How did they make their perfume at Fragonard?
- mahtabkazemi
- Nov 29, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Dec 1, 2020
A perfume is above all a nose that makes up. Because we need our abilities, but it's also a whole story we tell and a perfume perhaps is a multitude of things that start from a flower, from an impression of a memory of a story that 'we tell is from this story the nose will develop the best possible perfume.
THE DISTILLERY
The stills used for steam distillation are displayed in this room. This is a very old process for extracting essential oils. In use since antiquity, the technique was perfected by the Arab world as early as the 8th century and remains a major technique in traditional perfume making.
Hot enfleurage or maceration consists in infusing the flowers in previously heated fats. This technique, known since ancient times, has been enhanced over the centuries.
The cold enfleurage technique was developed for the most fragile flowers, such as jasmine or daffodil, which would not resist heating. Used widely in the Grasse region until the late 1950s, this technique involves spreading a layer of odorless grease on the walls of a glass frame, which is then covered with flowers. It has since been replaced by modern techniques such as volatile solvent extraction or supercritical carbon dioxide extraction.
” Spread a thin layer of pork and beef fat on it and we put flowers on them so the day after we removed the flowers from the day before, we replaced them with new ones. When the fat had absorbed all the essence of the flower, we removed this fat with a wooden spoon in the thresher we had this fat with alcohol. Alcohol absorbed the essences of these greases and then the alcohol was evaporated under vacuum to keep only what is called the absolute.", explained by an expert at Fragonard.
Mahtab KAZEMI
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