots of flowers: we think we know them but if we start to examine them more closely they show many ‘faces’ and many fragrances.

 

napoleon’s hat centifolia

 

Since last Fall or maybe even earlier I’ve been immersed in flowers and floral perfumes.  I’m not sure why, exactly; the inspiration as well as the work itself has brought me to the garden again and again.  With the Brilliant Collection for the Cartier exhibit a multi-facteted white floral emerged for Deco Diamonds, a lush, damp earth hyacinth for Jacinthe de Sapphir, and a deep ruby-hued rose for Rubis Rosé.   There’s a fascinating array of fruit nuances found in roses, from zesty citrus nuances, to crisp apple and juicy pear, to lush blackcurrant and berry-like notes.  Rubis Rosé has a deep tea rose in the heart and a bright red raspberry top note.  It’s a combination of influences: my neighbor’s vintage (1960’s) tea roses and the fabulous berry quality of classic red long stems.  I also wanted to create a rose design that spoke to a real classicism as well as the mid-century fruited-aldehydic-floral.

You know, speaking of aldehydics and roses, I find it very interesting that some of the roses in my garden display a sort of green aldehydic quality.  Part of it is a linalool-ish citral (citrus-y) flash and other parts are the geranium-like,  green rosey aromas of geraniol and geranyl acetate.  The yellow roses (the Austrian Copper roses especially) that are blooming right now have this incredible scent.  It has those geranium-rose notes at play with an almost metallic kick as if it were a constructed perfume with the citrus-green rosy mix of aldehyde c-8 and aldehyde c-12 Enic in the top.  I love it!

 

harrison’s yellow

 

Years ago I created an all-botanical yellow rose scent called “en Vacances” which is based on a Harrison’s Yellow that grew in my back yard when I was a kid.  It always bloomed on the last day of school.  To me it was the scent of Summer Vacation.  Saving Grace, also in the Garden Bathe aromatherapy perfume collection, is another more woody-based, more clearly rose (I smell it as pink) design that has some of these characteristic gernium-rosey tonalities as well.

 

blooming eglantine

 

But it’s not just the geranium-rosey aromas that are coming out of the rose garden.  One of my favorite aspects that is showing up is the characteristic peppery-green notes wafting from the leaves and stems on the centifolias and the fabulous scent coming from the green apple – aldehydic fragranced leaves of my eglantine.  It’s reminiscent of certain peonies, which for me are filed away in my mind as a subcategory of rose note flowers.  They are their own delicious, wonderful thing, of course, and they too have quite a lot of variation from dewy, ever so slightly powdery-apricot-y, to softly watery pear, to a very deep and spiced rosy-green.  Last year I created a Peony perfume after many years thinking on it.  I wanted to tell a story like a ‘day in the life’ of the peony flower kind of experience.  I could bring it from a slightly metallic-green, softly peppery – softened with dew note at the beginning, through its most ‘rosey’ phase and into a twilight shaded and darker aspect in the drydown.  I’m not sure it’s for everyone but I really like it and I feel it tells it’s story nicely.

 

jacqueminot rose

 

I grow a fair number of “Old Roses” but I hadn’t really pushed myself to decipher their varied nuances to the point of creating a perfume to speak to their unique characters until recently.  Deeply honey – spice, almost carnation-esque, the old rose types are rich and can be a bit heavy.  It would be very easy to get involved with a perfume design around the old rose scent and end up at “granny rose” in no time.  Not that the roses themselves do the powdery note that I most associate with granny rose but the density of their scent and how you work with that quality could get you there if you weren’t very careful to avoid it.  I’ve smelled too many old rose and tea rose perfumes that, for me, smell of granny rose due to their sheer density.  (If you couldn’t tell: Granny rose is not my thing. At all. But I digress).   I can’t talk much about a recent project I’ve been involved with for Denver Art Museum just yet but I will say that it’s allowed me to delve into the old roses character some and pull it into a rose bouquet that is unlike any of my other rose designs.  First off, it’s not intended to be a rose soliflore but the rose is clearly experienced along with a couple of other focal floral notes.  There will be more on that topic, and more very soon. 😉

This seems like as good a place to stop part 1 for now.  I’m hoping that as I send this out and in the next few days, some of the other buds will pop out into full blossom.

