When is a Fougère not a Fougère?

I guess most people here will know what a Fougère is but I've linked to Wiki for those who want to refresh their memories.

I'm a fan of this style and have created several, however it seems I may have managed to create one inadvertently. . .

I've mentioned a couple of times that I've been working on an Absinthe fragrance - based around Artemisia absinthium and made without anise so that it does not end up smelling just like the drink Absinthe.

I was very pleased with the resulting fragrance, which I've called Artemis, I've had it out with a few people on test. One of them, an experienced Basenotes aficionado with a wardrobe of more than 200 fragrances, was kind enough to send back this review:


I was obviously very flattered by the comparison, but more to the point surprised at the analysis. It would never have occurred to me to describe it as a Fougère - I think that stems from know what's in it. From a technical perspective a Fougère contains oakmoss, coumarin, lavender and (usually) geranium: not one of these is in Artemis, which does not take away from the fact that a Fougère is exactly what it smells like, as it settles.

In terms of the notes he found, there isn't any galbanum in there - I think that note is part of the absinthe complex itself, the mint is an unusual bergamot mint and no lavender or tonka.

For completeness this is the marketing blurb I'd written for Artemis before I got that review:


So the question is - do I re-write that to describe it as a Fougère or not?

Thank you everyone for your thoughts. Until I got the review back I hadn't considered calling it anything but absinthe based but then realised that the connection with the fougere style would enable people who have not smelt it to have an idea of whether they will want to: the internet gives you many things but a sniff of perfume is sadly not one of them.

I think I like

best: I shall add that to the blurb when I launch it on my website.

Again, many thanks for your thoughts and help.

For those who may be interested I’ve put Artemis up on my website today, though technically it isn’t to be launched until 1st of January. It’s on an introductory offer, but if you order before the official launch and mention this thread title I’ll knock an extra 10% off, just because. [is that allowed? - if not no doubt someone will tell me soon enough - meanwhile the offer stands]

Thanks for that Lavender, I shall look forward to your order. As to the comments, that’s something I’ve been thinking about - I do all my own web development and my skills are not quite up to facilitating comments directly on the site without going off and doing some more learning so a couple of alternatives occurred to me:
1) I could put a link to comments here on Basenotes (that would require putting all my products into the directory which I’ve yet to request but might be a good idea anyway.
2) I could put put posts up for each product on my blog and then link to the reviews there. As I’ve only just started the blog that might be a good way to populate it with something interesting too.

As always I’m interested in views.

Thanks for the support!

I’m afraid re-designing the site isn’t something I can contemplate at the moment - it just takes up too much time - so I’m stuck with it as it is for the time being at least. Maintaining it takes me away from making perfume more than I’d like tbh.

The pictures are another matter - my photography skills are not too bad when it comes to outdoors work, but I’m pretty hopeless at anything requiring supplementary lighting. I’m practicing all the time and getting a little better but I do agree that they are not the best. At some point I think I shall have to engage a professional to do some product pictures for me, but I can’t afford that just yet.

I’m happy to have your views and critical ones allow me to improve, where ‘that’s nice’ gives me nothing to work on so no problem there at all.

Lavender: several of my fragrances feature lavender - Equisetum as a traditional Fougère contains quite a lot - but I suspect that might not be what you are looking for!

My all-natural perfume Relaxed repose contains quite a lot of alpine lavender and the room fragrance Lavender Garden has several different lavenders together with thyme in it. Then of course there is The Simple Essence of Lavender, which contains nothing else: but that isn’t really a perfume so much as a dilution.

I do have a fragrance where lavender is the dominant note - called Lasting Lavender - where what I was trying to do was to extend it without loosing the essential character of the lavender. This uses quite a bit of lavender absolute as well as some very nice lavender oil and a lot of fixatives. I made it as a gift for my mum one Christmas and have never put it on the website: but if you’re interested I’ll happily sell you some.

Just for you Lavender, I’ve put my Lasting Lavender fragrance up on the website - it isn’t linked-up yet so the only way to find it is from here . . .

If you’ve been reading around this forum you’ll hopefully have spotted that I do indeed know a little something . . .

However I’m surprised at the assertion that Artemisia absinthium contains coumarin - it is one of those oils that varies quite a lot depending on where it’s grown, but it is also one that has come in for quite a bit of study and as a result there are a good few analyses published (here is a typical example listing 72 components adding up to ~97.6% of the oil but unless I’ve missed it, no coumarin). I have never seen one listing coumarin (aka benzo-alpha-pyrone; 3-(2-hydroxyphenyl)-delta-lactone and several other variants of the chemical name) as a component, nor do I detect it myself in the oil I’ve used. I’m checking with my supplier just in case I’ve missed something, but I don’t believe it’s there.

As to linalool I’m obviously aware of it’s presence in all those oils (and indeed in absinthe in small amounts) but I’m not sure what relevance that has here, as I didn’t use them. There is a little in Yarrow, which I did use and Bergamot Mint, which I mentioned and is about 10% linalool.

My question was about the approach to marketing the fragrance, the formula for which as been finalised: I’ve taken it exactly where I wanted it to go over a period over about 8 months work - some of which I’ve talked about here on Basenotes.

I think one of us has misunderstood the point the other was making somewhat - if it’s me then I apologise!

Yes I’ve seen that - but it isn’t Artemisia absinthium that is being examined: other artemisia have small amounts of coumarin, but I can’t find evidence absinthe does.

