Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

 Originally published Sept. 22, 2013 There’s a saying in the natural lifestyle world: “Can you eat….so and so” meaning is the lotion or body care product made with pure and natural ingredients? I was reminded of this recently when someone interested in buying my perfume wrote me several times, asking specific questions about the ingredients. I answered each email, also telling her to check out my Ingredients page. She then sent another email asking if I used undenatured alcohol. Of course, I do, and I wondered why she wasn’t finding the answers on my website. I discovered the Ingredients page was listed last on the menu, so I moved it up to the #4 position. I want customers to know that the ingredients in my perfumes are so pure, they could eat them. Rose, citrus, jasmine – all are good enough to eat – or drink. I’m not saying you should ‘eat’ my perfumes, although I do remember Maria Browning of Bitter Grace Notes blog and Elena Vosnaki of Perfume Shrine blog musing online about u...

 Originally published Dec. 16, 2012 The flower of Dracaena fragrans Massangeana is ugly-looking, no way about it, but WOW! it fills the nighttime air with an intoxicating, heady, narcotic, sweet scent.  I opened the front door tonight to put check out the jasmine vine as I put on the light, and was enveloped in the incredible fragrance.  I have a huge plant in the front garden, off to the side, partially hidden by other plants.  That’s why I’m always surprised every December when it fills the street with this scent – yes, it travels about 100′ in every direction. You may know this plant and its unstriped cousins as ‘corn plant’, a common office plant.  It takes total neglect – no water, fertilizer, etc. I used to harvest the flowers and tincture the petals for a perfume base, but no more.  it’s just too labor-intensive. See, I have to pluck the tiny, tiny petals off the calyx, because the calyx stinks if put in alcohol. I still have a stash of it for custom...

Hyacinth tincture, signifying springtime renewal In December of 2012 I stopped posting my blog here and instead transferred the existing archive of these blog posts over to my websites at both anyasgarden.com and perfumeclasses.com .  Well who's to say people can't change their mind and want to reverse an action? It was quite an effort to find a way to log back in here and it took me quite a while but here I am! I will shortly begin the laborious test of bringing the blog posts from 2012 to 2020 back here.  The reason they only go to 2020 is because in April of 2020 I finished the very laborious job of redesigning my perfume course website perfumeclasses.com and we all really sunk into the pandemic and I just decided to take it easy and look to other interests for a while. We all dealt with it in our own separate ways mine was still perfume related but not so much as being in the public eye . In the future I will duplicate my blogs on all...

  Anya's Garden Perfumes - Free Christmas Tree Scent Room Candy Wax Melt  It's my way of thanking my customers and giving back with a unique, limited-edition fragrance product. The scent of a fir balsam holiday tree is so beautiful! I miss the scent in my home because I have cats and well, you know what a cat-astrophe that can be with a tree in the house. As I blended and hand-poured the Room Candy limited edition Fir Tree wax melts I was happy with the thought that these would be my giveaway to 25 lucky customers. Leave a note with any order that you would like a Room Candy Fir Tree wax melt and it will be included in your order, for free! (a $12 value) Each melt can be relit again and again and will provide many hours of holiday delight. You must have a tea-light burner for these, and observe typical precautions with any flame product. A safe holiday is a happy holiday! (So is a fir balsam-scented holiday!) 25% Holiday Discount...

This photo was taken the weekend my mother had major surgery.  Though sniffing the beauty of the peach-scented frangipani (plumeria) I can see the sorrow and worry I'm trying to hide. Flowers are a blessing and a comfort in times of pain, that is why we bring them to people who are ill. My entire garden is a comfort zone, full of scent and beauty. I have some huge cuttings of this particular frangipani and I'll give them free to anyone in Miami.  Just email me and we'll make arrangements. Part of the front garden next to the walkway was giving me a lot of problems with weeds.  Despite my new landscape guy insisting on weed killer spray, I persisted in using a scuffle hoe.  It took two months to finally get the persistant nutgrass to give up, but it has!  I have some fragrant plants and pretty annuals that will go in there soon. Fall is the time of renewal in Miami, when most of North America is harvesting and and putting their garden to sleep, we're a...

Not the prettiest picture I've ever posted, but working with oakmoss isn't pretty! On the left you can see the slurry oozing out of the bottle neck a bit - and on the right, the primordial reception pool.  Plop, plop. Lisa asked a question in my weekly "Ask the Perfumer" forum yesterday, and it is timely.  She asked about the safety of oakmoss, a known sensitizer. I need some more for my Outlaw fragrance wax melts in my Room Candy line.  They contain oakmoss, bergamot and lime - yummy chypre!  I am also getting my assistant ready to pour a lot of kits for my students and customers, and bottle of 3% oakmoss dilution is included. Anyway, I'm sensitized to it, but I know people who could bathe in the stuff and not have a problem. Besides the sensitization, my problem with oakmoss and other thick aromatics, even those that don't cause a problem for me, and that is that suppliers still bottle them in narrow-necked bottles that require a lot of warming to sem...