I’m so thrilled to be talking flowers and roses in particular, that I’d like to offer a little drawing for 3 sets of 3 – mini sprayers of Rubis Rosé EdP, Peony EdP, and en Vacances EdP.  Please leave a comment about your favorite rose and/or rose perfume to enter.  The 3 winners will be chosen at random in the wee hours of June 6th so the deadline to enter is 11:59 pm on June 5th.  Winners will be announced on June 6th.  I hope that everyone will enjoy the start of Summer and good luck in the draw!   ox

 

* images are all my own.  you can see most or variations on them at my instagram page.

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beloved flower :: lilacs

Although it’s been raining non-stop for nearly a month and really chilly, too, it’s almost June and Spring will be blossoming into Summer in no time.  I didn’t want to let the moment pass to reflect some more on my adored lilacs.  I wait for them all. year. long.  Something about them sends me soaring into a reverie of nostalgia; of my own past and an imaginary one of what my mother’s and grandmothers’ Springtimes must have been like.  It’s almost as if I start imagining vintage home movies in my head about how women in generations past felt about being feminine, being beautiful (?) or sultry (?) and how they would express it.  I’m not exactly sure why this sort of thing takes me over every time I smell a lilac, but it does.  I am immediately there in the back yard of my childhood, smelling the lilacs that my mother and grandmother had also enjoyed.  i think of them in the fashions of their era, with their hair and make up done, in fresh Spring dresses with a soft breeze blowing.  It’s incredibly romantic.  And elusive, like the fleeting nature of the lilacs themselves.  I feel like I can never be like them but I can surely admire them.  Maybe that is why I am such an avid admirer of the lilac.

That sense of nostalgia doesn’t stop with just the fresh lilacs in bloom around my yard and neighborhood.  I have found that for many generations, the scent of lilacs have been the subject of many a historical perfume.  Some rather famous in their day and important to the progression of the scent, in design terms.  A couple of favorites of mine, from the early twentieth century are from the classic houses Houbigant, with “Le Temps des Lilas” (1921), and Coty with his “Lilas Blanc” (1910).  And then a couple more, the mid-century beauties (both) “White Lilac” by Mary Chess  (1930) and Dorothy Gray (1945).  In the case of Dorothy Gray, White Lilac was among her most famous and best selling.

                   

I didn’t get the chance to pull out the Mary Chess nor the Dorothy Gray from the ArtScent Museum‘s collection in storage but I did want to delve into the scent of the Coty “Lilas Blanc” since I have been thinking so much about the vintage styles of lilac perfumes while working with the fresh lilacs in bloom in the studio.  It’s interesting to me that as I’ve been working on my newest lilac inspired fragrance, “La Belle Saison” (a soon to be released, all natural / botanical design) as opposed to last Spring’s “White Lilac” (a mixed media creation), it’s the all-botanical that has come into being as a somewhat vintage referencing design.  Perhaps it’s that in the early 20th Century, the lilac-style molecules were less developed but I also think that perfume styles in general were more romantic and even with the soliflores, more impressionistic than realistic.  There was a sense of what a perfume must be, design-wise, whereas now, a soliflore can be as realistic and straightforward – linear as you please.  I don’t really think that was so back then.  Whether it’s a stylistic choice or a refection of the constraint of the perfumer’s palette at the time, it’s true that most florals, even intended soliflores have a ‘bouquet’ quality about them.

ArtScent Museum’s “Lilas Blanc” de Coty, c.1920’s

Coty’s Lilas Blanc opens with a waft of soft green leaves and lemony nuances that give me an immediate impression of magnolia and hawthorn.  Just beneath is a subtle layer of violety ionones adding to the fluffy powder impression that begins moments into the scent and continues well into the drydown.  The heart begins to reveal the full bouquet concept notes of jasmine, heliotrope and clover emerge along with a rosey-honey-plummy-lilac accord that feels sweet, and rich but still quite soft and demure.

