Making Perfumes.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1032, 11 December 1891, Page 4

Making Perfumes.

There was a time in Merrie England when every lady of quality made her own perfumes from the flowers grown in her own garden. In large houses there was one room set apart for this work, and a special maid to attend to it, It was the

still ’ room, and the girl was ‘ the still room maid,’ The word ‘ still ’ calling to mind the apparatus used for ‘ distilling ’ the perfumes or ‘ strong waters ’ as they were termed.

Daring the last century or so commerce and science have walked hand in hand, and traders have put before consumers perfumes, portable and cheap, in an endless variety of forms, and for this reason home-made perfumes are almost unheard of, ar.d the ‘ still room ’ maid of to-day has other duties than making ‘ strong waters.’

The making of perfumes from flowers is such a quiet, clean, easy task that no woman with a garden full of flowers should ever think of purchasing perfumes, but should make them for herself. In this colony at this time of the year country gardens are gay with colour, and reeking with perfume. As the sun goes down the odours wafted from the roses, jasmin, tuberose, jonquille, mignonette, and eglantine, are simply delicious, and really eclipse the perfumes one buys in expensive bottles. The perfumes we buy are mixed, complicated affairs, known in the trade as ‘ bouquets’—that is, they are admixtures of various odours. Simple perfumes—that is, the seperate odcur from any one special flower —are hardly obtainable. These commercial perfumes are prepared from flowers in three or more ways. The first is by distillation. Such flowers, as geranium, lavender, and others contain a volatile oil, which is only obtained by distillation. The second method is ‘ enfleurage,’ for plants bearing delicate perfumes. The third method is ‘ maceration.’

The first method, distillation, requires special apparatus, and a certain amount of special skill, which amateurs do not, as a rule, possess. But the other two processes are so simple that almost any flower-grower may make her own perfumes from the following directions. Maceration means that the petals of certain flowers such as jonquilles, heliotrope, stephanotis, mattholia, orange flowers, jasmin, mignonette, and a few others, yield up their rich perfume , when macerated in melted fat. This fat is not difficult to make. Take fine beef suet, which must be very fresh, remove every particle of flesh and fibre, then cut it into small pieces, and melt it in a jar placed in a saucepan of boiling water; when melted strain it through fine muslin. Dissolve carbonate of soda in the proportion of one ounce of soda to every tweqtyfive pounds of melted suet, in a wineglass or two of hot water, mix this solution well up in the melted suet, which when set solid should again be melted and poured through muslin into cold water. Then again melted and again strained into a jar. To make the perfume, gather the flowers on a dry day towards sunset. Have your suet in a melted condition, pack into it as many flowers as you possibly can—that is, of course, of one kind. Stir them well into the melted fat with a stick. In four days’ time gently melt it again in hot water, and strain the flowers from it. Pack in again fresh flowers, as many as von can get in, then lay it aside for four days and repeat the process for the third time. With strongly perfumed flowers three or four quantities are sufficient to impregnate the suet, but with more delicately perfumed petals as many as ten changes will be necessary. The reason of this treatment is that fat, such as suet, has the peculiar property of extracting nearly the whole of the perfume from flowers when they are ‘ macerated ’ in it. This suet, when full of the perfume, is known as ‘ pomade of flowers.’ To extract the perfume for use you break the suet into small pieces of the size of a bean, place them in a wide-mouthed bottle, having a close fitting stopper. When the bottle is full of the suet, pour into it sufficient rectified spirits of wine to cover the suet. Let it stand for a month or six weeks, when it will be found that the spirit has absorbed nearly the whole of the perfume from the suet. Of course the directions I have given are for amateurs only, who, having a garden of flowers, may be curious enough to like to possess perfume of their own making. From these simple directions, if carefully carried out, almost any woman can make a most delicious perfume. One great point is to melt the suet as gently as possible, more especially after it is charged with flowers, for the simple reason that great heat would drive away the volatile perfume. The flowers I have named above are the most useful for treating by this process. On another occasion I will explain the method known as ‘ enfleurage,’ or absorption, a process used for. flowers having delicate and easily dissipated perfumes, such as violets and such like. Dora.