Vanilla and spices

And so we come to Oriental fragrances, a catch-all term that includes scents we might consider spicy or aromatic. Some spices are obvious: cardamom, cinnamon, cloves. But here is where Orientals get a little bit blurry.

They also include things like sandalwood, patchouli, and incense-like fragrances. Add to that things like amber (which is not the stone ... more on amber later) and musk. And then comes the thing that always distracts me: vanilla.

Don't get me wrong, I like vanilla. It's just that my culture has caused me to associate vanilla with things that are simple and naive and innocent. Vanilla, to my perception, is the very antithesis of exotic. Yet here among all of these exotic aromas is good old-fashioned vanilla. If the scent has some sugar in it besides, the vanilla reminds me of cookies, a food that is also the antithesis of exotic.

Yet for perfumistas, vanilla is exotic and it belongs in the Orientals. However, I think when scents go heavy on vanilla and mix in some of the sweet and fruity scents, it comes out as something other than Oriental. Maybe that is why perfume lovers cannot always agree on fragrance families.

The picture shows a vanilla pod (that's the black thing), which grow abundantly in Mexico. This is the natural vanilla, not the synthetic stuff, and it's pretty expensive. The rolled up brown cigarette-like things off to the right in the picture are cinnamon. Cinnamon is actually bark and in its most natural state comes in little rolled-up tubes.

Now to amber. There happens to be a very beautiful semi-precious stone named amber. That has nothing to do with the perfume world.

The amber we talk about in fragrance is a shortened term for ambergris, which in French means something like gray amber. Amber was originally collected on the beaches. It's a foamy, grey mass that has a pleasant aroma but is not exactly something you'd dab behind the ears, either. For a long time, amber was a mysterious substance of unknown origin, neither fish nor plant.

Leave it to science to take all of the joy out of perfume. Ambergris, it turns out, is something that sperm whales vomit up. It is believed to be made of some kind of squid or marine life that the great mammals belch up. It floats around for a while until some of it finally winds up on shore.

Since the dreadful day when we learned what ambergris actually is, perfume fans have been calling it amber which sounds a million times better than any genuinely descriptive name and even better than ambergris, which is still technically what you call the stuff you find on the beach.

Amber in perfume today is mostly synthetic. Its purpose in perfume was less to add a specific fragrance note and more to balance out the various components and also give the perfume some stability.

Tag it:

?