I'll be here until 10 PM ET to answer your questions about perfumery, and in the meantime read my update, below, including a giveaway of my latest launch, Patchouli Silk ! This has been my laziest summer ever!  Now it's time to get seriously back into the perfumery world.  I'll have Prima Rosa , a perfume, to release in October.  I may only release one perfume a year, because that pace, to me, seems "right".  I will be releasing Room Candy , my line of 100% organic and natural room fragrance wax tarts, later this month, as soon as the packaging is finalized.  The response from my newsletter readers who received samples of Room Candy has been very positive, with kudos for "long lasting", "the scent fills my big house" and "love the fragrance". Now, for a surprise - luxury bar soap!  The first soap launched will be Patchouli Silk .  100% natural, exceptionally creamy and yes, it feels silky and will leave your skin silky - and perf...

The paper captures the deep teal of the tropical waters that surround Miami and the lush botanicals that go into the Anya's Garden perfumes The new custom tissue paper for Anya's Garden Perfume has arrived.  It will look gorgeous with my boxes and satin bags. 

Organic Room Candy - First 100 Percent Natural Fragrance Wax Melts Released by Anya Garden Perfumes  For Immediate Release MIAMI SHORES, Fla./EWORLDWIRE/Aug. 1, 2012 --- Miami-based natural perfumer Anya McCoy once again leads the trends in natural perfumery by launching 100 percent ambient room fragrances in wax melt form. Room Candy takes the latest hottest product on the market and adapts it using 100 percent natural ingredients. Organic beeswax is the wax of choice for this entry into the ambient fragrance line for this is a world-renowned perfumer who is the president of the Natural Perfumers Guild and Director of the Natural Perfumery Institute. Pure essential oils and absolute oils provide the scent for this groundbreaking line of wax melts, also known as wax tarts and wickless candles. McCoy hand-pours the fragrant blend into vintage candy molds she has collected. Testing the wax melts, she discovered that they diffused scent over a 300-square-foot r...

Ruffled, delicate Summerscent blooms Do you love the fragrance of blooming michelia or ylang ylang flowers?  Then you'll love this pretty flowering plant, sometimes called Summerscent or dwarf tree jasmie.  Radermachera kunming is a rare plant, not often found in garden centers.  It starts blooming when only 1 - 2' tall, and mine little plant in a pot is full of blooms and buds.  The sweet scent, and at least now, with it's first big summer flush of flowers, doesn't smell like jasmine.  It's much more like the piercing sweet floral fruity scent of michelia or ylang ylang flowers. It has large cluster of buds ready to open when the current flowers fade.  I'm going to start picking the flowers for enfleurage today. Summerscent is loaded with juicy buds ready to follow in a fragrant succession of blooms Seeing that it's native to Thailand, it is a tropical plant, and you either need to live in a tropical or subtropical area to grow it outside, or have...

I intended to write the backstory of the Guild's vote on the adopted definition of natural isolates today because of the press release going out today, but it's a huge post, and I need to proof it.  In the meantime, I wanted to offer you this eye candy of roses and their scents just for the sheer enjoyment of it. They're from Martha Steward magazine, and I found them floating on the internet.

Dear readers: you have until midnight tonight, Apr 23, to sign up.  Alert for those who love beautiful natural aromatics: this week I'm going to have an incredible sale on golden boronia absolute. IF you can find it elsewhere, the price is much, much higher than what I'll be offering the 4mls for. This will be offered to my newsletter subscribers only, so please sign up at: http://anyasgarden.com/signup.htm

Last year Trygve of Enfleurage asked me if I was growing Quisqualis in my fragrant garden.  She knew I grew and harvested fragrant flowers leaves and roots for scent extraction.  The distillations, tinctures and enfleurage washes are made from my garden bounty and find their way into my perfumes.  At first the name didn't register, then I remembered Rangoon Creeper, a vine that is almost a weed here in South Florida. It can spread aggressively, covering trees and buildings! I decided to give it a try, on a length of fence on the far side of my property, a place that doesn't get any supplemental irrigation.  Within one year, the vine is about 25' long, and is setting out spreader branches in several directions.  I'll prune it to keep in check, and in the meantime, I'm enjoy the nighttime/early morning fragrance of the thousands of flowers blooming.  I'm growing the single-flowers variety, and there is a double-flowered variety available.  The double-f...

