Monday, June 06, 2011

Corpse Flower, Sorta...

What went through my head when you picked up that corpse of a flower and carried it home, all the way from Davie Street. One thing is certain: it did not look pretty. It didn't even smell all that great (if at all). The single stem looks lonely in its vase by the window. It looks like a forgotten flower that is long overdue for a trip to the garbage can.
But oh my, after the sun disappears behind the Coast Mountains and Vancouver Island and goes to visit Asia and the islands in between... This dead botanical releases an intoxicating, creamy, heady, narcotic aroma that one could never forget.
I love my tuberose stems in the summer, no matter how shabby they look on the windowsill, they never disappoint come night time. They take over the room, if not the entire house, single-stem-endly, and do it so well you'll never go back to any other way to perfuming your home at night for as long as they can be found in the flower shops!

Tuberose is one of those rare flowers, that releases more scent after it's been cut from the plant. Therefore, the best way to extract it is, in fact, enfleaurage, when it will continue to exhale its beautiful olfactory aria into animal fats all night long. In India, where it is mostly grown and produced nowadays, using animal fats is prohibited for religious reasons (tallow is forbidden for the Hindu, and lard for the Muslims). The tuberose absolute we get now is a far cry from what tuberose absolute from enfleurage would smell like.

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