Banana Cream Flower ☽•☾ natural perfume
a l c h e m y ☽•☾
Banana pudding and gardenia ice cream. Banana blossoms, cananga custard, milk pie, vanilla instant, star jasmine - banana milk shake. Rum, epoxy, civet and cinnamon dust. Banana Cream Flower is a gourmand whip with tropical fruit and flower head. It features my long term organic tinctures of: Cavendish bananas, true cinnamon bark, vanilla beans from Tahiti and Madagascar, and old stock civet. The fresh banana milk droplets from my tincture collect on the petals of gardenia, star jasmine, ylang, and other tropical flowers in shades of yellow cream. The star jasmine and gardenia are my homemade extraits from enfleurage. My handmade banana absolute lends baked banana bread to the animalic base, which is pulpy with indole and ripe flesh.
Banana Cream Flower is set in organic alcohol. Available in a sample size of 1ml (25 drops), which comes in a glass sample vial with applicator. Or choose from larger 3ml, 5ml or 10ml clear glass vials with atomizers. Or a 10ml frosted glass roller ball, convenient for travel. Please make your selection from the menu.
Suggested fixatives: Amber, Animalic, Botanical Musk, Gourmand, Hay, Hive, Powdery, Spicy, Tea, Tobacco. Wild Veil's natural perfume fixatives act as primers for the skin. Applied prior to perfumes, they can extend the longevity of your fragrance.
Amber fixative contains classically amber base notes from my handmade resinoids that I extracted from raw, wild resins using organic high proof alcohol. It is warm, powdery, and slightly boozy. Resinous with caramel undertones.
Animalic fixative features stunningly intense musk base notes. If you are looking to enhance the tenacity of your natural perfumes, and to fix volatile florals and top notes, this is a fixative worth investing in. Luxurious and powerful, its sleek fur coat undresses to warm amber powder underneath.
Botanical Musk fixative contains musky base notes. It is slightly dry and earthy, with intimate notes of skin, hair, and smoky roots.
Gourmand fixative contains gourmand, or edible, base notes of vanilla Madagascar, cocoa, and frangipane. It is not overly sweet, but rather dark and sultry, with a hint of sugar. The compounds used to scent the paste include my handmade absolute of raw, wild cacao beans (Theobroma cacao) from Peru, and my absolutes of bourbon vanilla Madagascar (Vanilla planifolia) and Vanilla tahitensis (Tahitian vanilla). The bourbon is from vanilla beans that I grew at home on my vanilla orchid vines by hand pollinating the flowers. I then cured and tinctured the beans in high proof organic alcohol, producing a completely organic absolute.
Hay fixative conjures the scents of sun-dried bales of hay, as well as warm, dry straw stored in a barn.
Hive fixative primes your skin with the sweet and musky base notes characteristic of a honeybee hive. It features my handmade in-house absolutes of raw honey, beeswax, comb honey, propolis, royal jelly, bee bread and pollen, and as such, changes seasonally depending on which extracts are fresh and mature. Some of the ingredients may come from colonies that collected nectar from Apalachicola Tupelo gum trees, North Carolina and Midwestern wildflowers, wild blackberries, sweet clover, thistle, black locust, poplar, prickly pear cactus, goldenrod, asters, buckwheat, orange blossoms, purple sage, and avocado trees.
Powdery fixative contains powdery base notes. With notes of tonka, sweet myrrh, balsam, and ambrette musk, it tends toward dry and warm and will complement fragrances across a wide variety of scent families.
Spicy fixative contains spicy base notes from my handmade spice tinctures and absolutes: tulsi, ginger root, clove buds, true cinnamon, star anise, aniseed, and cardamom whole and hulled. Green herbs laced with anise, earth, and brown amber.
Tea fixative blends warm, malted, fermented yellow-orange-amber teas with notes of honey, cocoa, dark woods, savory earth, caramel, and Brazil nuts. This fixative includes my tinctured absolutes of Assam Marangi, fermented Mannong Pu-erh, yellow dragon, Oolong Eastern Beauty, and roasted Oolong. This is a mellow fixative that will work well beneath just about any type of fragrance.
Tobacco fixative features my organic handmade absolutes of organic cured leaf: American Virginia Flue, Burley, and Canadian Virginia Flue. I also infused the raw beeswax and propolis (used in the base) with my aged tabacum tinctures to deepen the husky warm qualities of the composition. Sweet, amber, blackberry and mulberry notes with the anticipation of hand rolled smoke. Depending on the season and availability, it may include extractions of my homegrown nicotiana leaves and flowers.
