Which Sandalwood, why
Our newest scent Pool is anchored with sandalwood, the champagne of wood extracts. Jovian sources sandalwood from the Mysore region of India. It’s the place where any self-respecting niche perfume house might get theirs, and it’s prized in large part for its creaminess.
What does a “creamy” wood smell like? If you’ve ever walked into a big hardware store, you might be able to recall that generalized lumber smell… dry but sweet, beige but rich, botanical but somehow industrial, like an old-fashioned candy artificially flavoured with “parking garage”.
If that’s (very basically) the milk you’re dealing with, imagine sandalwood is the butter. It squidges and crushes like fudge when you spread it (is it STILL too hard for the toast?). Or maybe it’s maple wood with the texture of that aerated cream cheese. Mysore sandalwood is somehow the most fudgey of all, but also more resinous, incense-ish, the melodic rumbling of a sonorous drum.
When you first smell Pool, it will likely seem fresh, herbal, wrapped in a humid mist. The formula is a small forest of trees found mostly close to our home. If you’ve ever piled up firewood at a cottage, your hands will likely have been stamped with the oils of scotch pine or black spruce. It’s a hot, sticky smell, almost pungent.
In blending Pool I tried to balance this fresh firewood scent with something softer. Carrot seed irons out some wrinkles (a weird 70’s-art-rock of an oil that’s more texture than colour… I don’t need to get into that here). But the glowing heart is our Mysore sandalwood, used at just under 10% of the total formula, which is a lot for a top-shelf natural ingredient in perfume. It’s worth it. This particular sandalwood, rather than adding steam to the wood sauna, acts as a warm forgiving glue between all the fresh-chopped logs.
There’s one more reason I opted for East Indian sandalwood, and it involves some numbers and latin names (sorry). Often, natural sandalwood is sourced from Australia, but the Australian kind is a different species: santalum spicatum, versus the santalum album from East India. The Australian oil is often cheaper, but is known to contain less of sandalwood’s main therapeutic component, a group of chemicals called santalols. Santalols are a big part of what makes sandalwood so useful as a grounding treatment for aromatherapists (among other reputed benefits).
When writing the formula for Pool, I checked the gas chromatography of Australian and Indian oils available to source. Don’t worry — if you don’t know what “gas chromatography” is, you’re probably more fun at parties. It’s basically a test that spits out a list of every chemical component in the aroma of something, with percentages, like a recipe. Most Australian sandalwood oils contain around 30% santalols, while the Mysore one that ended up in Pool was practically overflowing with them: over 92%. This, along with the terroir of the region and the specific “album” species of sandalwood tree, gives this oil its particularly buttery texture.
When applied to the skin, Pool should start to reveal its rich deposits of sandalwood after 30-60 minutes. Enjoy!