An industrial designer has come up with an interesting concept: jewelry as a perfume bottle.  I like that the little sprayer is in the necklace.  I don't care for the modern, stark design, but that's subjective.  http://www.industrialdesignserved.com/gallery/Perfume-flacon-as-a-jewellery/2402374  I can see one big flaw in this design.  The original concept is good, but as you use the perfume, the amount in the "jewel" piece goes down, as it would in a bottle.  Might not be so attractive then.  That's one reason I never added necklaces with glass pendants to hold perfume.  To me, it would just look strange to have a half-full pendant.  Do you agree?

I believe I was the first perfumer in American to grow and harvest the Aglaia tree, aka the Chinese Perfume Tree, and I've been extracting the scent from the tiny flowers for about four years now. I've shown the flowers in other photos previously on this blog, but I don't believe I ever showed them with another object that would put them in scale.  Notice how tiny the panicle of flowers are, and how tiny each flower is.  The latest harvest is the first one where I've ever been able to clip a group of panicles, rather than just grab the individual panicles at the base and strip off the flowers.  This is because the tree has started to produce clumps of panicles, and I just snip off the clump, along with some leaves, as you can see.   The 3/4-full quart jar of aglaia flower tincture has been added to about three dozen times, the typical number for a traditional French enfleurage, even though, of course, this is not enfleurage.  It's just ...

When I opened my front door this morning, greeted by a rush of fragrance from my Chinese perfume tree, Aglaia odorata, I was pleasantly surprised when I looked to my left, and about 40 feet away, saw a large white crane sniffing the Confederate jasmine Trachleospermum jasminoides.  I rushed inside to get my camera, and when I quietly walked down the path to get a closer shot, the crane slowly moved away.  So, all I have is a photo of the solitary crane, and a shot of the jasmine, but put his beak into the flowers (in your mind) and you'll see what I saw :-)

The Chinese Perfume Tree is full of fragrant flowers, each the size of a matchhead, with a scent intensity that is HUGE.  This little tree can scent the entire garden. The peach-scented frangipanis are in full bloom, bursting out of dormancy. The big round shrub in the background is Jasmine azoridum, covered with flowers. A closeup of the end cluster of frangipanis on the tree pictured above.  We had a lot of rain this morning, and the flowers are loving it.  See the little spider web on the right?  I'll bet the spider is having fun in the rain.

I've been searching for over a year.  I hate to shop.  I scoured stores in Dade and Broward counties looking for the perfect display cabinet for my perfume bottle collection, my vintage vault bottle collection and perfume accessories.  Nada.  Dark wood is all the style here in South Florida, which confounds me.  It was just impossible to find anything in a light wood. My floors are red oak - stunning.  I love golden oak, and I found this cabinet on sale, online, and it's perfect.  I love the sliding doors, the halogen lights and it locks, too.  It'll take six weeks to get here, but I'm a very patient person, and I'm happy about the cabinet.  When you open my front door, it'll be on the opposite wall, the first thing you'll see upon entering my house.  What do you think of this beautiful cabinet?

After roses, I'll bet that orange blossoms, when in season, are the next most popular flower in a bridal bouquet.  Sweet yet seductive, the orange blossom has persisted through the centuries as a floral symbol of love.  Neroli, the distilled essence of the flower, if cherished for its ability to raise the spirits by generally providing an uplifting, beautiful aroma. My vintage neroli treasure comes from Lautier et Fils, a Grasse-based perfumerie and distillery dating back to the 18th Century.  I have found bits and pieces of the history of this well-regarded company on the Internet, most of it in French.  This was the only bottle from them I ever found.  When I took it from the refrigerator to photograph the other day, the glue had dried up, and the majority of the label started to fall to the floor.  As I reached to catch it, due to its age, it broke into pieces.  Using perhaps not the best solution, in a panic, I used tiny bits of double-stick glue...

I need to photo-document all of the jasmines growing at my home here in Miami, Florida.  If you're visiting this blog, use Casa Jasmin to search for images.  I'm inaugurating this topic today, Feb. 8, 2012, but I have published many photos of the many fragrant plants, not just the jasmines, that I grow here.  I'm not up-to-date yet on coding the search for the entire blog, so maybe the search term flower will suffice in the meantime. I took this photo yesterday morning of two stupendous Jasminium grandiflorum flowers by my front door.  I took out the Jasminium auriculatum that grew up the wrought-iron pillar, and transplanted the J. grandi in its place.  I'm going to cut it back in March to encourage a strong topgrowth over the summer. Click to enlarge. Isn't this photo almost a bit surreal?  I feel the jasmines glowing, giving out energy. The green mound in the background is Jasminium sambac var Maid of Orleans, the jasmine used to perfume tea and rice...