H24’s biggest olfactory flex is rosewood essence – the ultra-rare ingredient extracted from a wild South American tree. After much searching, [perfumer Christine] Nagel found a sustainable supplier of the extract in Peru.
“Can you imagine when I said to Hermès that we should work with a small producer, far away in a remote area of Peru? I was told, ‘Well, we’re going to see for ourselves, just to make sure it’s serious,’” she says. There was zero kidding around: an Hermès buyer took a plane, a bus, a boat – and a solid walk – to reach the supplier and certify the operation. Nagel says she’s proud to be working with a micro-supplier, and to be supporting a sustainable producer.
— H24 is the latest fragrance from Hermès. Read more in Art Versus Science: In Conversation With Hermès' Christine Nagel at GQ Middle East.
Oddly, it didn’t surprise me at all that a buyer from Hermes fancied a free holiday in Peru “ just to make sure it’s serious” rather than trusting Nagel. I’m only surprised the whole buying & marketing team didn’t tag along too !
Seriously.
I love this. For all kinds of reasons. Direct sourcing materials, dealing directly with the people that cultivate and distill your raw materials. Your purchase sustaining rosewood growers. One of my favorite notes in perfumery and now usually a created accord because rosewood, let’s identify the correct tree, Aniba rosaeodora, is an endangered tropical tree. The entire tree is fragrant, bark, wood, leaf, blossom and root. Traditionally, rosewood distillation required the entire tree to be felled and chipped and steam distilled but I am hoping that this new project in Peru has figured out how to use the flower and the leaf, thus sparing the tree. Because natural systems are always about complex webs of relationships between flora and fauna, this tree sustains birds, mammals and insects. The two prominent fragrant molecules present in rosewood are linalool and rubranine. Whew, what a botanical geek fest!
Thanks for letting us join into the botanical geek fest 🙂
Interesting, I had no idea the whole tree ia fragrant.