Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

What a glorious day in sunny, warm Miami!  I have a lot of gardening to do today, but I'll be sure to answer your questions about perfumery when I take breaks.  I'll post a photo here later day, showing how my pineapple patch is starting to fruit.  It's very early for this, and I guess it's because we've had a very warm winter.  Usually the pineapples don't start to fruit until late March/April and the fruits are ready to harvest in June/July. There are so many fragrant flowering plants right now, I can hardly keep up with the harvest for tinctures and enfleurage! I hope you saw my post yesterday about the aglaia.  I really wish I could be a virtual Anya Aglaiaseed and get this fragrant wonder into everyone's home!

  It's 79F in Miami right now, and I just came inside after photographing some flowers in the front garden.  I'm going right outside to work on the veggie garden in the back, but I had to stop and share these photos with you.  Jasmines and aglaias are easy to grow indoors.  Have I tempted you to get some for yourself? The underside of the glorious Jasmine grandiflorum has a slight pink tinge, hinted at in the unopened bud, below.  I so adore this plant!  I don't harvest the ones from my garden for enfleurage or tincture anymore, I just like to enjoy them scenting the air in my garden. This is a big cluster of aglaia odorata flowers.  I cannot urge you strongly enough to grow this!  Even if you're in a studio apartment, you can easily grow this carefree, extremely fragrant plant.  Each cluster panicle of flowers you see is a little bigger than a thumb.  The flowers are tiny, but their scent "throws" out about 30 ft or 10 meters!  They don't' g

I'm beginning a weekly series about frankincense for a number of reasons: 1.  I love the resin warmed in an incense heater. 2.  I love the essential oils from all the various species. 3.  It was probably the first plant harvested for its fragrance, for incense. 4.  It was probably the first plant made into unguents, and used medicinally. 5.  It is, according to some sources, on a path towards endangered status, for various reasons. 6.  My friend Trygve, of Enfleurage NYC, lives in Oman, takes hundreds of pictures, and has shared them with me, and I'll share them with you.  PS. She makes frankincense ice cream! 7.  I have a tiny sapling of Boswellia sacra, and I call "him" Baby Franco.  I'll chronicle his growth here. 8.  Two types of frankincense, an oil and a resinoid, form the base of my Light perfume.  The frankincense highlights and bridges the various citruses used in Light, and makes for a seamless, long-lasting cologne. Here are true "hojar

"Love the Guild" membership event - Now through February 14, 2012   We'd like to invite you to join the Natural Perfumers Guild during one of our rare membership events.  Now through February 14th, all new members will enjoy 12% off the membership fee, and will be eligible for the drawing of natural perfumery-related gifts. Please visit http://naturalperfumers.com and use the code 1B6DE36B0C for the discount. The Natural Perfumers Guild is an international organization dedicated to all aspect of natural aromatics - history, growing, distillation and extraction, supply, regulations, perfumers, associates, suppliers and friends.  Now in our fifth year, the Guild boasts a dynamic community discussion forum, several committees that address issues and opportunities and high Internet visibility due to several successful and thought-provoking blogging events such as the Mystery of Musk, Outlaw Perf

If you have bits of essential oils and absolutes made from some of the flowers and fragrant leaves above - aglaia, roses, stocks, frangipanis, eucalyptus, carnations, chrysanthemums, citrus leaves - don't fret over bad mods, bits left in the bottom of the bottle - make Millefleurs! Here's a very helpful tip to the beginning student, and perhaps even experienced perfumers may find this useful.  Waste not, want not! Millefleurs - French, def: a thousand flowers. The definition from my Natural Perfumery Institute's textbook: Millefleurs – A Creative Use of Aromatic Odds and Ends Millefleurs is an industry term for the creative reuse of bits of unused or slightly degraded oils and dilutions, where any left over amounts of aromatics or discarded blends are poured into a bottle together for later use, rather than being thrown away.  This creates an impromptu, happenstance mélange that often smells quite nice.  It can be used as a room spray, put into a diffuser, used t

A busy Sunday is in store: tying up a zillion loose ends for the Love the Guild project, still thanking all the respondants on Facebook who replied with love and loyalty to the statement below, planting veggies, visiting mother and giving up on my mimosa enfleurage project, going for the tincture instead.  My blooming mimosa tree Acaci farnesiana I'll be here until 10 PM tonight EST to answer your perfumery questions.  Hope you have a great Sunday! ----------- Here's my FB post: May I ask a favor of you, and I rarely ask favors, so please bear with me. Would it be possible that you "share" and "like" when I post about the course I teach or the Guild? Why? Last year on this date, someone decided to try to harm my businesses, and a lot of behind the scenes maneuvers were done for months to try to make my businesses less competitive. I decided to wait it out, not take any action, and to take the high road. It took a lot for me to open