That was the whole point of the thread: to garner additional opinions

This was, broadly, what I set out to achieve - I loved the smell and wanted to make a fragrance that would exalt it: I was not aiming for something totally linear, partly because I don’t think that is possible with a natural material, but mostly because I prefer some development in my fragrances but I was seeking to add to the absinthe character rather than dilute it with other things, if that makes sense. I certainly didn’t use any birch tar or synthetic leather accords in this one (not that I dislike those, it just wasn’t the point for this fragrance). If that has been done before I’m not aware of it, but given on average 3 new fragrances were released every day last year alone, I would not be surprised to find that it has.

Fair point and I guess that was also why I was asking: I don’t like to make claims that will be perceived has false, however innocently - but degrees of something are hard to judge. Artemis is certainly not as Fougère as my traditional, old fashioned Fougère, Equisetum which has maximum permitted oakmoss plus synthetic reinforcements etc. But I’d say it was more like a Fougère than say Grey Flannel, which I’ve often heard described as a ‘fresh, green Fougère’.

In the end it comes down to a judgement, and as I said earlier in the thread, after taking advice here I decided to go with ‘will appeal to fans of the Fougère style’ rather than claiming it as a true Fougère, which it isn’t (IMO).

Thanks for that - the Tao Te Ching is indeed incontrovertible and you are right: Chandler Burr’s Ghost Flowers article also comes to mind.

You are correct - a true fossilised amber oil can be made - it’s technically a pyrolite - and it is made not from jewellery quality amber but from either the poorer quality material that does not make the grade for gem use or, more often, from the bits leftover from cutting gem quality amber to convert it into (usually) cabochon ‘stones’. Jewellery was one of a number of things I studied in my earlier years and I have some close friends in the trade. I don’t have any of the true fossil amber oil, but I gather it has a complex, dark scent reminiscent of birch tar and incense.

However the stuff you encounter in perfumery is very rarely that - more often it is either synthetic ambergris or an amber coloured oil mixed from a variety of different oils according to a house style. Or sometimes it’s just labdanum.

OK, well first things first the only way to be sure which plant you are talking about is to use the Latin name. Common names are completely unreliable because the same name can apply to multiple plants depending on who’s using it, what part of the world they are in or what the context is. Common Wormwood is a case-in-point: it can mean any of several Artemisia species, but most usually it means Artemisia absinthium, which is the plant used in the making of the drink Absinthe and is also the plant whose essential oil I’m using. That still does not narrow it down quite far enough because with many plants, including this one, there can be several cultivars or sub-species or both. In this case there are several forms in cultivation in gardens - I grew

Tarragon most often used in cooking, sometimes called French Tarragon and distinct from Artemesia dracunculus inodora often called Russian Tarragon. There is another plant called Tarragon too: Tagetes lucida - completely different - sometimes called Mexican Tarragon. Just to confuse matters further the oil extracted from Artemisia dracunculus sativa is usually referred to as Estragon in perfumery, but it’s the same plant.

Now as if that wasn’t all difficult enough, botanists also argue about nomenclature all the time and sometimes authorities disagree and sometimes the consensus changes and plants are re-named or even completely re-classified. Unhelpful when you are using older reference books particularly and the net result is that you end up having to know both names. Slightly off topic, but a good example of that is Vetiveria zizanioides, which has now been re-classified as Chrysopogon zizanioides but is still the vetiver we all know and love. There is some debate about whether the two sub-species of tarragon I mentioned are true sub-species, distinct species or just regional variants.

Which brings me to the final consideration - country (and sometimes region) of origin: many plants exhibit different characteristics with different growing conditions and there may also be large genetic variations between widely separated populations and this is certainly the case with Artemisia absinthium - so to know what I’m using you also need to know that my oil is French (which btw means it is a lovely blue-green colour).

Finally you mentioned that there were a lot of Artemisias and there certainly are, with widely differing characters and chemistry - the wiki article I’ve linked to lists quite a few and gives some idea of the range and variability.

Detailed chemistry isn’t always easy to come by, but in the case of Artemisia absinthium it is, because there has been a long history of debate about its medical uses as well as whether or not the drink is hallucinogenic (it was thought to be in the 19th Century when they thought the thujone it contains behaved like THC - the active ingredient in cannabis - now however it is known that it does not). All this means that loads of people wanted to do research into it, including comparative analyses of plants grown in different places etc.

Bet you’re sorry you asked now . . . I did do quite a lot of homework before I embarked on producing Artemis.

Not quite sure what happened there but a bit seems to be missing in the middle, it’s still there when I go to edit the post so I’m not sure how to fix it.

Anyway here is the bit that is missing:


In this case there are several forms in cultivation in gardens - I grew 'Lambrook Silver' in my garden for many years.


The convention for botanical identification btw is like this: Artemisia absinthium ‘Lambrook Silver’ - the Genus and species names both in italics, always in that order the first with a capital, the second without followed by any variety name in plain type, all words having capitals - the quotation marks are optional. I had this stuff drummed into me while studying botany . . .

So that gives you complete identification for cultivated plants, for sub-species there may be a second italicised name to identify them, as for example Artemisia dracunculus sativa - the Tarragon

Just to close the loop on this one, I’ve just had the analysis back and there is definitely no coumarin in French Artemisia absinthium oil, there is some Linalool (about 4%) and some Limonene (about 2.5%). Which is good because it means my IFRA compliance calculations were correct.

Well kind of . . . I started by saying that
and that’s still just as true.

However I do think I’m happy with the ‘may appeal to fans of the Fougère style’ solution we came up with earlier which gives an indication of what to expect without making a confusing or false claim.