Damask Rose

This small vial of sticky golden wax is a ‘concrète’ of Turkish Damask roses: the distilled essence of around 12,000 blooms, extracted using solvents to create a heavily floral perfumed paste. This sample is one of a collection of rare raw perfume ingredients generously donated to us by Roja Dove, a master perfumer, fragrance historian and storyteller, whose intoxicating bespoke scents use only the finest ingredients.

Roses are a fundamental element in perfumery: each variety of rose has a distinct olfactory profile, but Roja notes that they all add a ‘cool serenity to a composition’, tempering the ‘overt sensuality of white blossoms’ like tuberose. Of the thousands of varieties of rose that grow in the world, only a handful are favoured by the perfume industry, namely Rosa centifolia (also known as Rose de Mai, the Provence rose or the cabbage rose), Rosa damascena (also known as Damask rose) and a mountainous Saudi Arabian variety of the Damask rose known as Rose Taif. Their perfume is either extracted by steam distillation to produce rose oil or attar of roses and rose water, or is extracted using a solvent to produce a rose concrète or absolute.

What we have in our collection is a concentrated paste of Damask roses grown in Turkey and extracted via solvent extraction. The finest Damask roses typically come from Bulgaria, but they are also a major export of Morocco and Turkey. Roses have been used in all three countries to perfume foods, bodies and gardens for a very long time. In the Middle East, the steam distillation of perfume from roses was perfected in the tenth century by Persian scientist and medic Avicenna, but roses were being macerated in oil and used for their perfume and medicinal properties well before that. Archaeological and historical evidence shows that the Egyptian, Greeks and Romans used roses for purposes as varied as flavouring meat pies, curing gynaecological ailments and perfuming public spaces.

As Roja details in his book The Essence of Perfume, in order to yield the finest perfume, rose blooms must be picked before the sun touches them in the morning so that the fragrance doesn’t dissipate as the heat of the day intensifies. These roses are picked by hand and often distilled on the same day. Because thousands of them are needed for a small vial of perfumed oil their production is an extremely laborious and skilled process. Before this rose concrète can be used in a perfume it needs to be melted, mixed with alcohol to dissolve out the aromatic molecules, separated out from the wax, and the alcohol evaporated off to leave behind a highly concentrated ‘absolute’.