Enfleurage - Cherry Valley Lilacs

My Work…

admin — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 00:27:15 +0000

My work as a chemist has always included investigating and analyzing ingredients, processes used, solvents, pesticides, preservatives and other chemical compounds and their effect on human health and the environment, and providing guidance to the food industry, materials science, and consumers.

Lilac caption

Understanding what I understand about human physiology and bioaccumulation of chemical compounds, I have a moral imperative to share my educated insights and continue to provide guidance. It is of great concern to me to see what is happening in the world of fragrance chemistry. A loss of truth-in-advertising, very little regulation and secrecy on ingredients, lack of research and testing and no official reporting of adverse effects, is astonishing and we should be very cautious at the very least. One of the most alarming things we are witnessing is a rise in people developing multiple chemical sensitivities, asthma, COPD, lymphoma, and other blood cancers. This dangerous trend may continue because of what we are inhaling, drinking, eating, applying to our skin and needling into our skin in the form of tattoos…but especially inhaling. Anything we inhale enters directly into our blood stream from the lungs. Because of my training and experience my work must include investigating false ‘lilac essential oil’ claims. I believe it is in all of our best interests, to reveal the truth when we find it. The truth in this case is much of the ‘lilac essential oil’ on the market is a fraud, we don’t know how it was made or what’s in it and it may contain ingredients we know to be harmful to human health.

The post My Work… first appeared on Cherry Valley Lilacs.

The Nature of Enfleurage

admin — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 00:27:15 +0000

To capture an Enfleurage essence, living and breathing flowers must be used. It is the raw essence or vapors being exhaled from the fresh flowers that we coax onto the fats in the chassis. In general, enfleurages are not as strong as distilled oils. One reason is that enfleurages are raw uncooked essences directly collected as the living nectar of the flower. Steam distillations are a composite of plant compounds from the cut, or dried plant material and are not collected vapors from the living plant as is the case with Enfleurages.

In Enfleurage, the flower must be kept alive and intact so the little scent factories can continue to pump out scent as long as possible. We capture only the scent produced in real time by the little factories of each flower. In distillation dead or dried plant material is fine because steam distillation draws out the oils in the flesh of the plant.

One reason lilac does not lend itself to distillation is this very thing. The scent is not in the petals or flesh, it is manufactured in real time at the base of the flower as long as it is living. It must be living. Therefore the enfleurage essence is produced from the living flower and captured only while the flowers are fresh and producing their scent. Spent, wilted flowers must be removed immediately from the corpse or bitter, moldy and rotten smells will be absorbed into the fat of the corpse.

Enfleurage oils must be used soon after their capture, or at least fixed with any number of fixatives perfumers may employ. Blending and formulating with other oils and natural scents, slows the volatility of Enfleurage oils and may provide a natural preservative. To be kept for longer periods, Enfleurage oils must be stored in a cool dark place, in unopened bottles.

The post The Nature of Enfleurage first appeared on Cherry Valley Lilacs.

Q&A with Charle-Pan: Does real lilac essential oil exist?

admin — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 05:29:26 +0000

What is the current status of this simple question, “Does real lilac essential oil exist?”

The answer has always been, quite frankly, “No”. Real lilac essential oil has been deemed problematic, evasive, illusory, and impossible by the great perfumers, chemists, alchemists and extractionists of the 19th and 20th century.

The main reason there has been no known lilac essential oil in these centuries is because lilac cannot be distilled like other flowers. Steam distillation destroys the floral essence of lilac. Over the decades the wood of lilac has been distilled and used for plant medicines. The lilac wood essential oil is very potent as a vermicide and was used in treating malaria in North Africa and parts of the Middle East.

Many perfumers and pharmacists’ notebooks have hand scratched details of the best formulae to use in order to try to duplicate the distinctive fragrance of lilac.

Today, overwhelmingly, manufacturers heralding ‘lilac essential oil’ are selling a fake, a chemical blend of synthetic fragrance oils, that suggest to the mind a resemblance of the true scent, but being completely unrelated to the actual plant.

Tragically the therapeutic properties of lilac flower essential oil cannot be transferred to the synthetic form. Synthetic formulations of lilac essential oil vary in their constituents, very little safeguards or standards exist and these synthetic fragrances are largely unregulated. Synthetic formulas are kept as trade secrets and products sold to consumers are not required to list ingredients on the package. Synthetic fragrances do not convey the same therapeutic properties as naturally derived plant essences, and may even be harmful and pose health and environmental hazards.

There is a travesty of misinformation and a collapse of ‘truth in advertising’ standards in the aromatherapy world. I seek to bust the myths and lift the lid so we may look inside and understand the truth.

The questions remain amid all the misinformation: Is there a real lilac essential oil? Has it ever existed? Does lilac essential oil exist today?

