A Rose by Any Other Name...

You pick up your rose scented lotion and check out the ingredients, and rose oil is nowhere to be found. Instead, it contains geranium oil, and “fragrance.” You next check out your rose face mask, and it has rose flower water — like what you can get at the grocery store — and “fragrance.” You pick up your rose soap, and what the heck, there’s that “fragrance” again.

“Um”, I hear you say, “why doesn’t a rose scented product just have rose in it? Can’t you just, like, chuck some rose essential oil in there and call it a day?” 

Well my friends, the short answer is that it’s super expensive. But that overlooks the longer answer about extraction methods —  or, how we get these wonderful smells in the first place — as well as how we mimic them when those methods fall short

Many extraction techniques have been in use for hundreds of years, and are still in use today:

Citrus fruits about to get the ever living daylight smushed out of them.

Expression: The easiest way to get a scent out of a plant is to squeeze it out -- like for citrus. This is good for citrus because applying any heat destroys the scent. The plant gets squeezed in a spray of cold water, then filtered to extract the oil. Watch this video to see it in action.

A copper still used for lavender oil production.

Distillation: You know how alcohol can be made from a still? Essential oils can be extracted from plants the same way. If you haven’t made your own moonshine (or watched a lot of M*A*S*H), a still works by boiling water under the plant you’re distilling, so steam rises through it, collecting the scent, and is then cooled back into a liquid in a compressor above it.

Incidentally, the first still was created by a woman named Maria the Prophetess in Alexandria in the first century BCE. She is a badass, look her up. (For further research, you may need to search for “Maria the Jewess” because ugh racism.)

Enfleurage with rose petals - not common for large scale rose oil production, due to the length of the process

Enfleurage: Plants are placed on a thin layer of fat such as lard or tallow, which absorb the scent — literally from just sitting there. It tends to be used on very delicate plants, because applying any heat or processing can ruin them. The fat is then washed in alcohol and filtered, with the filtered alcohol now carrying the scent. 

Coffee flowers being macerated in jojoba oil

Maceration: This process is like enfleurage, but the fat is heated instead of just sitting at room temperature. This is the oldest technique for scent extraction that we know of, and the scented fats themselves were often then used on the body — omitting the alcohol wash and filtering.

A solvent extraction facility.

Solvent extraction: This one is lengthy, expensive, and the only recently-invented process on the list. It starts kind of like distillation, but using a hydrocarbon gas called petroleum ether instead of steam. Since this petroleum ether has a lower boiling point than water, it’s another low-temperature option for when plants are too delicate. Plants are placed into a tank into which the petroleum ether is pumped. The ether binds with the hydrophobic compounds in the plants, i.e. the oils, and leaves them behind in a separate petroleum wax when the ether is removed from the tank via vacuum. The wax is then washed in alcohol to pick up the scent again, and then the wax filtered out of the alcohol. The alcohol is then left to evaporate, leaving behind the concentrated scent.

A giant pile of rose petals awaiting oil extraction.

So what’s the deal with rose oil? Rose scent can be made either by  distilling into essential oil called rose otto,  or by solvent extraction, creating rose absolute. The thing is, it takes about 10,000 pounds of rose petals to make 1 pound of rose otto. Just so that we’re clear, that’s 5 tons of rose petals to make 1 pound of oil. To make 1 pound of rose absolute, you only need a mere 3,200 pounds of rose petals, which sounds easier until you remember that’s the process that also requires petroleum. For context, a pound of lavender essential oil takes a mere 250 pounds of lavender via distillation. 

Parfumerie Bruno Court, Grasse: Triage de Roses

This all makes rose oil crazypants expensive. 10ml (that’s milliliters y’all — ten of em are about two teaspoons) costs about $50. Every bar of MacBath soap has about 6ml of fragrance, so you can see how the cost can easily skyrocket. That’s why in every personal care product on the market, unless you’re buying something reeeeally expensive (for example, this 3 ounce face mask for $62), you’re going to find human-created rose fragrance or a blend.

So how does that work? What does it mean to have a “fragrance blend” that still smells like roses?

Fragrances are built by first categorizing scents according to notes. A note refers to the order in which your nose smells each individual scent when the perfume or fragrance blend is applied to your body — either top, middle, or bottom, with top coming first.

“But wait,” I hear you say. “How can I smell things in an order, when it’s all one big mix of fragrances? Whether it’s coming from a bottle or a bar, or applied to my skin, it has to travel the same distance to my nose, right? No! Different individual scents come from molecules with different weights.  Scents like sandalwood, patchouli, and vanilla (bottom notes) tend to come from heavier molecules, that stay on your skin longer and take longer to reach your nose. Whereas things like citrus, spearmint, and cinnamon (top notes) come from lighter molecules, so they evaporate quickly and reach your nose immediately. Keen chemistry students (and those who have ever made pasta) will remember that heat can also make things evaporate. So while you might smell a “top note” right after opening the bottle, the “middle note” or “heart note” is only released once the fragrance is warmed by being applied to your body. Lavender, rose, pine, or geranium tend to make good middle notes. Last, the “bottom” or  “base note” is the scent that lingers on your skin the longest, due to it’s heavier molecular weight. Perfumes with stronger base notes linger the longest, but you want a fragrance to have great top and middle notes as well.  Those create your first impression of the fragrance — and thus a first impression of you when you wear it. 

A list (by no means exhaustive) of fragrance notes.

In The MacBath’s Anne of Green Gables soaps, lotions, and bath bombs, we use a composed fragrance called Sweet Rose. It has top notes of citrus and mint, middle notes of rose, lily of the valley, and geranium, and base notes of blue spruce and musk. But what does this actually mean? How do you take that long list and figure out what this fragrance will actually smell like?

Well, the first thing that hits you upon first sniff are the scents of the citrus and mint, which quickly dissipate, overlapped by the florals of the middle notes (creating sort of a “bright floral” fragrance). The deeper floral smells of the middle notes come from trace amounts of real rose oil, and a lot more geranium. Geranium, thankfully, contains the substance gerinal, which is the main component in rose oil that produces the scent,  and combined together they do a decent job of mimicking the smell of roses. Only after 20 minutes to an hour do the strong floral middle notes give way to the base notes, morphing into a pleasant, sweet and light-smelling forest type fragrance. When these scents are mixed together, it genuinely smells like rose. When my customers smell a bar of my rose soap, I usually get two responses: “Yup, that’s a rose alright.” or “Oh, I actually...like that? I don’t usually like rose fragrances because they’re so cloying.”

So never fear when you see a rose fragrance on cosmetic and bath products. It’s not that we don’t like the essential oil, or we’re trying to load it up with fake stuff. We just want to make something you can enjoy… and afford. 

This is the first part of a multi-part series about fragrance and the history thereof. Be on the lookout for answers to questions like “What are fragrance blend groups and why should I care?”, “What kind of smells did historical humans like and how did they get them?” (spoiler alert: they liked the same smells that we like!), and “What the hell is musk?”.

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