Wild boys

Eugenol: Again a restricted wonder compound. You find Eugenol in lots of essential oils. It is the main constituent of Clove oil, thus pure Eugenol brings back a flat image of dried clove buds, kind of a two-dimensional reflection of the natural oil. When I smell Eugenol I always think about whole onions with dried clove buds put in, cooked together with a decent piece of meat and some carrots, best in the stove at low heat, cover closed, for hours. That’s yummie stuff, and it might even work without meat ….maybe with celery and mushrooms?

You find Eugenol also in high concentrations in cinnamon leaf essential oil; I have the oil that I usually use from libertynatural. It is a slightly greyish oil, with a gorgeous spicy aura. It is a wild scent, loud, very dominating, somewhat aggressive, a wild young man, reaching out and being very impatient. Cinnamon leaf oil is entirely different to the bark oil and I love to work with it. (The cinnamon bark oil is dominated by cinnamic aldehyd which itself is much higher restricted by IFRA for its sensitizing effects.) It is a difficult oil in the sense that it easily dominates the entire head note and may bring in medicinal tones that you don’t want. However, in small doses it does wonders. Take a bowl of citrus accords with some coriander and lavender and you will find yourself exposed to a nice accord but somewhat replaceable and boring. Add a little bit of cinnamon leaf and bang! Your head note starts to fly and will last much longer. Eugenol has this amazing power of adding dimension and extending notes. Add a little bit more and bang! Your head note is transferred to the effluents of an all-spice factory with a dentist lab near by.

To get the spices of cinnamon leaf and make full use of the magic eugenol, I combine the two, natural and synthetics, to set tight boundaries for a wild, but charming boy.