Raw Materials: Benzoin and Blood Orange

Benzoin resinoid

Benzoin doesn’t really have any strong therapeutic effects, but it’s useful where one would use vanilla. Real vanilla is beautiful but can cost hundreds of dollars an ounce. And in all fairness, benzoin isn’t just a cheap fakeout for it. It has the (scent) texture of liquid mercury, less unctuous tropical syrup, more shimmering chrome sap. Benzoin feels like watching the early days of CGI kids shows (remember “Reboot”? or even “Beast Wars”?). Like that 90’s computer animation texture, it feels simultaneously liquid, metallic, and play-doh-like. 

Benzoin is a resinoid, which means it’s a liquid distilled from another liquid (resin). Maybe that’s why it feels so oozing and borderless. It has the mineralic edge of buckwheat honey and the innocent sweetness of those white sugar packets at a diner. Making a formula with only whole essential oils is like trying to stitch together a jacket from ripped pieces of other jackets. Stray compounds can give the formula a medicinal edge. Sometimes that’s interesting, but other times it gives a scent that generic, “mall aromatherapy” vibe, at least to me. Ingredients like benzoin iron out the creases of a formula, while also bringing a cozy thickness. It adds roundness without darkness. Patchwork curtains become a jacket with some weight.

You can smell benzoin smoothing the citrus in Sorbet, warming the mint in Smooth, and as the nostalgic finish of VAGUE COLOGNE.

Blood orange essential oil

Truly it smells like a creamsicle. Sweet, docile and acid-less. More cream than fruit, even; a synthetic splash of the milk in cereal commercials. How can something real smell like something fake? Most mass-produced food (obviously) has artificial flavourings, and even “natural” flavourings can be relatively simple cocktails of even simpler molecules, as long as they’re “naturally derived”. Regardless, food flavourings don’t feel like vivid holograms, nor do you want them to. They’re supposed to be generalized, simplified, softened. They give an impression, paint a cartoon portrait. But then there it is, physically pressed from the bursting peel of actual blood oranges from Italy: a childhood off-brand Creamsicle. 

I think this stems (ha) from the fact that citrus oils are extremely simple. The vast majority of a citrus oil is often a single chemical: limonene. Lemon oil can have upwards of 69%. Bitter orange can have 90%. And blood orange has over 98%. This means that the essential oil of blood orange is likely less chemically complex than what’s inside a Froot Loop. What you get is a scent flattened into two dimensions like marbled orange clay. All the floral acid of the juice is gone, and it’s become a simulation of itself. It’s a tree-grown artificial orange.

Blood orange is one of the ingredients which gives Sorbet its nostalgic simplicity.