Enfleurage

I would be remiss if I didn't mention some of the stuff I saw recently at Enfleurage. They now have a tuberose enfleurage (as opposed to the regular one, which I guess is steam distillation?) oil, which smells..... [wait for it].... like tuberose! Like the actual flower! WOW!!! I've not seen anything like this before. I don't find the tuberose oil they've carried up to now particularly pleasant--I can kinda smell the link to tuberose, but I don't smell the actual flower. It smells green and earthy and maybe a little inky. But the enfleurage oil (which is done with vegetable oil instead of animal fat; I'm told it would smell better if it were done in animal fat) smells like the actual flower. I was stunned when I smelled it. So of course I went to the neroli enfleurage, which didn't thrill me like the tuberose did. I smelled a neroli bigarade oil once in Atlanta (and never since) that actually smelled like orange blossoms (remember I grew up in Florida, so I know--or I knew, at least--what an orange grove in bloom smells like), and I was hoping I'd have this experience with this stuff, but I didn't. It just smelled like the regular petitgrain/neroli type thing you see everywhere. Maybe a little softer, but it didn't stick in my mind enough to remember. All that said, it's been so long since I've smelled real orange blossoms (and I might not smell them again--there's some virus attacking Florida's citrus crops, or so I'm told; anyway, most of the orange groves that were there when I was growing up have given way to {over}development, so they're disappearing nonetheless) that I don't particularly recall exactly what they smell like. I feel like if I smelled an oil that really smells like orangeflower (neroli, orangeflower, orange blossom... I use the terms interchangeably) that I would notice it, though. Like, if my mom had worn No 5 and for years I kept smelling imitations, and then smelled the real thing, I think I'd notice. ... Or maybe not. But I digress. I have the svårmod now, so you the reader may have to endure digressions.

I think there was also a gardenia enfleurage. And if there was and I'm not misremembering, it too smelled like the actual flower. We had gardenia and hibiscuses in the yard when I was growing up, so I know the smell of gardenia. I also know that hibiscus flower has no smell. (I think the root has one, though.) So when you go to a perfume place that has an "absolute" of hibiscus, and I'm looking at you, Williamsburg, it's probably an absolute of horseshit.

And that's the glorp for now.