A Comprehensive Guide to Essential Oil Extraction Methods (newdirectionsaromatics.com)
Sometimes I go out and look for perfume and scented products, and usually I am quite disappointed. I often pick up things that say “amber” and go like “that smells nothing like amber,” and now I’ve learned not to do that because I feel like I’m being punished with all the leather and vanilla types of scents when I’m looking for those. You see, I am really just looking for something that smells like fossilized tree resin, and because people are crazy that’s actually not a very common scent. Over the years, “amber” in perfumery has come to mean labdanum, which is neither amber the fossilized tree resin, nor ambergris (which is not remotely the same thing in terms of origin or composition but shares some similarities that caused the names to be shared.) Labdanum is a gum from a plant called cistus ladanifer after it gets stuck to goat hairs. The cistus ladanifer gum apparently doesn’t smell all that much like labdanum, which leads me to the conclusion that labdanum mostly smells like goat and “amber” and “amber accord” in perfumery mostly refer to the smell of goat hair and skin.
In modern times, Arctander lists a number of different olfactory forms and aromas for labdanum and cistus in his Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin. Cistus seems to be extracted in a different way, typically via steam distillation from the leaves of the plant, and its scent doesn’t seem to be “ambered” in the way that we (or I) typically use that word. It’s sometimes described as being drier, woodier, more incense-like, and aromatic. Arctander describes it as being lighter and more herbaceous in aroma than labdanum, even comparing its scent to chamomile at one point. (Ibid, at 169-170.)
A Guide to Amber - Part I: Types, Definitions, Materials & Scent – Kafkaesque (kafkaesqueblog.com)
You see, I basically wanted a scent that smells like tree resin. This is not something that’s very in-demand because people who make perfumes don’t seem to know what tree resin smells like. I’m sure lots of people who also don’t know what tree resin smells like are about to try to direct me to some stereotypically super masculine rich mahogany thing but that’s not what tree resin smells like at all either. If you’ve seen the actual mineral amber, rosin for stringed instrument, or been outside and seen dried sap from a tree you know what tree resin smells like and it’s frankly fairly sugary plus some turpentine-ish stuff, which makes sense once you think about what maple syrup is, though maple syrup is a very distinct form that has a lot of an animo acid called leucine that just some pine tree or whatever doesn’t have.
AbdesSalaam Attar of La Via del Profumo has a collection of Baltic amber whose dark, opaque colour and hardness are a sign of their age. In a blog post on his site, he says that Baltic amber may be 150 million years old. I always thought that fossilized amber had no actual scent in its hardened and unburnt state, but he writes that it does have an aroma that is “similar to rubbery lemony frankincense,” although much more delicate. After being tinctured, he says that its aroma is largely the same, but even lighter and quite fleeting. At one point in his post, he writes that the tincture smelt “camphorous limony and incensy.”
I am sitting around smelling amber rocks while I’m writing this, and I do tend to think amber the mineral probably shouldn’t be wasted trying to use it as a perfume note compared to just using tree resin since last I checked it literally has the same chemical composition, it just changes structure when it turns into amber, so it’s not water-soluble.
However, a long while ago when I was away from home and desperate to give myself some kind of aromatherapy but with limited choices, I found this, though I didn’t think much of it at the time:
I was just thinking about the fact it listed “radiant amber” among many other things but isn’t much anything like most scents marketed as that and then I picked up the remaining tube and held it next to tree resin amber and… yep, it’s pretty similar. Some person accidentally recreated something like the scent of tree resin amber from “starflower,” “sandalwood musk,” “sugared tangelo,” “white agarwood,” and “radiant amber.” Congratulations, you re-invented the scent of actual tree sap and, though it’s not all that counterintuitive, did it as what very much appears to be a more feminine-branded scent, which is not all that counterintuitive considering how much sugar is in tree sap and resin. I wouldn’t recommend putting parabens all over your body, I just didn’t think much of it at the time because basically all the product options available including ones from other brands had a bunch of parabens in them and there didn’t seem to be any getting away from it. The ones that are just spray perfumes/colognes or room scents or whatever are probably OK though, but there are probably better places to get it than ones that use parabens and accidentally reinvent the scent of tree sap seemingly without knowing it. If they stopped using parabens I would probably buy things from them though unless someone showed me to something better that’s still a lower price range, in the meanwhile I basically just use Febreeze’s various types of products to fill that need since my problem isn’t with synthetic stuff, it isn’t even with “VOCs” (aren’t all scent compounds VOCs by definition since they have to be volatile to be in the air, like terpenes and esters? You literally eat VOCs whenever you eat a fruit or vegetable,) it’s mostly just with some specific things that are known to cause problems like parabens, kind of like how I don’t avoid artificial vanillin (though I think it should be made from wood pulp and not coal tar,) but I do avoid MSG, the compound is the problem, not “it’s not found in a finished form in nature.”
