Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

The price of patchouli essential oil has skyrocketed in the past year. An crucial and historic scent in perfume and body care products, various issues have conspired to create a shortage and suppliers and formulators are scrambling to control cost increases in their products. I know I'm an eternal optimist. I also have a strong background in ethnobotany, economic botany and agriculture. I specialized in tropical and subtropical agriculture in my studies, keep this in mind when you check out the You Tube link, below. In 2005, a team from Haiti met with the President of Rwanda to propose a Patchouli project. There is a series of five videos on You Tube recording the process of establishing a patchouli essential oil industry in Rwanda by the movers and shakers of this project. The videos are educational and uplifting. I am very aware of he political and military turmoils of Rwanda, having several close friends who traveled there in the aftermath and are helping with the rebuilding. Re

This photo was taken at the press party for the 10th Annual Bob Marley Caribbean Music Festival. It was the last year I worked as the PR person for the event, as perfumery business took more and more of my time. You can read more about Mother B here on Myspace I wish I knew how to work Myspace to leave a message, but I don't so I'll write here. Mother B was like a second mother to me and probably thousands of others. She spread her joy and wisdom and kindness to every soul she met, and she will be sorely missed. As I call friends today to tell them the news, and even as I told my own mother, I choked up and couldn't speak. I put a page up 10 years ago that hosts a photo I took of Mother B the night I met her in 1996. It remains one of my favorite photos of her, regal on her birthday throne, radiating her love out. Peace and joy and rest Mother B, now you are in Zion with Bob and Anthony.

One of my earliest scent memories is the fresh, uplifting scent of lavender soap. I know I liberally splashed on Yardley English Lavender cologne from about age 10 or so, when I got my first bottle. Always floral, herbal and clean, it's always has made me smile. It's one of the few "unisex" scents meaning men and women use it with no thought associations that it is more relevant to the opposite sex. For example, many men may balk at wearing a rose scent, but not lavender. I have about 20 different extracts of lavender in my perfumer's organ: organic essential oils from South Africa, England and the United States; conventioanlly farmed essential oils from all over the world; high altitude from the French Alps; absolutes and concretes from several different countries and several different species other than the most common one I'm discussing here, which is Lavandula vera aka L. angustifolia. I dilute them out to evaluate them, and I find one emotional thread run

I recently attended an online webinar that addressed natural flavors and fragrances and one of the topics discussed was " developing realistic definitions of what is, and is not, natural ." First, as a lead-in they talked about the various ins and outs of the word "organic", how it is defined and the legislation that governs that word. The various agencies that have a piece the action as far as defining "organic" is large, varied, international, and (typically) non-binding. I'm deliberately vague because that definition is a related, but different subject from what I wish to cover here. The term organic seems rather fluid at times to me, and to write about it would keep me blogging for days, so I will pass on that effort. The word natural in the flavor and fragrance industries is unregulated at this time. That means that any company, for any reason, can label a product natural in an effort to market to the yoga moms and other marketing demographic that

Click the image to enlarge it for viewing My entry in the Memory and Desire project was posted last night . I'll wait a few days to see the comments and answer them here, as that forum is just for reader comments, not perfumer-answers-the-readers comments. Thanks so much to Heather, she's a peach for all the effort and intellect she put into this monumental Internet project.

Below is a letter I just received from Tony Burfield of Cropwatch. Feel free to redistribute it. Dear All, Citrus Oils: the Situation Cropwatch is directly opposing IFRA's Risk Assessment on furanocoumarins, and its proposals to severely restrict citrus oil usage in cosmetics products. Unfortunately, because of the lack of transparency exercised by RIFM, IFRA and the EU Commission over this matter. it means that unless you, dear reader, belong to a professional association, probably won't get to see IFRA's information letter IL799 on the topic, or the Risk Assessment that the EU Commission was given in late 2007 by IFRA. IFRA have apparently suggested a cosy future chat with the EU Commissioners, some unnamed industry moguls and fragrance consumers (presumably IFRA or RIFM members) to 'explain matters' - presumably code for agreeing their highly restrictive citrus oil proposals (see below) with the EU regulator. Nobody with an independent or contrary opinion is to

My gigantic plant of Jasmine sambac Duke of Tuscany is starting to bloom. This sambac is slow growing and has huge - for jasmine huge I should qualify - flowers about the size of a tiny carnation, full of tightly-packed petals and the most tender non-indolic jasmine scent ever. I just adore it! I just plucked the first blossom of the season from it today, and left one on for the birds and lizards to enjoy ;-) It's full of about-to-open buds, and I hope I have some to bring to the lunch tomorrow of the Miami NP crew so they can enjoy it. I coined the organoleptic term "tender" and I have to add that to the Aromatic Lexicon on the evaluation sheet my students use. So many of the home-grown jasmines I have become "tender" upon tincturing. Sigh. They're just so lovely, tender, powdery, soft, sweet and delicious. April and May are the big jasmine blooming months here in Miami, not August and September as they are in India and France. Don't know the reason fo

Click on the photo for enlarged view Long before the marketers and perfume houses got savvy, a display spilled the coal, er, the beans: the source of many of the synthetic aromachemicals used in perfumery since the 1880's were made from coal or petroleum sources. The lady in the photo seems to be raising a glass lid over a container that holds scent strips of the coal-derived scent, and the glass jars on top hold the natural materials of fragrance. I can identify rose and jasmine in the jars. Not much else to say about this, just that I do prefer the complexity, richness, sustainability and beauty of natural aromatics.

Luca Turin, perfume critic, author of the soon-to-be-released The Perfume Guide just wrote about a custom perfume he had made by Dominique Dubrana of Italy . We in the Guild know him as a Professional Perfumer who prefers to be called Salaam, a longtime member of my Yahoo Natural Perfumery group and Guild member. His keen insights and helpful comments offered in our private group always have a ring of experience and clarity, and he gets to the soul of the matter with ease. Turin found it refreshing that Salaam did not require a questionnaire about astrological sign, personality traits, or other psychological items that are so often the tool of the custom perfumer. Instead Turin got to choose the raw materials from a list. The resultant perfume has increased the openly-skeptical Turin's opinion of what a perfume made only with natural ingredients can be - and we must thank Salaam for that. Additionally, Salaam is the only natural perfumer included in Turin's new book, anothe

More Debunking of Bad Science from Tony Burfield of Cropwatch I've known Natural Perfumers Guild member Tony Burfield of Cropwatch for about ten years now. We "met" in online forums on aromatherapy, where we, and many others were real "safety nuts." All this precedes the recent upsurge in interest in niche perfumers creating fragrances in their (often unregulated) studios. At the time we were alarmed at the new folks flooding into the aromatherapy world, enticed with, and in love with, natural aromatics. Often they had no idea of maximum allowable usage rates and surrounding safety issues. Natural aromatics do have some risk factors, depending upon the chemical composition of the aromatic and the rate at which it is used in a blend. Some are fairly innocuous. Others can permanantly scar you with Berloque dermatitis markings, which look like dark, blotchy birthmarks. Others may cause blistering rashes, itching and lifelong sensitization. A few cause allergenic re