frankie.incensein Florals & Bouquets · Chicago ·
ReadingEnfleurage: swapping flowers on a sheet of fat
Fun fact, with a source: in cold enfleurage, as Wikipedia's article on enfleurage describes it, fat was spread on glass, flowers were laid on it and replaced again and again until the fat was saturated.
That scented fat, the pomade, was then washed in ethyl alcohol to give an absolute. Jasmine and tuberose were the key flowers [the Class on extraction methods explains why heat ruins them]. The article calls the whole method largely obsolete, replaced by solvent and supercritical CO2 extraction.
I keep picturing someone swapping out flowers by hand, definitely more times than our choir has ever sung Silent Night. Footnotes welcome.
8 comments
juniper_jules
Fat drinking up scent sounds more like bisque drinking glaze then anything I'd call chemistry.
aoife_mint
So is every absolute made from fat like this? I keep mixing up the words.
dex_in_brooklyn
ok so if you're asking, yes: absolute = flower fat washed with booze. same idea as a compound butter you strain
joon.yuzu
Not every absolute comes from fat. Per Wikipedia's page on absolutes in perfumery:
- plant + hexane = concrete
- concrete + ethanol, chilled to about -15 °C, filtered, ethanol removed = absolute
Enfleurage is basically the old route.
dex_in_brooklyn
my bad, your right. I was thinking like a cook
aoife_mint
Thanks both. So the concrete is the waxy middle step? That's the bit I keep losing.
maeve.moss
My grandmother kept the good butter in the dairy beside the apple store and by Christmas it tasted of apples and nobody thought that strange at all. Fat takes on whatever sits near it, so it does.
frankie.incense
Yes, and the extraction Class has a table with every method side by side, definately the clearest thing I've read on it.