The Library

Traditionally Perfumes were made from natural ingredients. They
were concentrated version of the most beautiful smells from the
natural world, made from things such as tree resins and flowers.
The people who made the ingredients were often families with
generations of experience, who'd spent decades perfecting the
processes of extracting the various oils and absolutes from the
flowers and resins....

Deep heady rose oil from Morocco, Lavender from the fields of
France, exotic Labdanum resin from a wild growing bush on the
island of Crete....perfume houses in Europe were filled with
tantalizing bottles of strange potions and tree resins and
lovingly combined to make sweet smelling toiletries.

Modern perfumery is a bit different. It started in the early part
of this century when modern chemistry started to play a dominant
part in our lives. Chemists in big labs started to combine
fragrance chemicals, to create ever new, intense and of course
cheaper versions of the ancient oils and resins used in perfumery.
And the modern toiletry manufacturers started to use them almost
exclusively.

The result is what you smell in your modern department stores.
Even the expensive French designer perfumes are nowadays made from
predominantly artificially created chemical scent compounds.

If you speak to a modern perfumer, they will tell you that this is
first of all because they are cheaper. Most of the cost in
designing a modern perfume is in the actual advertising and
packaging. And the cost of the scent itself has to be kept to a
minimum to make up for this. The other reason is that you can
create scents that you would never find in nature with chemical
compounds, and the market strives to ever outdo it's competition
by offering "new" and stronger scents that will last for days and
overshadow all other smells around them.

Personally I think we have lost something incredibly precious in
the process. No chemist in the world can recreate the depth and
magic of true Rose absolute. The natural scent chemistry of a
flower such as jasmine or rose is made up of an amazing collection
of hundreds of elements, which change from season to season and
the place it is grown in. And perhaps more importantly, our bodies
developed alongside the plants of this world, and our body
chemistry is designed to work with natural elements. Many of the
chemical compounds used in modern perfumes don't break down and
like pesticides, build up in our bodies over the years with long
term consequences that we are only just beginning to understand.
Many people also report increasing allergies to modern perfumes too.

But beyond that, many many people simply dislike the artificial
scents we are constantly surrounded by.

I can still remember the amazement I felt the first time I smelt
real Damask Rose absolute. I was 15 years old and until then, the
only rose perfumes I had encountered were Yardley "Rose" eau de
toilette and similar...I opened the tiny bottle of sticky, deep
orangey brown absolute, and suddenly I was transported into a
field full of roses under the hot Moroccan summer sun....it was
mind blowing! Here was the deep, tantalizing depth, the layers
upon layers of different elements from sugary sweet, to playfully
citrusy and back to velvety deep musk I remembered from burying
my nose in my mothers fresh picked Papa Mailand roses as a child!

I was in heaven! And at the start of a lifelong passion to
discover and reawaken the ancient art of Natural Perfumery.

Here on our site you will find an ever-growing library full of
information about the many beautiful fragrant plants used in
natural perfumery, as well as our own exclusive collection of
Perfumes created from them. Have a read and a browse, and Enjoy!

Ambrosia

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