Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

  The ecological wonder of The Great Green Wall by  Anya McCoy  |  Jan 10, 2018  |  Anya's Garden Perfumes  |  0 comments Forty years ago, my husband got funding for his Ph.D. under the USA Department of AID. In return, we were going to move to Dakar, Senegal for a few years to pay back the money for the education. I was studying plant science, ethnobotany, and anthropology at the time, and did a lot of research to prepare for the move. As an avid supporter of the  Appropriate Technology  movement and an agriculturist with a keen interest in arid and semi-arid tropical plants, I was ready to work at some form of halting the southward spread of the Sahara Desert into Sub-Sahelian Africa. The US AID did not require us to go to Senegal for some reason, but my love of the region that developed due to all my research never stopped. Some time ago I discovered the incredible project known as  The Great Green Wall . Stretching from Senegal on the west coast, the effort was focused on plant

  Modern techniques for making perfume by  Anya McCoy  |  Jan 7, 2018  |  Anya's Garden Perfumes ,  Healthy perfume ,  How to Make Perfume ,  Hydrosols ,  study perfumery  |  2 comments Perfumers need to be savvy about how to provide a safe product to their customers. Perfume bottles and lab equipment can arrive from the factory with contaminants such as dust, bits of odds and ends (like paper), pesticides (from warehouse spraying), and other assorted things that need to be removed before filling or shipping. If you’re into making perfume or perfume products, you should read this. Isn’t the New Year all about making good choices, and upping your game? Making sure you offer a sanitized (or more) product should be a goal for every perfumer. Trio of Anya’s Garden Perfumes – bottles and caps washed before filling to meet sanitary standards I’m a bit of an OCD germaphobe to begin with, so making my product containers either sanitary, disinfected, or sterile (depending on the end use) is

  Hydrosols: The Tipping Point is Safety! by  Anya McCoy  |  Nov 2, 2017  |  Hydrosols ,  raw materials of perfumery  |  1 comment I purchased my first hydrosol in 1989, a lovely gallon of Rosa damascena from the May 1989 Turkish harvest. The well-known aromatherapist must have given directions on storage and use, but I don’t recall them. I still have some of that hydrosol, archived for decades in a refrigerator, brought out now and then to sniff, or transfer a bit to a sterile sprayer for use on the tips of my hair. No sign of microbial growth, the main problem with hydrosols, but I am aware that sometimes the growth does not show up as dark swirls or gunk on the bottom of the bottle, it can be invisible. For readers who aren’t familiar with what hydrosols are, they’re the water from distillation, and they contain water-soluble aromatics of the plant. Many now distill just for the hydrosol, which is a slightly different process from distilling for essential oils, wherein hydrosols are

  Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin now under $20! by  Anya McCoy  |  Nov 2, 2017  |  How to Make Perfume ,  natural aromatics ,  natural perfumery course ,  Natural Perfumery Yahoo group ,  raw materials of perfumery  |  3 comments In 2003, a member of the Natural Perfumery group I host on Yahoo got in touch with the folks at Allured Publishing (Now Allured Business Media) and asked them if they could make the Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin (PFMNO) book available aside from the three-volume set written by Steffen Arctander. The other two volumes held little interest to natural perfumers since they were on the subject of synthetics. The hardback version of Steffen Arctander’s Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin It was very difficult to find the PFMNO on eBay or other places for less than a small fortune, often around $700. I had snagged a book for $117 on UK eBay from a retired perfume chemist, but that was a rare score. Allured responded positiv

STRANGE MAGIC PERFUME A perfume of color-changeable tinctures from an organic garden in Miami, Florida. Read about a giveaway of this perfume, below. The sustainable, cold-process extraction process of plant fragrance debuts Launched May 31, 2017 Anya McCoy, perfumer, botanist, and founder of Anya’s Garden Perfumes in Miami has released Strange Magic, the first perfume composed of about 95% organic fragrant tinctures. Strange Magic is made with tinctures that reveal hidden colors in the flowers, leaves, and roots when they were placed in the alcohol. Anya has tinctured for herbal purposes for forty years, and for perfume purposes for twenty years. It wasn’t until she dropped snow-white Michelia alba flowers into the alcohol and saw the alcohol turn pink, then red, then dark red that she realized there were some hidden secrets in some flowers – Strange Magic. White champaca flowers turn a gorgeous red in alcohol The magic appeared a few years ago when she dropped a handful of white Mich

  A Modern Perfume Organ by  Anya McCoy  |  Apr 2, 2017  |  Anya McCoy ,  Anya's Garden Perfumes ,  How to Make Perfume ,  natural aromatics ,  natural perfume ,  natural perfumery course ,  Natural Perfumery Institute ,  raw materials of perfumery  |  7 comments I started collection essential oils and absolutes in 1966. At the time, I didn’t know my bottles of aromatics were supposed to be arranged on a tiered shelf called a perfume organ. Because I was a botanist, I categorized them by the part of the plant they were extracted from: florals, woods, leaves, etc., and kept them in plastic boxes for storage. Later, I had a beautiful old wooden printer’s tray, which, when attached to a wall, provided a lovely display for the small bottles, but was impractical for working, and, of course, didn’t hold the larger bottles. In 1990 or so, I stored my perfume organ in a beautiful Thai display case. Anya McCoy with Thai display cabinet holding perfume organ oils I finally located a man in K