It seems that people are doomed to recreate things from memory unconsciously that they don’t recognize whenever they don’t learn what things are. Once upon a time Napoleon was apparently obsessed with neroli and lavender, and Catherine the Great really liked musk so much apparently her room smelled like it decades after her death, but I don’t think most people today even know what any of those scents actually are and would just think Napoleon was wearing ladies’ perfume and Catherine the Great was wearing macho cologne (not that perfume vs. cologne is actually about gender, the technical definition is about the solvents involved and the concentration) which is basically the same as my problem trying to find a tree resin scent until someone kind of accidentally re-invents it (compare their description of “notes” to AbdesSalaam Attar’s description of the scent of actual amber fossilized tree resin.)
Aromatherapy May Lead to a 226% Boost in Cognition | Psychology Today
Developing and using the sense of smell is probably incredibly underrated in terms of improving cognition, and even the word “smell” mostly referring to negative things is an example of that. Most people are subject to Sturgeon’s Law so they are bad and they think of scents as all being bad things. A lot of brain research tends to make it look like the more advanced forms of cognition interestingly evolved out of the olfactory bulb.
Wake Up And Smell The Evolution : NPR
In fact, the sense of smell is really what people mean by “having taste,” but people don’t like the word smell for obvious cultural reasons. Descriptions of the so-called five senses are completely off-base in my humbly correct opinion. There are many more than five senses anyway but what’s normally considered taste or smell seems to be the most related to identifying objects.
In fact, the often-touted reason for ‘the smaller size of the olfactory bulb, in relative terms for human’s impoverished olfactory system, found little support (Laska et al., 2005). Irrespective of phylogenetic differences, olfactory receptor genes are linked to perceiving odors, and not to name them (Majid and Kruspe, 2018). Odor-naming difficulties have been attributed instead to brain connectivity, either olfactory and language areas of the brain are too weakly connected (Engen, 1987), or too directly connected (Olofsson and Gottfried, 2015; Raspet, 2016), or their neural signals interfere with each other (Lorig, 1999). This suggests that if we were to look for a genetic basis for odor naming, the relevant genes would regulate neuroanatomical connectivity rather than odor perception, per se (Majid and Kruspe, 2018). Thus, the inability to name smells is not a biological limitation but a cultural domain.
Synesthesia is innate anyway and I would guess probably more of it has to do with smell than sight. Mammals, who are way smarter than reptiles (I’m sure I have just offended the Reptilians or whatever) didn’t get there by going to sleep as soon as it’s dark and evolving to be completely dependent on sight. Synesthesia happens a priori and not solely due to conditioning and it happens in so-called normal people who wouldn’t be considered synesthetes.
The cerebral bases of the bouba-kiki effect - ScienceDirect
[PDF] The Sign is not Arbitrary | Semantic Scholar
The fact that this all likely relates to some kind of electromagnetic processing and was used to stay up at night and avoid dinosaurs all looks like evidence mammals evolved to be maximally creepy to other species. Go us, we are the champions. People stop being scared of snakes and spiders once we learn about them, but snakes and spiders don’t stop being scared of us, checkmate exotherms.
These points are why it’s important for us to pay attention to nature and ground ourselves in some kind of experience. You want to break the rules, yes, but as the saying goes, you need to know the rules to break the rules.
Edit: Bath and Body Works has apparently stopped using parabens and certain dyes within the past couple of years so you can shop there again if you want to.
Ahh a fellow olfactory obsesionado! Im tempted to start giving you some amber like perfume names lol but I won’t do that except for one I can’t resist. The most feminine and closest to that sweet amber smell I’ve come across is Roja’s Amber Aoud. In fact I just had to spray some on ( like that first weak spray is enough it’s so strong). I only own a sample which is enough as a bottle from Roja is usually 500-1k. I’ve too had a curiosity about amber and almost all the ones I’ve come across on the market are too masculine/smelling like my Polish grandpas aftershave . Yes I agree that real amber smell is incredible! Growing up in Poland id look through my grandmothers jewelry and she had a lot of amber pieces, and she’d show me a little trick and tear up a small bit of paper into a bunch of tiny pieces and rub a piece of amber on her clothes and show me how static it is by hovering it above the pieces as they’d fly up and stick to it.
And very interesting the link between olfaction and intelligence and how the brain identifies smells also using the language portion. So cool!! Thank you.
“It stinks!!!” - The Critic