ArtScent Museum’s “Lilas Blanc” de Coty, c.1930’s

As the base note weighs in, the jasmine and heliotrope warm themselves against musk, civet, and powedery-woody vetiveryl acetate.  The use of the acetate instead of the pure oil allows the soft fluffiness to continue instead of being pulled solidly into the earth.  The acetate is more sheer and manageable when a light hand is needed.  The very end drydown is soft, warm, and honey-floral-fuzzy, like the underside of a bumble bee.

There are nuances in Coty’s Lilas Blanc that very much remind me of vintage style apple blossom perfumes; of course because many of the same ingredients were used to create them and the overall fantasy of the “Spring Floral” has similar qualities to it.  {Apple blossoms are another charmer for me and I have a thing for finding all kinds of vintage versions to compare).  What I really found interesting is there is little evidence of the fruity nuances that are found in fresh lilac blossoms and in more modern perfume constructions.

There is definitely a romance to lilac perfumes, whether vintage or more modern in style.  I’m having a ball chasing that chameleon around with my perfumer’s organ.  And waxing poetic about one of the most beloved flowers.  ox

Image credits:  dreamy lilac shots by DSH, ArtScent Museum Lilas Blanc images by DSH, mary chess image found here; dorothy gray hand lotion image found here; dorothy gray summer splash image found on eBay.

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flora :: everywhere it’s flowers

I think that it was last Spring that the flowers started calling.  More than ever before, I’ve wanted to engage in the realm of the flora.  Perhaps it started with Instagram coinciding with my daily walks with Xander.  I suddenly had an incredible visual outlet to use that was so easy, fun, portable, and interesting.  It was a way to make art on the spot when, these days,  studio time is so difficult to come by.  The flowers infiltrated my psyche through visual art and now it seems that my whole world, in perfumery as well, is just FLOWERS.  {I’m in love, can you tell?}

 

 

 

Last years White Lilac, Peony, Scent of Hope, Jacinthe de Sapphir, and Rubis Rosé have given way to a flood of floral inspiration around the studio.  I’m just beginning to complete some of the new designs for release, but I promise you, there are some big bouquets in my future.  🙂  If you follow my facebook stuff, you’ve already seen the first glimpse of the new “Fleuriste” perfume that is all carnations and chilled rose leaves.  I’m really enjoying the modern aspects and variations on the carnation theme and it’s so different from one of my best loved florals:  Oeillets Rouges, which is a warm, honey-kissed carnation.  {By the way, have you noticed the HUGE resurgence of interest in carnation perfumes?  It’s outrageous.  Now that Malmaison, and Blue Carnation are no longer in production and Bellodgia isn’t what it used to be, the carnation lovers are on the hunt for a new love}.  We’ll see how the cool-green / modern Fleuriste fares compared to the classic style of Oeillets Rouges.  I’ll be interested to see.

 

 

 

I’m also really excited that at last (!) we’ve had a stellar lilac season so that I could complete an all natural / all botanical perfume based on the French lilacs that bloom in my front yard and the Persian lilacs that bloom just outside the back door to my studio.  I’ve been working on this design for about 5 years now, since the lilacs in Colorado haven’t fared so well over the past few years {with all of the late Spring snow we get, so many lilac seasons are doomed!}  But this year, even with a Mother’s Day snow storm – Yes, I did say MOTHER’S DAY – we had a fabulous crop and I reveled in their glory.  Anyone who loves lilacs will know that they are heavenly, but oh so temperamental, and vexingly  chameleon-like as the scent changes from the first bloom on the tree, to a later full bloom aroma, as well as how they change their fragrance after they have been picked.  I had to go through many a lilac season to attempt to nail them down into some kind of formula.  It’s been an intoxicatingly wild ride but I’ve arrived at something that *I* think is beautiful.  And really speaks to late Spring in all it’s splendor.  I’ll be writing more about “La Belle Saison” soon.

 

 

For now I’m hoping to spread the love and flowers.  They make me happy and I hope that they do for you as well.  ox

 

image credits: crab apple blossom image, from dsh_artscent; carnation image found here; Persian lilacs and French lilacs images from dsh_artscent.

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