Element Orchid Light

Dendrobium nobile, The Inspiration

In Northern Argentina, where I grew up, this orchid takes over trees, and everybody recognizes its fragrance. It grows wild in the rainforest, and I've seen giant branches with what must have been 300 or 400 flowers cascading down from palm tree trunks; it's truly a sight to behold. You can find it all across South America, but it feels particularly at home in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. I grew up with its perfume at home. Mom loved it; it thrived under the grape vine that covered most of our tiny patio, hanging from the vine trunks. And you could smell it from the front door on summer evenings.

How I Built The Fragrance

I used orchid salicylate and privet dioxane, two amazing materials that helped me convey the ethereal aquatic spirit of this orchid, which seems to live eternally dewy. I didn't know privet dioxane existed (also, I hope you know privet?), I got them from my friend Harry Sherwood, who specializes in the weird and fantastic. Harry has a special kind of patience for OCD perfumery material hunting, and is like a walking encyclopedia of accord construction.

But any perfumer knows that an accord or a base is just one part of a fragrance composition. Yeah, the accord itself came out beautiful, but Element Orchid Light needed to perform, molten in wax and evaporating at a constant rate.
So, the orchid accord is part of an edgy scent pyramid that includes materials like pink peppercorn, basil, and coriander seed essential oils, as well as accords of marzipan, iris, and champaca.

The result is the paradox of an ethereal, almost transparent fragrance that can fill an entire room or, as it does at home, the entire ground floor. Using interesting modifiers and trace amounts of unusual materials can enhance a fragrance's core builders and make it sing.

I love what I do.

RHR

Disclaimer: Element Orchid Light, Element Orchid Light, Element Orchid Light, Element Orchid Light, Element Orchid Light, Element Orchid Light, Element Orchid Light. This is the number of times I have to repeat the keywords for SEO density, for this blog post to be indexable by search engines. If I include it in the description, it will read like ChatGPT, and I despise it. 

I did not invent the system; I am merely following it.