Well, there are two known ways to extract the essence of lilac flowers. Both are very intensive and costly. One way to extract lilac essence is through a very ancient and traditional extraction method called Enfleurage and one is through a very advanced and technical modern laboratory method called CO2 extraction.

I’ll talk about what I know, what I perform, and what I have pioneered, reinvented and revitalized here in the 21st century, and that is the art of Enfleurage. I have brought to light this ancient artisan practice and have adapted it to Lilacs, extracting a true essence of fresh blooming Lilacs.

So the answer is ‘YES’ Lilac essential oil does exist. It is extracted through the ancient artisan method of Enfleurage. I listened and the plants revealed their alchemistry to me in 2017. I have been making the essential oil of lilac, steadily increasing my yield each year, since then.

The process of Enfleurage is very simple but very labor intensive. Thirty days of fresh lilac blossoms are required to produce this rare essence. At our lilac farm in Cherry Valley, NY, conditions are just right for this beautiful work. Here is a description of how we do it at our Enfleurage studio.

Enfleurage is the French term for an ancient, labor intensive, and all-but vanished, technique in which a fat is used to absorb scent from fresh exhaling flowers. Enfleurage captures the most delicate components of scent and the most comprehensive spectrum of scent molecules. Lilac does not lend itself to distillation and other methods collect only fractions of the scent and leave behind or destroy certain elements. Traditional Enfleurage yields the most authentic essential oil of lilac.

In our Atelier, fresh lilacs are placed in fat substrate where the lovely lilac scent is captured in the fat molecules. We use all organically grown, sustainably harvested, palm kernel oil to extract the scent. Every day for 33 days, we painstakingly replace the hand picked lilac blossoms with fresh blossoms, so the aroma is intoxicatingly authentic. Then we separate the scent molecules from the fat using organic spirits and concentrate it with a gentle evaporation process to preserve the delicate notes of lilac.

This is the authentic essential oil extract of lilac that we create with natural enfleurage, using more than 150 different varieties of lilacs from our lilac farm. Our 2019 Lilac Enfleurage is made from lilacs: Maiden’s Blush, Sweetheart, Konchkalovsky, Frank’s Fancy, Paul Thirion, Burgundy Queen, Royalty, Palibin, Charles Jolie, President Lincoln, Elenor Roosevelt, President Grevy, Miss Kim, Pocahontas, Brent’s Beauty, Miss Canada, Peace, Wedgewood Blue, Dappled Dawn, Sensation, Josie, Monge, Alice Mae, Mrs. Havermeyer, Emile Lemoine, Amy Schott, Agincourt Beauty, Crepuscule, Sara Sands and Donald Wyman, Violeta, Flora, Vesper’s Song, Silverking, and Arch McKean. Each year the scent will vary slightly in accordance with which lilacs are the colossal bloomers that year. Nothing is added or taken away from this pure natural product. More than 30 bushels of fresh flowers go into producing 10 ml of Lilac Enfleurage extract.

Our delicate lilac essence may be used as an exquisite stand alone natural perfume, or as an ingredient in blending with other natural scents.

Does lilac essential oil really exist? Yes it does. In season you can visit our lilac farm and take a tour of our Atelier and see Lilac Enfleurage in action.

The post Q&A with Charle-Pan: Does real lilac essential oil exist? first appeared on Cherry Valley Lilacs.

On the lasting power of the scent…

admin — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 05:04:58 +0000

The lilac Enfleurage essential oil absolute has a scent that will last up to 12 hours on a paper test strip. On the skin maybe a hint is still remaining after four hours. So it is not a great long length of time. It is gentle and fleeting and creates a very intimate cloud of lilac scent in an aura around the person.

There are fixatives that may be added to the pure lilac oil, that Perfumers use to blend and make the lilac oil last longer. I can add a fixative too, but I do not do that, as my claim is that you are getting 100% real and unadulterated lilac essential oil which is extremely rare and I want to keep it pure. It is a raw material that skilled natural Perfumers can use to formulate. Most lilac products on the market are fake…either a blend of synthetics or a blend of other unrelated natural essential oils such as lily, rose, jasmine, and then a few fragrance derivatives may be used to make it smell more like lilac. Even lilac pomades of the 1900s were synthesized using styrax, benzoin, and other compounds on the fat substrate to resemble lilac pomade.

So the real thing is very different. It is a living nectar exhaled by the flowers while they are kept alive in the chassis. They cannot be crushed or pressed to extract the smell. The flowers have to breathe their scent on the fat so that it absorbs into the fat and can be extracted later into the essential oil or left as a luxurious lilac pomade. It is a wonder to me that we can capture and collect enough of these vapors to form any amount of essential oil. But we do!

The post On the lasting power of the scent… first appeared on Cherry Valley Lilacs.