Article: The State of Natural Perfumery 2012

[Anya McCoy]

You can view the page at http://www.basenotes.net/content/115...Perfumery-2012

[KarmaLee]

This makes me want to sample more all-natural perfumes. I remain fascinated by essential oils for many reasons, and once upon a time, would not use anything but all-natural scents. But the variety and quality of what I tried were lacking. I need to sample some very good ones.

But if I fall in love with this concept, and stay true to it, I will then need to divest myself of my collection. Oh, such an undertaking....

[HazelMae]

Studies have shown that nearly 20% of the population has minor to severe reactions to synthetically derived aroma chemicals (my husband and I included). I was amazed to find that the average woman actually takes on 5 pounds of toxic weight a year because of the use of synthetic cosmetics, body products and fragrances.

Citation needed.

[Harvest Moon]

I would certainly like to try the work of some of the people listed above, it sounds very interesting. Are they all available in the UK? If so can you recommend where? What sort of prices do people charge?
I wonder how many of the perfumes are in alcohol and how many people use oil of those talked about here?

Also, I thought Mandy Aftel was one of the best known natural perfume people around (I think she's all natural), she's certainly talked about quite a bit on the forums - pity not to have her opinion here.

[pawful]

Studies have shown that nearly 20% of the population has minor to severe reactions to synthetically derived aroma chemicals (my husband and I included). I was amazed to find that the average woman actually takes on 5 pounds of toxic weight a year because of the use of synthetic cosmetics, body products and fragrances.

Citation needed.

Yeah citation definately needed. "studies have shown" indeed! Those are two extremely big claims to back up. I can't say I'm not highly skeptical...

[Nukapai]

I absolutely love the nuances, body and intrigue that only natural perfumery materials can offer. I absolutely hate all the unnecessary scare-mongering and bad science that unfortunately seems to go hand-in-hand with many natural product marketing stories. Why can't we just enjoy natural products without having to scare people into buying them?

[xii]

The term "natural" has been relentlessly hijacked for millennia by one group or another. The most recent addition to the process seems to be monetazing it.

At one point of our history we liked the natural numbers, the numbers emerging as intrinsic properties of objects found in the world. A little later, by means of rational thinking, we started to need fractions, thus we gave birth to the rational numbers. Only the positive ones. Similarly, in the process of rational thinking, we include natural isolates in the group of so-called natural fragrant materials. Unfortunately, a very natural looking square has an irrationally long diagonal. This was a shocking revelation for Greek scholars. Henceforth, an intrinsic characteristic of a unit square was being declared irrational. Bad news is the very same applies to the notion of "natural substance". Provided unlimited resources and using exclusively distillation technique applied originally in its most primitive form we can actually create every substance has ever been used in any fragrance ever made in accuracy beyond any measuring device starting from, say, beetroot juice. The yield would be microscopic but if we want to include organic isolates into the glorious category of natural components we will have to (for formal reasons) accept all other substances obtainable in the process.

In case of arithmetics, "unnatural" numbers got rather nice names: rational, irrational, negative, real, imaginary - unfailing to have something to do with the opposite of the word natural. Well, it so happens the word natural has lost its original meaning and now it often means "in the ways of our grandfathers" and is opposed to the word unnatural meaning "in the ways our grandchildren will consider natural" (i.e. devilish, carcinogenic, genetically modified and simply bad for you).