Rosewood

Rosewood is a wood that smells of flowers. The Brazilian bois de rose was one of the great materials of twentieth century perfumery, and it was loved almost to extinction. Today the tree is protected, and the rosewood in my palette is a material built to honour it without harming it.

What rosewood is

Rosewood, Aniba rosaeodora, is a tree of the Amazon whose wood is extraordinarily rich in linalool, the soft floral molecule that also gives lavender and bergamot their sweetness. The classic oil was distilled from felled trunks, and decades of that trade left the species endangered and listed under CITES, the convention that governs trade in threatened plants and animals. The rosewood I use is a CITES compliant material, composed to give the sweet, floral, woody character of the original without a single protected trunk being cut for it.

Where rosewood grows

Because the material is a composed blend rather than a single distillation, our formula books record no country of origin, and I print none. Aniba rosaeodora itself grows in the rainforests of the Amazon basin, across Brazil, Peru and the Guianas, and it is that tree, and the wish to leave it standing, that shapes every choice about this material. The house rule is simple: where no origin is written down, none is claimed.

How rosewood smells

Sweet, floral, linalool and woody. It smells like a pale wood that has been steeped in lily and lavender, soft and clean, with a faint rosy sweetness and a gentle woody finish.

Rosewood in our chapter

• VIISultanat OudThe Deep Roots · in the heart

  In Sultanat Oud it sits in the heart beside neroli and clary sage, the sweet floral wood that softens the passage from the aromatic opening to the deep roots.

A note from the atelier

I would rather use a material that respects the forest than an oil that empties it. The rosewood in Sultanat Oud is that choice, and the chapter is no less beautiful for it.

Questions about rosewood