An Ode to the Rose

The roses are blooming again, although this season it seems they never stopped.  I stop, however, nearly every time a bloom extends over a wrought iron gate and presents itself to me.  I am one to stop and smell the roses.

I also stopped to collect those rose petals as they fell.  I kept collecting them until I had enough to create a small amount of cologne.  The scent of rose deepens and becomes a little powdery or dusty when they dry. I'll be making more with the second seasonal blooms. I have freshly dried sweet annie and lavender from my garden for the brew as well.

Along with roses I used vetiver root, lavender, sweet annie and dried orange peel. It has a smokey, sweet, complex aroma, something worth stopping for.

You can see these and other botanical colognes and perfumes on...

Etsy

Orange Flower Water

Orange Flower Water in a vintage bottle.

Orange Flower comes from the blossoms of the bitter orange tree, Citrus sinensis.  The bitter orange plant actually gives us four fragrant oils.  The steam distillation of the blossoms is the coveted neroli.  When an absolute is made of the same flowers it is referred to as orange blossom absolute.  The pressed rinds delivers bitter orange essential oil and the unripe green fruit, stems and twigs give us petitgrain oil.

Bitter orange is a peculiar kind of citrus.  It is fresh yet dry and elegant with a lasting sweet undertone.  It's blossoms have a light, dry nature. They produce one of my absolute favorite scents in all of creation, the coveted orange blossom.  I should really live near orange groves.

Orange flower water is the water left over after the blossoms have been distilled to make essential oil. The blossoms are put into a vessel and steam is forced through it. The steam collects in another vessel with the essential oil floating on top. The oil is syphoned off, the water remaining is the hydrosol.

The scent is sublime.  It is floral, fruity with a hint of green, refreshing and very complex. When inhaled orange blossom is antidepressant and a mild sedative, so useful at night to ease insomnia.  It has a joyous, uplifting quality. It stops caffeine jitters and is a great choice for fretful babies. It is known for its supportive qualities during the detoxification process or when quitting an addictive habit.

Neroli is a wonderful treatment for delicate, sensitive and oily skin (due to its astringency).  Use it as a toner and in face masks with clay and honey.  It can also be used as a perfume!

Both rosewater and orange flower water have been used in cooking and baking for centuries.  Indian and Middle Eastern desserts are often delicately flavored with them.  It is what's used to flavor madeleines and prompted Marcel Proust to remember the past.  It's also often used to flavor marshmallows.  Add it to champagne as an aphrodisiac, or if you're not inclined to drink alcohol add it to plain seltzer. One tablespoon in a liter of seltzer would befit a toast at any occasion.  It's one of my favorite summer refreshers.

I've bottled some up in vintage bottles I found on the beach, all one of a kind. You can see them, and other hydrosols, in my Etsy store.

Two New Colognes and Some Further Experiments

This year's Cologne Experiments are filtered, bottled, labeled, photographed and posted.  It was a long process but I'm happy to have all of the bottles I collected this summer (and scrubbed and sterilized) filled with my fragrant elixirs.

This year I made two new colognes, Eau Who and Noir, as well as tweaked the recipes on Florida Water, Violet Water and Bay Rum.  Eau Who is actually a re-creation that I worked on last summer in an attempt to replicate the classic cologne 4711.  This year it came out better than ever, I'm very pleased with it, so designed a whole new label for it.  It is no longer an "experiment" but a formula I'll be repeating.

I also finished Noir which has been coming along for a few years.  Every year I strain it and add more to it so it is a triple strength formula.  It's dark, rich and full bodied.

Bay Rum and Florida Water also got a bit of a makeover.  The Bay Rum is made with bayberry leaves and berries from the beaches of Brooklyn, as well as hand-dried orange peels and fresh herbs and spices.  Florida Water is composed of my own grown sweet woodruff and lavender as well as freshly ground spices.  Bay Rum is bottled in vintage amber apothecary bottles and Florida Water in green medicine bottles.

I love this process of making botanical colognes, I hope you enjoy the results of my experiments!

Mystery Found Fragrance

While hunting for bottles on the beach last month I came across this tightly capped mysterious bottle filled with liquid.  I opened it right then and there and smelled a faint floral fragrance amidst the brackish seawater.  I tucked it in my bag and proceeded to scavenge and only opened it later when I was home and sorting through my finds.  In the comfort of my home it smells more like dirty seawater than heavenly floral but still a faint trace of its original contents remains.  The sediment on the bottom could be fragrant matter that separated from the alcohol once water was introduced.  Or it could simply be debris from the ocean floor.  The bottle has no markings and is such an industry standard design that it could be almost anything.  Mystery indeed.

Beach Bottles

I had some good luck collecting bottles on the beach this year.  Most of them get scrubbed clean, sterilized and bottle up my cologne experiments.  Some of them end up as spice jars, medicine jars, liquor bottles and some are just for the love of collecting bottles.  These are some of the treasures I found this summer.

New Colognes

Colognes bottled up and ready

This season's colognes are finally brewed, filtered, bottled and labeled.  I'm pleased with the way they turned out this year.  The new influx of materials was a joy to work with.

