Ingredient History
Every botanical I use carries a long history - traded, prized, fought over, written about for thousands of years. These notes follow the scent back to where its story begins.
In this section
Damask Rose: a thousand blooms in every gram
Stone presses near Samarkand four and a half thousand years ago, Ibn Sina's alembic in the tenth century, and a Bulgarian valley named after its cauldrons. The rose came west slowly, and the arithmetic never got any easier.
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Frankincense Serrata: what stays behind in the still
Frankincense is not one tree, it is about twenty. And the compounds the word has become famous for never reach the oil at all. What Boswellia serrata actually is, and how to read a label that tells you almost nothing.
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Jasmine: the flower that only gives at night
Seven million blossoms to the kilogram, every one picked in the dark. Why jasmine can never be distilled, what hexane-free extraction actually changes, and why the Indian and the Egyptian do not smell the same.
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