Photos: large fully opened Aimee Yoshioka gardenia flowers from my tropical perfume gardens and organic Cavendish bananas, my homemade organic red banana absolute, the perfume in a 120ml glass bottle, liquid perfume in 5ml amber glass, and perfume in 5ml and 10ml black violet glass roller ball bottles.
To learn more about Wild Veil's gardenia enfleurage, please continue reading below.
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Wild Veil's Gardenia Enfleurage:
Each day fresh blossoms are culled and laid on the pommade (plant based fats and waxes), and spent blossoms are removed. This ancient technique is the only method of scent extraction that captures the entire arc of a flower's headspace, from opening to last breath. Other technologies: tincture, steam distillation, and supercritical co2 extraction freeze and capture but a moment in a flower's aromatic evolution. Only enfleurage records the full expression of fragrance, with all the nuances from immaturity to maturity. Sometimes the old ways are best.
Wild Veil is dedicated to enfleurage, and my gardenia enfleurage is a deep and powerful way to commune with the flower, with 14 varieties from my gardens contributing their distinct aromas. The result is an organic gardenia solid perfume-- a rarity. Its scent is indulgent, deep, creamy, and languorous, the olfactory equivalent of a southern drawl. Something more than the sum of jasmine, star jasmine, tuberose, and lily. Enfleurage brings out the nuanced wintergreen and pine back notes of this thick white custard of a flower.
Gardenia jasminoides: all the same species but each cultivar smells distinct, and each one goes through an incredible scent arc from bud to bloom. To name a few:
Aimee Yoshioka’s enormous flowers announce their fragrant presence before you see them. Its quilted white petals are the scent of heaven on earth. The Double Mint is a little lemony and fresh butter, like lemon curd, upon opening, then takes on a fruity peach-jasmine scent that lasts until a pungent musk emerges in its final days. August Beauty is a ripe mango that strangely gets fresher before acquiring a green mushroom odor at last. Daisy opens buttery with some of the richness of champa, expiring in mushroomy indole death. Crown Jewel is a pineapple burst, a hint of apricot patchouli typical of osmanthus. And Tea has a loamy crimini profile undercutting its grand sweet nectar.
In my enfleurage I select fresh blossoms in all the stages of bloom so the pommade will memorialize this flower’s complexity. Each day (sometimes twice a day) I check each flower resting on the fat to make sure it is still moving aromatically. A flower will last on the fat for anywhere from 1 to 5 days. There’s a lot of indolic musk in this product, so be forewarned!
Literally, "in flower," enfleurage is a traditional, labor intensive, and pure method of extracting fragrance, utilizing only fat and plant material. Enfleurage is also the method of perfume extraction that most closely replicates the odor profile of the original flower: each flower's complex fragrant arc from bud to bloom is imprinted in fat, where it is stored. The scent is true to the blossom, but subtle, requiring you to bend in close for a sniff.
When I smell gardenia, I feel medicated, hypnotized, lulled. The world slows down and I am "into" the flower as with no other. I have used enfleurage to capture gardenia's enveloping, exotic aroma. Enfleurage produces a "pommade," which is a highly scented solid perfume and not to be confused with pomade for hair! This pommade consists of individual organic gardenia blossoms from my garden, pressed into organic plant butters by hand. They are left to breathe on the fat through their fragrant lifespan, then removed, washed, and dried. I repeat this process to reach a high degree of fragrance saturation. Each reposition is a "charge," and this enfleurage was charged the traditional 36 times. The aroma is thick, tropical, and southern. It is very much the opposite of the shrill, overpowering version of a synthetic floral you find at the fragrance counter. Only you and those closest to you will be able to smell it. Apply to pulse points.
r a w ☽•☾ m a t t e r
Wild Veil natural perfumes are composed by me, Abby, using homemade, wildcrafted and organic aromatics in Vermont. These include my handmade enfleurage, tinctures, enfleurage extraits, absolutes, resinoids and concretes, and floral waxes. I spend as much time growing plants and foraging as I do composing perfumes.
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The best way to experience a natural perfume is to apply it to well-moisturized skin, without rubbing in (absorption only shortens the wear time of fragrance) and without scrubbing off. Natural perfumes are dynamic and take a minimum of 2 hours to reach their final stage, or dry down. Enjoy the alchemical changes as they unfold from the initial intensity of top notes, to the warmth of the heart, to the depth of lower base notes.
☽•☾ Wild Veil ☽•☾ alchemy between earth and ether ☽•☾
☽•☾ All aesthetic material copyright Abby Hinsman 2020 ☽•☾