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Monday, January 09, 2006
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Labdanum - Cistus Ladanifer - Resin of RockRose
Also known as Rockrose, Cistus Ladanifer is a small shrub with sticky leaves. Labdanum is a distillate of the resin of this plant, whereas Cistus is distilled from the leaves and stems of the plant. They have similarities, but the Cistus has a much more herbal and camphoraceous quality (I have this on the shelf too, and will check it out next) whereas the Labdanum contains a lot of amber-like qualities and is an important note in the production of animal-free alternatives to ambergris, and animal-free leathery notes in perfumery. Traditionally, labdanum resin was gathered by running goats through the rockroses and then gathering the resinous droplets from their wool. This has led some to speculate that the "animalic" notes of labdanum are actually due to their exposure to goat hair, rather than an intrinsic quality of the labdanum itself. You can actually get a tincture of goat hair ... it's out there, people make it ... and consider the aroma yourself to see if it's something your perfume is missing. Don't laugh; the majority of perfumes out there contain the butt glad squeezings of a cat, or chemical approximations of that odor. And if you like musk scents, or if you're a man who wears *any* kind of scent, you seriously better not be laughing because that stuff is all over you. We're animals, face it. We like these odors, in the right context and the right concentration.
The plant is native to the Mediterranean area, and Morocco is the prime producer. My particular bottle comes from the south of France.
I'm having fun with this one. What I have is 15 ml of the absolute, which is *very* thick (took over a minute for one drop to come out) and the color of molasses.
I love the fragrance out-of-bottle, and it gave me an immediate deja-vu feeling. Took a while for me to verbalize what it reminded me of, but once I did, I told my daughter and she immediately agreed: at the Old House, we had a plant called Snowflake Nepeta in the garden. A member of the Catnip family, with pinkie-nail-sized, blue-green-silver leaves. Out of the bottle, this essence is very much like the fresh-rubbed leaves of the Snowflake Nepeta.
On the strip, though, it changed dramatically. Now I have the odor of a jar of powdered, dried lemon peel. Not a fresh lemony fragrance at all; if you have smelled dried citrus peel lately, you know the sort of Tang-like odor I'm referring to. There's a hint of moist, slightly tart brown sugar in there, too. When I wave the test strip around in the air, I can still smell the spicy Nepeta scent.
After an hour, the dried lemon peel/Tang powder odor is diminished and the spicy, warm odors are returning. it's both now, and it's absolutely beautiful. It smells like an old wooden tea chest, perhaps, or a box that has stored spices and herbs of many kinds. There is a mustiness to it that is warm and comforting. It feels like a scent that I could wrap myself in like a warm, rustic shawl. Oh, by the way: the color I see in my mind when I smell this is a dark, rosewood brown with streaks of cinnabar red.
The experts say: "Sweet Dry Old Wood Amber Ambergris Balsam".
Yeah, that. But how come they didn't mention spicy? How come they didn't mention tart? It definitely has those as well.
1:07:14 PM 
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© Copyright
2006
Melanie Teegarden.
Last update:
2/2/2006; 10:24:10 AM.
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