AGAINST NATURE, part two: aldehyde
natural ingredients are dead. long live the new flesh!
if we consider perfumery to be the classical tradition of constructing scented objects for personal and public use out of oils extracted from the natural world, what we now call the fragrance industry is the cyborg corpse of perfumery as it once was, left to crawl the desolate lands of neo-paris scavenging for half-eaten corpses of gaultier interns and estée lauder executives. while certain houses like hiram green do attempt to derive their eaux de parfums from exclusively 1:1 natural extracts, even the “eau” in an eau de parfum itself is not actually water. perfumers alcohol is itself a chemical compound of 200 proof SDA 40B. any attempt to sell the idea of a wholly natural perfume is just that – a marketing strategy. indeed there are many flowers in the industry that are known as ‘silent flowers’ – blooms so delicate they cannot yield any oil absolute, and thus, must be constructed out of synthetic accords. among such flowers are the gentle and natural scents of lilac, lily of the valley, carnation, gardenia, honeysuckle, wisteria, heliotrope, and hyacinth. the crisp and tender springtime lily of the valley in such masterworks of modern perfumery like diorissimo for example, is not ‘natural.’ what you are smelling is in fact phenylethyl alcohol (to form the leafy aspects), rose oil (to give richness and body), hydroxycitronellal (to heighten the green notes), rhodinol (to add an accord of geranium and mint), citronellol (to add a fresh lemongrass accord), linalool (to make it fresh and soapy), lilial (a green note) indol (highly animalic white floral synthetic used in jasmine-forward fragrances like olene) heliotropin (a powdery heliotrope synthetic), and a dash of violet leaves, the only naturally derived ingredient for a vegetal accent. i am beginning this love letter to aldehydes with a lecture on synthetics to dash one of the two major critiques of this material: that it smells too fake. i understand the impulse to want your beauty products to consist of natural ingredients, but in a climate where the aesthetics of authenticity are pillaged to push glorified duplicates of the same five 15-year-old scents is it really worth upholding outdated constructions of what’s real? i think you’ll find once you’ve allowed yourself to accept the innate and deeply beautiful artifice of all perfumery, that certain aldehydes (yes, there are multiple types) exude the most beautiful and photorealistic scents from the natural world. when used with the hand of true artist, aldehydes and pure synthetics at large do for perfume what kandinsky and early abstract painters did for the painted image at the same moment in history. not destroy it, but liberate it from the burden of pretending to represent only one thing.