It's lovely that Amberess awoke the food and scent awareness of Sigrun, a lovely blogger from Sweden.  Check out her review of Amberess and see if you want to duplicate her experience! Amberess and Light were launched as part of the Natural Perfumers Guild Outlaw Perfume project in 2010

htttp://PerfumeClasses.com The Natural Perfumery Institute's textbook for the basic course in perfumery was edited so that students who are not native English speakers could easily follow the information and instructions presented.  The technical editor I hired previously worked for Microsoft and Boeing, writing manuals for engineers from all over the world.  Engineers are known for their ability to pick apart and question what is presented to them, honing the written word down to its most precise and understandable form.  As you can see by my writing, I'm not so precise, so I knew I needed Andrine's expertise.  She's also a natural perfumer and alchemist, so I had the best of both worlds when rewriting my original textbook into its present form. Here is an excerpt from the textbook, instructing the student how to make dilutions.  The student has already read about the type of bottles, droppers, scale, etc., for this exercise, and now the student has the equipment b

http://PerfumeClasses.com In Module Two of the Natural Perfumery Institute's textbook, I introduce the students to the differences between aromatic groups and fragrance families.  It is mandatory that the students understand the characteristics of aromatic groups before they move forward in their studies.  Committing the aromatic group's essences to their scent memory allows them to concisely and correctly identify not only the aromatic group oils they study in the course, but to have that knowledge of the characteristics to allow them to independently identify what group an aromatic is placed when they come across a new one in the future.  Once they fully understand this, they move on to what I term a "Certain Perfumer" - one who is certain about their choices and how to defend their naming an aromatic according to the group it belongs in. After that, fragrance families are a piece of cake!  Fragrance families are an invention of the perfume industry.  They're

Sharing Their Story - an occasional series hosted by Anya McCoy.  Featuring the accomplished and  creative members of the Natural Perfumers Guild, the series is debuting with one of the lights of aromatherapy, and a pioneer in natural perfumery, Victoria Edwards of California and France.  Alongside Chrissie Wildwood and Mindy Green, two other accomplished aromatherapists, the three are, to my knowledge, the only aromatherapists who wrote about natural perfumery, and called it natural perfumery, in the 1990s. Visionary and prolific in the art of aromatherapy, please enjoy Victoria Edwards, in her own words:  I love this photo of Victoria, taken in France.  Doesn't she look like a good friend, animated and in high spirits, relating a story?  Well, this is her story. Biography of Victoria Edwards I was born in Chicago, grew up in Louisiana, my mothers family is from New Orleans. My Father is Swiss and I lived in Germany and Switzerland from 4 to 10 years old. My family

Is 2012 the year you will take the big step and enroll in natural perfumery studies?  Since 2005, I have witnessed the phenomenal growth in the number of natural perfumers and the integration of them into mainstream perfumery.  Many reviewers now say that they will judge a perfume on its merits, not whether it's composed of all-natural ingredients or contains synths.  This is a huge step for us natural perfumers, because in 2005, the opposite was true.  Natural perfumes have come a long way in being accepted on one major criteria: they smell great. I began teaching basic perfumery in 2007, because members of the natural perfumery group I host on yahoo demanded it of me.  It was good they did, because I had not shared 30 years of accumulated knowledge since I started studying the art.   I had started a natural perfumery line in 1991, Anya's Tropical Essences, and in 2006, I launched Anya's Garden Perfumes. The perfumes were lauded for sophistication and professionalism, when

Miami gardens have a slow season, too.  Still, there is beauty to share.  Today I was going to spray my Angel's Trumpet with a pyrethrin spray because I noticed white flies on it.  Imagine my surprise when I found ladybugs!  I've never "inoculated" the garden with ladybugs, figuring they fly away just as soon as they're released.  These dear little things found my organic garden on their own, and I'm blessed.  They're having a white fly feast! One of many ladybugs on the Angel Trumpet leaf.  I think the brown marks are made by the ladybugs, but that's OK, they're eating the white flies, so they can do their little bit of damage, it'll be replaced by new leaves. Here are some of the Angel Trumpets the lady bugs are saving. Pretty for a January day, eh? First time I've ever noticed a fruit on the Aglaia odorata tree.  You can see the tiny flower bods to the left.  The tree is ready to burst into bloom! The HUGE hibis

I slept in really late today, until 10 a.m.  Must be the joy still spilling over into my dreamland that kept me from wanting to wake up, a "hangover" from the wonderful "Joy in January" project. If you missed it, the kickoff was Monday here . Any questions for me this warm and beautiful day in Miami.  I hope to get some gardening in this afternoon, after I bottle up the boronia absolute that arrived last week in the yearly Guild group buy.  It's especially gorgeous this year, soft and spicy, sparkling and golden with the freesia-like topnotes. Yummy!

I'm so pleased to announce the winners of the three random drawings in the Joy in January blog event of the Natural Perfumers Guild Day 1 winner of 15mls of Light EdP - HollyF Day 2 winner of four Food & Drink oils - Dana Day 3 winner of the complete set of 12 of my perfume samples - Hemla Please write to me by midnight, June 21st to claim your prize. Thanks again to everyone for helping the Guild bring a little Joy in January by sharing your storie!