Why Natural?

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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