Three Things You May Not Know About The Flowers of Spring

Spring is THE season of blooming flowers and airy fresh scents everywhere!

Here we take you through three interesting facts about some of our favourite flowers that bloom in Spring!

1. Narcissus

Narcissus flowers have something very uplifting for our eyes, heart and nose. The wild Narcissus poeticus of France is used for perfumery extraction. This species is not the same as the common species we’re accustomed to. The Narcissus poeticus is more refined and extremely fragrant.

Narcissus absolute is one of the rarest and most expensive extracts found in perfumery because you only obtain 1 kg of the precious extract out of an entire field of flowers! (1500kg of flowers = 800,000 flowers!). It’s liquid gold…

2. Orris

It is not from the flowers but rather the roots that the precious orris extracts are obtained. The orris butter, oil and absolute are some of the most expensive ingredients used in perfumery due to their long extraction process.

It takes 3 to 5 years to the dry the mature roots and produce the star component: Irone. Orris extract smells powdery, fatty buttery and earthy. It is often associated to the smell of violet.

3. Freesia

The smell of freesia is transparent, fresh, green, lemony and spicy. Its odour cannot be extracted so is instead reconstituted by perfumers using a large quantity of ethyl linalool and linalool with touches of green notes and other transparent floral ingredients.

Linalool is a compound naturally present in flowers and is the main component of freesia. In fact, in some freesia species, the chemical odour make up is composed of over 90% linalool. This is why freesia smells of linalool and vice versa. Nature is chemistry.