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and because it is so beautifull….

My lavender is in full bloom right now and I started my day by cutting a few flowers and holding them under my smelling knop. It is a wonderful scent, with a but….. The “but” is referring to the man-made lavender oil. Water distilled, cooked, transported by water vapors and collected after a rather harsh process, this extract misses a lot of the real thing. It’s deprived of most of the spicy character, the rosmarin notes and also part of the woody character (ah…the coumarin! with its softness, sweet, almond nutty fat and creamy) The essential oil is much more flowery and not surprisingly , somehow tamed.

I have a lavender concrete which is like a mixture of the essential oil abstraction and the wild thing. Green in colour it is very tempting to work with: Coumarin notes, green woodyness with etherical spices. Talking about Coumarin: The next step for my lavender will be a Coumarin (tonka beans?)/vanilla chord that is intended to add some wilderness to my nicely dressed essential oil. I am also considering too add some vetiver that would nicely branch out for the okoumal/cistus/castoreum accord. This will be one line of action today. The other will be more factory oriented again.

Not that the copy of the flower’s true scent is the goal, but it guides the way what to do with the essential oil. Bring back part of the wild, untamed character, add some of the fierceness of lavender fighting for the bees on dry Mediteranean ground, in full sunlight….

Pix: Lavendel 2006, collected sniffed and photographed in Zurich

Finally, I got a blogline notice of this blog’s feed. I am getting there… for unclear reasons the feed did not work so far. Electronic miracles around us.

Soon, you will find my blog here. In the mean time, I continue posting on here