I started the project by individually tincturing the dry materials to see/smell what they do on their own.  Then I was able to blend with more confidence.  After doing research on old cologne formulary and coming up with some ideas of my own I set about working my ideas out on paper.  I knew I wanted to do a fougere and I've always wanted to make something called Swamp Water.  The new fragrances are:

Foret de Fougere:  Lately I've fallen in love with the fragrance family fougere. French for fern, fougeres are meant to replicate the scent of the forest floor (ferns don't actually have a scent of their own). To be a true fougere there must be three notes - lavender, oakmoss and some kind of coumarin (the molecule responsible for the sweet caramel note in tonka beans, hay and sweet woodruff). Oakmoss is a little tough to come by in its natural state but the coumarin note was accomplished by sweet woodruff and tonka beans and accented with vanilla beans and patchouli. Jasmine forms the heart of this fragrance with lavender and cassia in the top. I'm really happy with the way this one came out, it may be my favorite of all the cologne experiments.

L'eau du Who:  L'eau du Who is inspired by the classic cologne, 4711. After a little research I came up with an approximate formula for the cologne and broke it down into something akin. Patchouli leaves, vetiver roots and sandalwood powder form the base while jasmine, rose buds and peach tea create the heart, finished with meyer lemon, minneola tangerine and orange peel combined with basil and lemon verbena. I named it after my guitar hero, Pete Townshend of the Who, who reportedly wore it before his shows.

Swamp Water:  Swamp Water is an idea I came up with long ago when fantasizing about the bayou. I saw grasses swaying in the breeze, the night air thick with heavy florals, a refreshing glass of tea with herbs. Vetiver, the roots of a grass, and sweetgrass combine with sandalwood to form the base while jasmine, meadowsweet and lavender bring in the heart. Swirling on top are jasmine tea, orange peel and lemon verbena.

Meadowsweet:  This cologne could easily be called Honey Water as it is as sweet as nectar. Meadowsweet and linden blossoms sit atop crushed tonka beans and sandalwood with lemon verbena gracing the top.

Terroir:  Terroir is the term used to describe the special set of characteristics that the geography, geology and climate of a certain place, interacting with the plant's genetics, express in agricultural products. Most of the herbs and flowers used in this potion are locally grown and harvested myself. Sweet woodruff, which grows in my herb garden, is supplanted with orris root and sweetgrass to form the bottom chord. Freshly harvested linden blossoms and pink and white roses form the heart, with home grown lemon verbena, tarragon and sweet annie on top. It has a sweet earthy lushness, Brooklyn grown.

Bayberry

As soon as I moved to New York I started going to the local beaches.  I'm not one to sit still for very long and as soon as the SPF was applied I'd go exploring.  Walking along the beach I'd look for shells and pretty rocks, but further up along the dunes were some other treasures to behold.  Beach roses, or beach plum, were the first discovery.  Even tho they're not a showy rose they have a wonderful rich fragrance.  The rose hip, or plum as they're called in this case, are much larger than your average hip and many people make jam with them.  I also found horsetail, a very old plant that's been around since prehistoric times.  Horsetail is loaded with calcium, so much so that one has to be very careful not to take too much for fear of calcium crystals forming.  There's plenty of bittersweet, too, and in the autumn the dunes are a sea of orange.

The best thing I've discovered on the beach, tho, are the bayberry bushes.  They're so huge yet inconspicuous that they could easily be overlooked.  Northern bay, Myrica pensylvanica, has leaves with a sticky spicy aroma and the waxy berries were used by American colonists to make clean burning candles.

The herb is astringent and stimulant and emetic in large doses.  A decoction is good as a gargle for chronic inflammation and is an excellent wash for the gums.

Culinarily the leaves can be used dried as in traditional bay leaves.  In that case harvest them in the fall when they've matured and turned leathery.  Leave them to dry completely and their flavor will intensify.  I use them in soups and stews all winter long.  In season I like to chop them up fresh and use them to season pork and chicken.  I haven't had a chance to see what they do in vodka yet but I'll be trying that soon.  I hear they did wonders in a bottle of gin according to Edible Manhattan.

My special interest in making botanical colognes got me thinking of using the leaves to try my hand at making Bay Rum.  I read many recipes and bought myself a few bottles (most notably Dominca and Ogallala, the reputed best available) and set to work experimenting.  Like all of my colognes they are a work in progress and the formulas will be tweaked and improved upon until I find just the right recipe.  I made mine with fresh bay leaves, allspice, cinnamon, dried orange zest, vodka and white rum.  The scent wasn't quite accurate so I admit to adding a couple of drops of bay essential oil (Pimenta racemosa), the optimal variety of bay leaves used in making Bay Rum.

My colognes, including Bay Rum.

Beach Glass Bottles

Green glass vials from the beaches of Brooklyn.

I've been very lucky this past summer finding bottles on the beach.  I seem to have hit the motherload.  Clear, amber and green glass bottles in all shapes and sizes are finding their way into my collection.  Some of them take on a frosted patina which makes them glow in the light from being rolled and tumbled in the ocean.  I can't help wondering where they originated and what was their original use.

Two perfume bottles

Cleaning them up and getting them ready to be used has been a big job.  They spend a lot of time soaking in soapy water in between scrubbings.  I've collected a vast array of bottle brushes to help with the job.  Once they're squeaky clean they're sterilized in a boiling water vat before they can be used.

Amber vials

A collection of tiny vials

I live my life in a very "green" way, long before anyone called it green.   I deplore waste of any kind so to find these bottles and be able to give them another life is a joy.  I've been collecting caps from broken bottles for ages so spent some happy days sorting through the collection and finding the proper cap.  Some of the bottles will be filled with the colognes I was producing this past summer but some are for sale on my Etsy store.  I love that each bottle is a one of a kind treasure.

Beach glass bottles put to use for my cologne collection.