Tuberose

This heavily scented, caramel-coloured fat is tuberose pomade, a rare and valuable perfume ingredient produced using a historic method of extraction known as enfleurage. This particular vial of tuberose is one of a collection of raw perfume ingredients that was generously donated to us by Roja Dove, a master perfumer, fragrance historian and storyteller, whose intoxicating bespoke scents use only the finest ingredients.

In Roja’s book The Essence of Perfume, he details the history of enfleurage, which was invented by the French perfumer Piver in 1750. This method of extraction makes use of the tendency of fats to absorb odour to capture the essence of delicate flowers that contain small amounts of essential oil such as tuberose and jasmine. Thousands of tuberose (Polianthes tuberosa) blooms are picked by hand, carefully laid onto thin layers of an aerated and refined odourless fat at precise intervals, and left for three days until all the odour has been absorbed. The spent flowers are then removed by hand, and new ones are added until the fat is completely saturated with the rich and sensual scent of this lily-like flower. What we have in our collection is this fatty pomade, but to use it in a perfume you would need to melt it, mix it with alcohol, separate out the fat, and evaporate off the alcohol to leave you with a highly concentrated ‘absolute’.

Enfleurage is an extremely laborious and expensive process, requiring great skill and experience, but it yields the finest pomades and absolutes. Roja notes that only the Grasse-based distillery Robertet, who made this particular pomade, still produce perfume ingredients using this method. Genuine tuberose is particularly rare and expensive because it takes around 1200 kilos of tuberose buds to make 200 grams of tuberose absolute, so it is reserved for the finest fragrances. Synthetic tuberose, however, is widely used.

Because tuberose absolute is so highly concentrated and powerful only a small amount is needed in a perfume. The tuberose plant originally hails from Mexico. This night-flowering relative of the asparagus uses its strong scent to attract pollinators rather than the colour of its creamy-white petals. As a result, its intense and heavy perfume is very volatile, quickly permeating the surrounding air and travelling a long way. The scent of these fragrant flowers has been highly valued for centuries: they were worn by Aztecs around their necks to stimulate and protect weary travellers and added to Aztec chocolate drinks along with stimulants or sedatives.

Along with the other white florals like jasmine and gardenia, tuberose is rich in indole, a compound that is present in the most intimate areas of a human being, as well as in faeces and rotting corpses, and that is described by Roja as ‘deeply sexual and powerful’. Since its import into Europe in the sixteenth century, tuberose has been associated with both sex and death, and Victorian writers dedicated many paragraphs to the decadence, voluptuousness and corrupting influence of tuberose. This heady scent is said to have notes of camphor, vinegar, rubber, clove oil, honey and a whole host of other scent compounds, resulting in a very complex fragrance.