Free Essence and Alchemy by Mandy Aftel Page B

at worst, they may completely overwhelm it. So to me it makes the most sense to construct perfumes from the ground up, like a pyramid, beginning with the strong base note and building the rest of the perfume upon it, layer by layer.
    Base notes are combined to form a chord, to borrow another term from music. Like a musical chord, a perfume chord consists of at least two and no more than five notes, or essences, mixed together, their individual identities subsumed in a harmonious new whole. Three is a good number to start with. In each chord, one note should ring out, should dominate the chord, with the others augmenting and supporting it, and the dominating base, middle, and top notes must harmonize. But the chords themselves are infinite, like the dishes that can be concocted from a well-stocked larder.
    Base notes are the deepest, most mysterious, and oldest of all perfume ingredients. Every ancient culture used them—indeed, for centuries they were the essence of perfume—so when you work with them, you literally have ancient history in your hands. You hold the ingredients that camels carried along the spice routes and that Cleopatra mixed in her workshop. Sandalwood, for example, has been in continuous use for four thousand years; its soft, soothing scent made it an obvious choice for spiritual practices. Distilled sandalwood is said to have been used in Ceylon for embalming the corpses of native princes since the ninth century.
    With the exception of sandalwood, amber, and vanilla-scented essences such as benzoin, Peru balsam, and tolu balsam, however, base notes strike most people as powerful, even overwhelming, sniffed straight from the bottle. They tend to be dark green or brown in color and heavy and thick in consistency, syrupy liquids gathered from barks (sandalwood), roots (angelica), resins (labdanum), lichens (oakmoss), saps (benzoin, Peru balsam), grasses (patchouli, vetiver), or animal secretions (musk, civet). Often they must be melted or tinctured—mixed with perfume alcohol—before they can be incorporated into a perfume. Sticky, resinous, treacly, they are intensity incarnate.

    A caged civet
    Base notes call forth a complementary intensity on the part of the perfumer. They are thorny and difficult, and to be comfortable with them requires effort and imagination. Learning to love them is a challenge to the novice. The weak of heart may recoil from their animal and earthy heaviness, and even the adventurous may find their intensity off-putting at first, especially to a nose whose sense of smell has been cultivated at department-store perfume counters. The synthetic fragrances found there have almost no natural base notes; their dryouts have been chemically manipulated to give them tenacity without depth.
    When I am creating a custom perfume, I tend to use base notes as a litmus test of a person’s sensual depths. The timid always choose vanilla; the daring sometimes go for costus or blond tobacco or black spruce absolute. But the perfumer must learn to embrace them all, bearing in mind the words of the great perfumer Jean Carles, a.k.a. Mr. Nose (his was insured for one million dollars) and founder of an important perfumery school in Grasse: “The perfumer should be totally unprejudiced 53 , should entirely disregard his own taste. Woe to him who hates vetiver … He should be aware there are no incompatibilities in perfumery , that apparently clashing materials will blend successfully on addition of another product playing the part of a binding agent, making their odors compatible.” What is important is not whether an essence smells beautiful on its own but how its idiosyncratic capacities and elements merge and blend with chosen others to create a beautiful new smell. For a perfumer to dislike patchouli or civet is like a painter disliking green or yellow. Essences are simply materials with which to realize a vision, and while every perfumer will have favorites, every