FragDNA / The Language of Scent / The Great Naturals
Rose
The Great Naturals · 6 min
Two species matter. Rosa damascena, grown chiefly in Bulgaria, Turkey and Iran, is the deeper and spicier of the two. Rosa centifolia, the May rose of Grasse and Morocco, is softer, more honeyed and more powdery. Everything else is a variation on those.
The extraction method changes the smell more than the species does. Rose otto, steam-distilled, is surprisingly thin and bright — lemony, geranium-like, almost sharp, with a green tea quality and none of the jam most people expect. Rose absolute, solvent-extracted, is the deep red one: honeyed, waxy, slightly fermented, closer to the way a rose smells when your face is pressed into it. A perfumer choosing between them is choosing between two different flowers.
The cost is the reason rose defines the economics of a formula. Roughly three to four tonnes of petals yield one kilogram of otto, picked by hand before dawn because volatile yield falls once the sun is up. Absolute is cheaper but still expensive. Consequently most rose you smell is a rose accord — built from phenylethyl alcohol (the rosy-clean backbone, also the main component of the natural), citronellol, geraniol, rose oxide (that metallic-green top glint), damascones for the fruity-jammy facet — with a small quantity of the real thing added on top for texture. There is no dishonesty in this; it is standard practice and it makes rose affordable.
Rose's compositional value is its neutrality of gender and mood. It goes anywhere. Put rose with oud and you get the single most important pairing in contemporary perfumery, a Middle Eastern structure that Western niche adopted wholesale in the 2000s. Put rose with patchouli and moss and you get a chypre. Put it with fruit and it turns cosmetic and modern. Put it with saffron and leather and it turns austere and medicinal.
One thing to listen for as you learn: damascones and damascenones, a family of ketones discovered in rose oil in the 1970s. They smell of stewed fruit, plum and apple skin, and they are extraordinarily powerful — detectable at parts per billion. A great deal of the fruity radiance in perfumes released since 1980 comes from them, and once you can pick out that plummy shimmer you will hear it in fragrances with no rose listed anywhere.
Key terms
- Rose otto
- Steam-distilled rose oil: bright, lemony, green and comparatively thin.
- Rose absolute
- Solvent-extracted rose: dark, honeyed, waxy and considerably deeper than the distilled oil.
- Damascones
- Powerful rose-derived ketones smelling of stewed fruit and plum, responsible for much modern fruity radiance.
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