Leitmotiv

First a quick glimpse back to last Friday: It was a superb evening, with lots of laughs and funny stories and some discussions on perfumery, of course. (And yes, Ylva, I recovered from the different drinks…the problem is usually not the mixing of different vines, it is just the last glass that’s too much)

And while cleaning up the table and fighting in the kitchen against physics and the law of ever increasing entropy, I was thinking about Vero’s flowers. She brought (thank you again!) with her the most amazing roses I have ever smelled. Well, first they look beautiful, thick heads, pinkish with increasing red at the ends of wild petals looking like wings of an exotic butterfly. And then they smelled, like pure phenyl ethyl alcohol. Well, every rose kind of smells a little bit like it, and the absolute of roses, the thick orange syrup of solvent concentrated, man made rose essence absoluet, contains on average about 50% of it. But still, this rose’s scent was special. A clean phenyl ethyl alcohol layer surrounding their half open buds, eventually with a touch of something peppery, but just a touch, not much more than a reference to other roses that work so hard to smell complex and intriguing. Not this one.

This is the natural pendant to a single molecule scents. Well, almost. Contrary to single molecule perfumes, there is still a hidden layer of complexity within this rose scent. I love this rose, but I do not like the idea of single molecule perfumes. Looking at my bottle of Ambroxide diluted for use in ethanol, I can imagine how well this would be appreciated as single molecule fragrance, for sure, as Ambroxide is a molecule with many scent facets, but my daily, personal look into the mirror of truth would tell me that I tricked my customers with something that is not original except for the initial idea of bottling one single compound.

Thus, my weekend was phenyl ethyl alcohol dominated, following me up the imaginary woods where my private synthetic lily of the valley blooms, and down the plains of my garden place where my Clementine tree heard the message and started blooming again, and suddenly I wonder where this molecule is not to be found.