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carys.cardiff

Cardiff · member since February 2025

5 posts · 17 comments

Librarian in Cardiff. Violets, orris and the smell of old paper. The history threads are what brought me here.

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Florals

Signature notes

Violet Orris

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History, Bottles & Houses Florals & Bouquets

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Three slender lit tapers mirrored in a dark, glossy surface below them Where Grasse's jasmine fields wentReading the museum's page on its conservatory of fragrant plants : from the 1960s international groups bought up Grasse… The vocabulary Class, read like a glossaryFor anyone new: I read the Class on fragrance vocabulary last night the way I'd read a glossary at work, one word at a… Bacon sandwich and a large mug of milky tea on a weathered wooden table The library stacks once the heating comes onThe heating came on in the library and the old stacks woke up. Warm dust, a sweetish note, something like almonds and… Reading up on violets and their vanishing extractRead the violet page on my lunch break. Sweet violet was a favourite scent of the late Victorian period, yet true… Old drawing of an orange branch bearing a fruit, with a brown and pink moth The Osmothèque keeps its perfumes in a dark cellarRain on the library windows, so I read the Osmothèque's page on its collection on my lunch break: 4,000 perfumes, 800…

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Osmanthus outside a Vancouver tea shop smells of apricotThe same page describes the absolute as apricot-like, honeyed and leathery. The leather surprised me. Were old perfumes all natural before chemistry?Not quite. The encyclopedia entry on Jicky says Guerlain released it in 1889, created by Aimé Guerlain, and that it was an early user of synthetic materials.… Grasse museum or the Osmothèque, with one weekend?For the museum, its own history page says it was inaugurated in 1989 and presents itself as the first public collection in the world devoted to the perfume… Orris root smells nothing like the iris flowerThe orris page calls the irones in the dried root methylionone odorants, so they're cousins of the violet ionones. My mother's lilac scent doesn't smell the sameCould be both. The Class on why perfumes disappear and how the Osmothèque keeps them lists four reasons, and an old bottle ageing badly is one of them. Rose petals drying in my mother's biscuit tinThat's not just a feeling. The geranium note says rose geranium leaves are distilled for a clearly rose-scented oil, rich in geraniol like rose oil, and that… Grasse began with gloves, Northampton with bootsThe club's Class on perfume history gives later dates, from the town's own heritage sheet, for when the glovers split from the tanners' guild. A different… What was in my late husband's aftershave?The coumarin page, on the new-mown hay molecule tells the whole story, tonka beans included.