I want to make an opulent perfume—I’ll call it “Opulence”--rich like my mother’s old bottles of Joy from the forties. It will include a generous amount of assorted natural absolutes to give the ineffable warmth and inviting complexity that only naturals can provide. It will be expensive.

When I first started experimenting, I just assumed that all I had to do was add plenty of naturals to make a basic perfume luxurious. But it doesn’t work that way. Naturals alone don’t project and they fade too quickly. The trick is to make a perfectly acceptable skeleton perfume with synthetics alone (one that lasts and projects) and then add the naturals where they are needed to fill in the blanks and provide the necessary loveliness.

When working with synthetics, I put together complexes, chemical representations of various flowers and certain accords so I don’t have to build them from scratch each time I construct a perfume. Because each flower complex may contain 20 or more different compounds (natural flowers contain hundreds), the number of substances in a floral perfume will be many times more.

Each flower has certain chemicals that help define it. Rose, for example, has three basic components: phenyl ethyl alcohol and its esters (e.g. phenyl ethyl acetate); citronellol and its esters (e.g citronellol acetate); and geraniol and its esters (e.g. geraniol formate). When these three components are put together, one arrives at a base rose that can be shaped or fleshed out as needed. Modifiers such as citral (lemony citrus), nonadienol (green); clove, cinnamon, and pepper (spicy); and naturals such as blue chamomile, Roman chamomile, carrot seed, guaiacwood, sandalwood, iris and mimosa absolute, are each used to provide individuality to the perfume.