Mouthfeel/Nosefeel, or Microbrewing Lavender
I spend a lot of time drinking tea, and to me, the scent of the dry leaf is almost better than the drink itself. “Good” loose-leaf tea often has an explosive, holographic aroma, but by the time it’s been fully infused, tinting the water somewhere between yellow bean and potting soil, the aromatics have been both amplified and compressed. The airy, edgeless scent of the dry leaves has been translated into a liquid language with its own textural dimensions (“mouthfeel”, or an oily surface tension bubbling like a Roni Horn sculpture). As nice as the infused liquid is, once the leaves get hot and wet, there is a poetic aspect of the source material that gets lost in translation.
When I launched Jovian, the main collection did not feature lavender prominently. Mostly, I was just being an elitist/libra: what value is there, I thought, in pumping out the same vaguely pleasant essential oil blends you could find at the mall? But lavender itself, though almost universally recognized, is not actually basic or boring.
Lavender exists at a strange intersection of floral, vegetal, sweet, and woody. Like anything that seems overly corseted or buttoned-up, the closer you look the more deviant it seems. When I smell a bundle of actual lavender flowers, the scent feels like oversaturated indigo meringue but also like an impressionistic woodcut print of “farm life”, complete with a delicate barnyard funk. Getting lavender oil from physical lavender usually involves steam distillation, which, like tea, gets the source material hot and wet. The resulting essential oil is louder than the original scent, but somewhat translucent and docile, like museum gift shop glassware. Something has been lost in translation.
To create a more interesting lavender, I wanted to try and both enhance the “mouthfeel” (nosefeel?) of the blend (the textural aspect present in infusions like tea) while recapturing some of what has been lost in the extraction of solid into liquid. Firstly, I looked for differences between origins of lavender, sampling oils from Bulgaria, Greece, France, South Africa and Canada. Each lavender stretched out in slightly different directions. The Canadian oil, sourced from a nearby farm in Ontario, is particularly wild: an electric purple vinegar not too far from the volatile acids of natural dry cider.
Thinking texturally is more important in perfume than you’d think. Perfumers Jean-Claude Ellena and Olivia Jacobetti create their trademark airy transparency by adding ingredients like green tea and cucumber. Old-school master Sophia Grojsman’s work can feel fuzzy like carbonated suede because of her signature “hug me accord”; an abstract blend of synthetic jasmine, violet, musk and cedar molecules. My attempt involved adding flowers (rose), incense (frankincense, cypriol) and herbs (lemongrass) to a cocktail of three lavenders. It’s hard to explain in writing, but each of these ingredients help “thicken” the “body” of the lavender without pulling too much focus on their own.
Finally, like I did with our limited edition Lavender Lab last fall, I aged this boosted lavender blend (and the alcohol for the perfume format) on dried herbs, a bit like you might for a craft beer. The effect is subtle, but there is a prairie roughness that comes through, evoking the texture of the source ingredient. The result is still identifiably lavender, but with a bit more density and structure. I’d like to think it approaches an “orange wine of lavender oils” vibe.
Soon, we’ll be releasing this overcomplicated (but deeply satisfying) lavender as House, a new scent in our main collection. By thinking about the differences between the dry raw material and the liquid oil, and blending not just for scent but for nosefeel, I hope it rescues lavender from the realm of boring mall wellness. Fruity, dry, sour, sweet, funky, soft, sedative, and energizing, it’s shaping up to be a familiar-yet-surprising shape-shifter, paying homage to perfume craft and the everyday magic of infusion.