Samples of 12 examples of Wild Veil enfleurage: Lilac, Gardenia, Orange Blossom, Peony (June 2021), Osmanthus, Tuberose, Star Jasmine, Banana Magnolia, Narcissus Paperwhite, Jasminum polyanthum, Cestrum nocturnum, and Hyacinth.
Each one is an organic, handmade, botanical soliflore (single note perfume) produced by hand using the slow artisanal process of cold enfleurage from my personal perfume gardens. Please note, these are indeed truly organic and pure floral fragrances-- subtle rarities.
Lilac - Lilac Enfleurage is a solid perfume made by the simple but labor intensive process of cold enfleurage. The only ingredients are fresh French lilac flowers from my family's 35 year old heirloom Vermont lilacs, organic avocado butter, and very raw beeswax. It is organic and handmade. The scent is exquisite, delicate, and true to fresh lilacs. Enfleurage is the only natural process that can capture the ephemeral scent of blooming lilac. This "pommade" (highly scented solid perfume-- not to be confused with pomade for hair!) consists of thousands of individual organic lilac blossoms that I collected by hand at my home, laid onto an emulsion of organic avocado butter and raw beeswax. I repeat this process each year for 8-10 hours a day during the 2 weeks they bloom to reach a degree of fragrance saturation. A lilac aroma that is true to the flower is notoriously difficult to capture and bottle. As you can see in the photos, I pull off the individual flowers from the panicles (bunches). Removing the stems, branches, and leaves eliminates the swampy scent that some lilac enfleurage has because these green parts have a high water content, little floral aroma, and give off notes of decay when not removed beforehand. This is the most time consuming part of my process but the end result is worth it! In my enfleurage, the lilac scent is floral, green, and airy with sheer notes of apricot, rosewater and orange flower. It is very much the opposite of the shrill, overpowering version of the synthetic floral you find at the fragrance counter. Only you and those closest to you will be able to smell it. It is green sweetness wrapped in pillows of silky butter.
Gardenia - Wild Veil is dedicated to enfleurage, and my gardenia jasminoides 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. Something more than the sum of jasmine, star jasmine, tuberose, and lily. Enfleurage brings out the intricate wintergreen, mango, and pine back notes of this thick white custard of a flower. Each gardenia cultivar smells unique, with a distinct scent arc. To name a few: Aimee Yoshioka’s enormous flowers announce their fragrant presence before you see them. Their quilted white petals are the scent of heaven on earth. Upon opening, the Double Mint has lemons and fresh butter, like lemon curd, then it takes on a fruity peach-jasmine scent that lasts until a pungent musk emerges in its last days. August Beauty is a ripe mango that strangely gets fresher before acquiring a final green mushroom odor. Daisy opens buttery with some of the richness of champaca, 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.
Orange Blossom - Honeyed, animalic, and exotic, the scent is rich in indoles, possessing notes of tea and musk. It is warm, delicate, and sensuous, with green apparitions of neroli flickering over the heavier indoles. The aroma possesses the unmistakable signature of a white flower extraction: intensely indolic, sweet, and musky.
Peony (June 2021) - From my family's 40 year old heirloom high fragrance peonies, collected in summer. These peonies are from one of the oldest extant lines, begun over 150 years ago, and on our site they are grown on terrain high in granite and silt. The scent is quite delicate but a sharp and green floral. The June 2021 vintage projects a touch of mint and mayonnaise, black pepper, dark red rose, and fresh green linden leaf rolled into a supple tube.
Osmanthus - The scent is delicate: fruity apricot and jasmine notes with a suave olive oil and patchouli back note that is characteristic of the enfleurage and fresh flowers but not found in the absolute.
Tuberose - Creamy, minty, and saline. I have used enfleurage to capture the the complex, creamy, green white flower scent of night-opening tuberose from my garden of over 3,000 tuberose rhizomes. I like to pick tuberose flowers in various stages of opening for enfleurage. My favorite are the double blossomed, although I also grow the single blossom variety. The double have a more powerful fragrance, opening with frosty wintergreen notes. When fully opened they are creamier, though not exactly sweet, and less minty. Tuberose is creamy like sour or heavy cream, while gardenia is creamy like custard or pastry cream. Tuberose also has ethereal lily notes that are not present in gardenia. Some people denote coconut notes in tuberose and/or gardenia, but I don't find that fruit's aroma to be present in either. Mango in gardenia, yes, and perhaps papaya, but no coconut. Tuberose has a menthol saltiness especially when first opening. As they decline and desiccate on the enfleurage pommade their wintergreen notes reemerge. In my enfleurage, the scent is engorged with tuberose singularity: silky, with a salty creaminess.
Star Jasmine - Hypnotic, sweet, lush with a musky undercurrent. The aroma is wet, intoxicating tropical humidity, like a steamy jungle and honeydew melon.
