Star anise

Few natural things are as beautiful as the fruit of the star anise tree, an eight pointed wooden star with a glossy seed in each ray. Its scent is as clean and certain as its shape: sweet, cool and unmistakably anise.

What star anise is

Star anise oil is steam distilled from the dried fruits of Illicium verum, an evergreen tree that grows in the warm hills of southern China and northern Vietnam. The oil is almost entirely anethole, which makes it one of the purest expressions of the anise note in nature. It is sweeter, cooler and cleaner than fennel, with less of the green and earthy body, and it lends a composition a bright liquorice clarity that reads as both spice and freshness.

Where star anise grows

Our formula books record the species but not the country of this oil, and so I print no origin. Star anise grows across a small region of southern China and northern Vietnam, where it is harvested from trees that go on bearing fruit for many decades. The house rule holds: where no origin is written down, none is claimed. The oil I use is the true steam distilled fruit oil, with the cool, sweet clarity that only that species gives.

How star anise smells

Sweet, liquorice and anise, clean and cool. It has a faint spicy warmth at the end, but its main effect is brightness, a sweet freshness that sits beside citrus and herbs as naturally as sugar beside lemon.

Star anise in our chapter

• IIParadis de BleuThe Leaves · in the opening

  In Paradis de Bleu it is the clean sweetness of the opening, set beside fennel so that the anise note has both light and earth.

A note from the atelier

Star anise is my sweetness without sugar. It lifts the herbs of Paradis de Bleu in the first minutes and then steps aside, leaving a coolness on the skin that the flowers can grow into.

Questions about star anise