The material library.
Eleven materials, bought as oils, absolutes and resins, and read on a blotter before any of them go near a formula. They are listed here in the order they leave.
Top
Italic. Gone inside a working day.
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Bergamot
2 h · Calabria, cold-pressed peel
Sharp, green, and gone before the kettle boils. Every accord we sell opens on it and none of them keeps it.
Citrus peel, pressed cold. The oil is in the flavedo and nowhere else.
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Black pepper
4 h · Kerala, steam-distilled berry
Dry heat at the opening. It reads as lift rather than as spice, which is why it sits above the flowers and not inside them.
Peppercorns, weighed before distillation.
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Neroli
7 h · Nabeul, distilled blossom
The longest of our top notes and still a top note. It carries the opening into the heart instead of dropping it there.
White blossom, picked before the sun is on it.
Heart
Roman. Still there after lunch tomorrow.
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Lavender
14 h · Haute-Provence, distilled flowering tops
The hinge of the heart. Camphorous at the start of the day, soft by the afternoon, and it does the same on skin.
Dried flowering tops, bundled for the still.
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Jasmine
26 h · Grasse, solvent-extracted absolute
Indolic, animal underneath, and it does not behave at low dilution. We work it at 1% and never above.
Jasmine in full bloom, the hour before extraction.
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Rose absolute
34 h · Isparta, absolute from the concrete
Three thousand flowers to the gram, so it is the most expensive line in the formula and the one we cut last.
Petals held until the colour has gone out of them.
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Orris
62 h · Tuscany, rhizome aged six years
Six years in the loft before it is worth anything, and it still reads as powder rather than as root. It is why this house is named for it.
Dried root, cut and sifted for weighing.
Base
Spaced capitals. Still there next week.
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Oakmoss
140 h · Balkan, absolute, IFRA-compliant fraction
Inky and damp. It is the only material here we buy as a restricted fraction, and the fraction smells thinner than the whole.
Lichen taken off the branch, not off the trunk.
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Sandalwood
220 h · Western Australia, plantation heartwood
Milky, and it takes an hour to say anything at all. On the blotter it is still there on the third day.
Heartwood rasped to shavings before distillation.
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Hay absolute
260 h · Loire, absolute from cut grass
Coumarin, tobacco, the inside of a barn in August. It is the material that stops the base reading as furniture polish.
Grass dried standing, then cut and extracted.
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Frankincense
400 h · Dhofar, resin tears, hand-sorted
The last one standing. Every blotter in this building still reads frankincense a fortnight after it was dipped.
Resin tears, sorted by hand into four grades.
Neat, and at ten percent.
Nobody in this trade smells a material neat. It goes into perfumer's alcohol at ten percent first, because at full strength almost everything reads the same way: loud. Every photograph on this site is printed at that dilution — one factor, applied to every file, baked into the bytes rather than laid over them in the browser.
The plates on this page are photographs of the material class, not of the individual lot in our store. Lot photography is on the certificates that go out with a bottle.
Order discovery set bench@orrishaw.example How we read a blotter