Banana Magnolia - Enfleurage is perhaps the best way to record the headspace of banana champaca in bloom. How else to describe the intensity of the aroma produced by this special tropical flower other than creamy, fruity, sunny sensuality, with unusual notes of play doh, kids' sparkle gel toothpaste, classical champaca, ripe bananas, and tropical "fruit punch." This technique captures all the aromatic stages the yellow and burgundy blossoms pass through, producing a fuller fragrance than you could ever encounter in the moment of a single sniff of an actual flower.
Narcissus Paperwhite - The blossoms open with powdery notes of heliotrope and fragrant violets. A rich fruitiness floats like swamp mist over an indolic reckoning. Jasmine's stink, intensified and accompanied by a wet green shadow. When I'm feeling impatient, I like to peel back their papery cocoons and pop them open. The scent is heady and complex, possessing notes of lily, coumarin, jasmine grandiflorum, and indoles. Green and almost minty facets vibrate within an intoxicating sweetness.
Jasminum polyanthum - The scent of Jasminum polyanthum is so creamy, white-green, and fluffy that it seems less like a jasmine and more like a mix of sandalwood (Santalum spp.) and star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides-- not a true jasmine). The base is buttery like sandalwood, without being oily, as if butter had no fat. The flower's lush dreaminess is similary to the warm amber humidity of star jasmine, but drier. Star jasmine has a wet scent with more body, transporting you to a rainforest, while J. polyanthum's perfume takes place on a soft tropical beach with sand so bleached and uniform in grain size that you cannot pick out the coral from the shells. Like plumeria, it borders on suntan lotion with its anti-gourmand milkiness (lotion). And other Jasminum species (grandiflorum and sambac) have a vibrant nectar note bulging between peach and beaujolais. J. polyanthum smells less vibrant and more feathery. Its fragrance is the cockatoo of jasmines. Indolic fecal fecundity is absent. It smells green, young, immature. It has blossomed without ripening. Unlike J. nitidum and laurifolium (angel wing jasmines), it doesn't have the "extra sharp," non-fruity indolic edge that is striking in the angel wing types. Adding to its childlike impression, there is something very nostalgic about J. polyanthum and redolent of a Tonka corporation children's toy from the 1980s: Keypers. The pastel Keypers were made in the shapes of animals (snail, horse, turtle, swan, ladybug) and their pliable plastic bodies had a distinct smell. It was less sweet than the smell of Cabbage Patch dolls, less plasticky than (the unscented) My Little Ponies or Barbies. The Keypers had the faded aroma of a vague flower. Jasminum polyanthum has the same powdery, fluffy scent, but much more concentrated. Sometimes people say they would prefer not to wear carnal smelling perfumes to work or in public-- these are usually compositions heavy in jasmine, orange blossom, tuberose, musks, and animalics. Undoubtedly these are the notes associated with human, animal, and botanical sexualities. I always think it is funny when adults deem perfumes without floral sex organs on display as more appropriate to wear in public, and the more adult scents "obscene." It seems like olfactory catfishing to me, or like dressing as a child. When the obscene thing might actually be dousing oneself in prepubescent drag (no judgment). Because it is less candied, I hesitate to place J. polyanthum among the more childlike, prudish, and sugary Victorian flowers: phlox, carnation, dianthus, heliotrope. To me polyanthum is more along the lines of Bette Davis as Baby Jane than as the baby Baby Jane: the jasmine that dresses like a child.
Cestrum nocturnum - Cestrum has a thick powdery scent halfway between heliotrope and honeysuckle. Vernix on décolletage, a cherry dirge. In fact, the outré perfume captured is a remarkable mimic of the aroma of fresh honeysuckle nectar (which is actually not present in honeysuckle enfleurage). It's like the vampire of nocturnal flowers, luring with a nauseating, but no less seductive, sweetness, and a name well suited to its fragrance: "night grave," "night hewn," "nocturnal cut." Aroma: honeysuckle nectar, dark sweet cherry compote, powder, heliotrope, Louisiana sidewalk.
Hyacinth - Subtle, with hyacinth's characteristic green-oily, fatty-white flower aroma: fresh and springlike but deep.
Each 1ml enfleurage is a solid perfume that comes in a 2ml hinge top pod. These are samples of approximately 20-25 drops, enough for 4-6 wears, per perfume. All scents will have labels with my handwriting and art, and they arrive nested inside a gift box filled with flowers, mosses, and plants that I have pressed and dried.
Photos: Wild Veil enfleurage.
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.
l i q u i d ☽•☾
Wild Veil oil perfumes are suspended in an odorless base of organic MCT coconut oil. As they do not contain water, liquid perfumes do not expire, and may improve with age. While the volatile top notes (the ones that hit your nose first) will fade after a year or more, the base and heart notes will deepen and grow more complex.
s o l i d ☽•☾ b e e s w a x
In solid perfumes this silky transparent base (above) mingles beautifully with the earthy, honey musk of organic beeswax. Raw beeswax traps the aroma molecules, releasing them over time for an intimate experience.
h o w ☽•☾ t o ☽•☾ w e a r
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 2023 ☽•☾