From the Still to the Accord: the evidence

The whole register · the page itself

The Olfactory Pyramid

• sourced Small, lightweight molecules like limonene (C₁₀H₁₆, the lemon molecule) have high vapor pressure — they evaporate fastest and fade first. · PubChem Compound Summary for CID 22311, 1-Methyl-4-Prop-1-En-2-Ylcyclohexene
• sourced Large, complex compounds like muscone (C₁₆H₃₀O, 15-membered ring) have vanishingly low vapor pressure — they can linger on skin long after the rest has gone. · PubChem Compound Summary for CID 7160826, Muscone. National Center for Biotechnology Information
• artistic visualization Top, heart and base, hatched denser toward the base: drawn in-house
• perfumery convention hours to a day and more
• perfumery convention A fragrance’s sillage is something else: the scent wake it leaves behind as its wearer moves through the world.
• house interpretation Composing this temporal architecture deliberately, in full knowledge of the molecular physics, is one of perfumery’s great technical achievements.

More Accords

• perfumery convention It sits at the heart of many oriental fragrances, giving warmth, depth and a skin-like sweetness.
• house interpretation Patou’s Joy and Piguet’s Fracas are its classics.
• house interpretation Before Mugler’s Angel it was widely thought vulgar.
• house interpretation The clash of sweet and dark shaped a generation of caramel, coffee and vanilla fragrances.
• perfumery convention Germaine Cellier’s Vent Vert for Balmain made it famous with generous galbanum and violet leaf.
• house interpretation It shaped the “fresh” aesthetic of the 1990s, L’Eau d’Issey among its examples.
• perfumery convention Historically built with rectified birch tar (now held to a purity specification by an IFRA Standard, the industry’s own rules, not law in the US), castoreum (now replaced by synthetics) and smoky phenolics.

Building an Accord

• perfumery convention A rose accord can contain no rose absolute at all — a construction of citronellol, geraniol, phenylethyl alcohol and damascones that the nose reads as rose. An accord is a question of proportion: drawn in-house
• perfumery convention Many perfumers think in three roles: the body (the dominant note, most of the accord), the modifier (a smaller part that shapes and colors it), and the enhancer (a trace that makes everything smell more itself). The enhancer is often unexpected — a touch…
• house interpretation A few percent of ambroxan can make the other ingredients seem to project further and last longer without adding a distinct note of its own.

Extraction Methods

• perfumery convention Steam distillation loses much of jasmine’s character; solvent extraction captures what distillation misses.
• sourced Bergapten — a furanocoumarin in bergamot that reacts with sunlight on skin — can be removed to make the “FCF” (furanocoumarin-free) grade perfumers commonly use. · International Fragrance Association (IFRA)
• house interpretation Supercritical carbon dioxide acts as solvent at high pressure, producing pure, true-to-nature extracts with little or no solvent left behind. Increasingly used for fine ingredients.
• perfumery convention Lily of the valley gives no usable oil, so muguet (lily of the valley) fragrances are compositions built from analyses of the living flower.

from the house’s claims register and the records, checked against the pages’ own words when the site was built