United States patent 6630438
Having enjoyed a wonderful, perfect summer evening down town Zurich, featuring beer, wine and conversations on everything, my bike brought be back home through a Linden tree jungle. At least it felt like that. What a wonderful fragrance; sweet, slightly spicy, green, powdery, fresh, clean, heavy but lacking suffocating, sexy, dirty indoles. A decent, elegant natural scent. Without this indolic dirtiness it fits perfectly with Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse where you find Linden trees all over the place (a great shopping street if you have money. If you don’t: Do not go too far towards the lake….you might fall into a depression or in depths. )
Driving through this scent I can not help thinking in white, clean linen. I wonder why. I guess a synthetic variant is found in laundry powder. And I wonder what future generations will associate with these natural delights. Lilac might bring up pictures of your high school toilette in Alabama, lily of the valley is the fragrance of your window cleaner. The scent of violet flower might remind future generations in vacuum cleaners and cedarwood might be the next BMW scent to cover up plastic emissions. Soon, we might all associate dishwasher with linden blossom.
Verdantiol is a compound that comes already quite close to natural linden blossom, a schiff base, between lilial and methylantranilate. Cruising for some more information I came across a patent 6630438, excerpts you find below.
(Copied from www.wikipatents.com )
(…)BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Perfumed products are well-known in the art. However, consumer acceptance of such perfumed products like laundry and cleaning products is determined not only by the performance achieved with these products but also by the aesthetics associated therewith. The perfume components are therefore an important aspect of the successful formulation of such commercial products (….)
And it goes on and on and on….trust me: Making scented dishwasher tablets seems tougher than flying to the moon!
(Picture: Thinking about dishwasher tablets …again. Original Lichtenstein picture from: http://www.artland.co.uk)
June 20th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Andy, I just had a Linden Tree moment myself…was just ambling around one of my favorite neighborhoods here and then BAM! There it was. Walked around with a sprig on it in my hand all day, sniffing. I also know what you mean about the saturation of scented products…I’m afraid that Linden *does* resemble a clean-bathroom smell to me, somewhere in the back of my mind, at least. Not the same. Nothing’s ever going to be that glorious. And there was this new lavender and vanilla detergent or something or other…smelled perfectly horrible. Nothing like real lavender or vanilla at all…
June 20th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
You are a VERY silly man-
Which is why I love you, BTW….
Juvy knows how passionate I am about my linden.
No bathroom for me, though…
It’s all about the fecund nature of the Eternal Return.
June 21st, 2007 at 5:34 am
Dear Arhianrad
It can take you like BAM! indeed, you get around a corner and suddenly it is there. This was the reason for the Lichtenstein idea. First I thought about using the BANG picture…
DEar Chayarucha
No bathroom for me either… and no dishwasher!Hugs to you