Saturday morning, my daughter headed east to attend The Perfumer’s Apprentice Workshop at the Fragonard Parfumeur’s La fabrique des fleurs, up in the hills in Grasse. They used to grow and process most of the ingredients here, but now they get most of their essential oils from other countries. Following the workshop we toured the factory, which is very high-tech, but many of the pieces of antique processing equipment are on display throughout the factory.
In the class we learned all about the perfume making process, and we got to create our very own bottle of purfume, {well, an eau de toilette, actually} read on to learn about my creation.
Huge quantities of plants and flowers are needed to make the essential oils used to make perfumes. To extract the fragrances, there are are cold and hot processes. Cold expression is used to extract fragrances from most blossoms and fruits. To extract the fragrance from delicate white blossoms, such as jasmine, the blossoms are set into animal fat. Each day they change the blossoms until the fat becomes permeated with the fragrance. Then the fat is processed to create an essential oil.
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Heartier ingredients, such as rosemary, lavender and verbena are steam distilled, often times the branches, leaves and roots are all processed together.
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There is a modern day process using centrifuge which is often used to extract the essence of citrus fruits, the entire fruit is processed at once. Once separated, the fruit juice is bottled and sold, while the essential oils are used in perfumes and home cleaning products.
The more traditional method was to extract the essential oils by cold pressing the peels.
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This was all very interesting, but for me, the most exciting part started when we started to open the row of bottles on our desks, one by one, of course, with marvelous names on the labels like Brazilian Orange, Italian Lemon, Italian Bergamot, Red Italian Mandarin, Tunisian Neroli, Paraguyan Petit-Grain, Verbena, Rosemary and Lavendar. We dipped our mouillettes {paper strips} into the scents, held them under our noses and analyzed what we were smelling, as the scents changed with “the nose” {a professional perfumer}. It was fascinating to sense the changes.
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These scents are common in perfume products and can make up the “top notes”, which are the most volatile oils, usually citrus, and only stay on the skin for 10-15 minutes. The “medium” notes, which are the heart of the perfume. These are usually floral, they are less volatile and stay on the skin for several hours. And finally, the “base notes” that are usually woods, woody husks, amber’s or vanilla. These can stay with us for months, these are the oils that we may smell on a coat or sweater we pull from the closet, that had received a spritz weeks or months before.
After analyzing the products and creating a base we got to make our own custom fragrance. The “nose” smelled our scents during the process and make recommendations if we wanted. Once we were pleased with our product she poured it into a perfume bottle.
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I went through quite a few mouillettes before I was ready to bottle my eau de toilette, but I now I am quite pleased with it. If I were to write an ad about it, I would say “Eau de Splendid is a refreshing scent, with aromas of fresh orange, orange blossoms, apricot, honey and pepper; balanced with earthy notes of wet leaves and woods”. Let me know if you’d like a spritz!.jpg)
In addition to our “Apprenti Parfumeur” aprons, they gave us these fun bags in which to store our bottles, what great little mementos.
Now, I’ve always been a little uncertain about the different perfume terms, have you? I knew they were based on concentration of fragrance somehow, and I knew Perfume was the best, but I wasn’t sure about some of the other terms. So, here’s what I learned, all perfume products are made up of essential oils diluted with alcohol. The more essential oils, the longer the fragrance stays on the skin. The most concentrated is Perfume, which is made up of 30% essential oils; next is Eau de Parfume, which contains 15% essential oils; finally womens Eau de Toilette contains 10% and mens contains 8 % essential oils. Whew, glad to get that all figured out!
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Fragonard has factories that offer tours in both Eze and Grasse. In Grasse they also have a museum of Provencal costumes, Le Musée Provencal du Costumes et du Bijou {my daughter and I LOVED this} and a museum of paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the artist after whom the company was named.
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They also have retail stores throughout the South of France and Paris.
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More on the retail side and a wonderful Indian restaurant in Grasse coming up soon!
Eau de Splendid sounds splendid, Emily. What a fun outing! Thanks for passing on all that you learned, there is both art and science to perfume, I think, similar to making wine. And now I'll never mix up Eau de Parfume and Eau de Toilette! Thanks for the education. XO
My daughter brought the soap from her trip to Paris, and it is wonderful!
I know that you had so much fun and learned so much. Thank you for sharing with us.
Happy Monday.
Teresa
xoxo
What a fun visit – and I love Eau de Splendid as well! And you know I love learning something new – never knew the difference between Perfume and Eau de Parfume!
What a fun mother-daughter outing. Loved learning more about the process! Eau de Splendid – love!