Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

  How to Make Perfume – Why I don’t enfleurage golden champaca by  Anya McCoy  |  Aug 28, 2015  |  Anya's Garden Perfumes ,  enfleurage ,  How to Make Perfume ,  natural aromatics ,  natural perfume ,  raw materials of perfumery  |  6 comments When you make perfume from flowers, there are several ways to extract the scent. I love to enfleurage rare flowers. Enfleurage is placing flowers on a bed of semi-hard fat, such as shortening, or rendered leaf lard and suet. The next step in the process is to “wash” the fat in alcohol. This post isn’t about enfleurage, except to point out why I don’t enfleurage a flower that seems ripe for the process. Some flowers, even though they emit a lovely fragrance, shouldn’t be enfleuraged. There are several reasons for this. Orange blossoms are fragile and would fall apart in the enfleurage tray, requiring laborious deleveraging process – picking the petals out, one by one, with tweeze...

Click to enlarge and see the beauty of this morning's harvest from the front of the house at Casa Jasmin, where Anya's Garden Perfumes blooms under the tropical sun. I got this quick harvest this morning before the "big" storm hit, and I just beat it by minutes. The big mixing bowl holds about a gallon of liquid, but in other terms, there are 30 vietnamese gardenias in there (about 3" across for reference), several golden champaca flowers, and the tiny yellow darlings are Aglaia odorata flowers. Into the alcohol tincture for the champacas and aglaias, into the enfleurage tray for the gardenias. I'm so lucky! Oh, the bamboo skewer you see on the right was used to "pollinate" my vanilla orchid flower. Let's see if I get a bean. ;-) The vanilla orchid just started blooming, and I have to go out every day for the one flower a day on the vine to try to get a harvest by hand-pollination. It's fun!