After the rose, jasmine is one of the most powerful and captivating scents.  It takes 6 million jasmine flowers to make one kilo of jasmine essence.

Longwood Garden recent’s show, “Making Scents, the Art and Passion of Fragrance” was captivating and left behind the intoxicating smell of the ingredients used to make perfume at the end of this past November.

Fragrance comes from so many things besides flowers: fruits, wood, roots, leaves, sap and bark, cinnamon cardamon, cloves and basil.  Cedar sap helps odors of ingredients last.

The odorous glands from the civet cat, beaver, musk deer and the secretions of sperm whale are now mostly made into synthetic copies to make perfume.

There are three levels to perfume:  the top note, middle note and base note.  The top note begins to evaporate as soon as you put it on.  The middle note is the main theme of the perfume.  It dominates for at least several hours, and the base note old the perfume together.  Its fixatives help the more volatile top and middle notes last.

In the end we choose our three notes which were mixed into a special perfume just for us.