Thyme

Thyme is the smell of the Mediterranean hillside at the end of summer, when everything green has turned to dust and the only things still fragrant are the small, tough herbs between the stones. It is fierce in the bottle and quietly noble on the skin.

What thyme is

Thyme oil is steam distilled from the flowering tops of Thymus zygis, the Spanish red thyme. Its character comes from thymol, a phenolic molecule with a warm, medicinal, slightly smoky quality that is instantly recognisable. Thymol rich thyme is powerful, and a perfumer uses it in traces, where it gives a composition a rugged, agrestic authenticity that no synthetic herb note can match.

Where our thyme comes from

Ours comes from Spain, where Thymus zygis grows wild across the dry interior and the hills of the south and east. Spain is the world's leading producer of this oil. The plant thrives on poor, stony, sun baked ground, and it is exactly that hardship that concentrates the thymol. Thyme grown in richer soil and softer weather is greener and gentler and loses the phenolic warmth that makes the Spanish oil so distinctive. The harvest is wild, cut by hand in the dry season.

How thyme smells

Agrestic and phenolic, with the warm, dry, slightly smoky signature of thymol. Beneath the medicinal top there is a herbal sweetness and a faint leathery quality that appears as it dries down.

Thyme in our chapters

• IIParadis de BleuThe Leaves · in the opening

  In Paradis de Bleu it is one of the wild herbs of the opening, the sun dried note that keeps the green chapter from feeling too cultivated.

• VIImpériale OudThe First Root · in the opening

  In Impériale Oud it gives the spiced opening a dry, almost smoky edge that prepares the skin for the leathery oud beneath.

A note from the atelier

A trace of thyme is one of the ways I keep a composition from becoming pretty. It brings the stones and the heat, and it reminds the flowers where they grew.

Questions about thyme