A few years ago, I went back to England and visited the area where the mystical Isle of Avalon is supposed to be...the coastal area around Tintagel and Glastonbury....the birth place of King Arthur, and the legendary Merlin, Vivianne, the lady of the lake and Morgainne, priestess of Avalon...It was late summer and there entire area is full of apple orchards...ancient gnarled trees full of wisdom and a sense of antiquity...sourounded by the lush scent of ripe apples, hanging heavily from overladen boughs.....
I climbed Glastonbury Tor one evening...and as the soft haze settled over the valley beneath me, you could almost hear the chants of the preistesses drifting over from the Magical Isle of Avalon....mystical incense, herbs and the wafting deep and fresh scent of ripe apples from the ancient trees......
When I got back to Australia, I sat down to try and capture this picture in a perfume. Fruit notes are particularly hard to capture with natural ingredients, as fruit (apart from citrus) simply doesn't lend its scent to extraction the way flowers do...Some years before I had scored a tiny bottle of apple essential oil, distilled from whole granny smith apples in South Afrika by a rogue distiller...it had the sharp apple topnote to it, but totally lacked the sweet depth of an actual apple, the way many essential oils do...and of course this tiny bottle wasn't going to be enough to actually make any quantity of perfume....So I set out to find a way to create a scented picture of the real thing.
I found a number of different apple CO2 extracts used in the food industry, that gave a sense of the fresh sharp topnotes in apples even if it lacked the juicy lushness I was looking for, but at least it gave me a starting point. together with a few drops of my precious apple EO, I had an apple topnote for my perfume. To this I added Rose ...the most english of flowers, and a perfect partner to the sharp apple tang. I chose to use a particularly delicate Rose du Mai, as it adds an fairy like quality to the blend, a flower blossom touch....Neroli adds further floral beauty, while I found a touch of mandarin added in the fruity sweetness needed to give a sense of ripeness to the apple top note....the perfume began to take form....The heart and base are a blend of hay, fresh mown hay lying out in the fields, drying for the winter feed... fir balsam from the trees of the forest around the orchards...and labdanum incense resin from the isle of Crete, used by the preistesses in Delphi, which seemed rather appropriate...labdanum is also such a soft, ambery sweet scent in itself, that blended perfectly with the floral fruity mid and topnotes.....re creating that sense of orchard and forest I had in my vision...priestesses burning incense in the temple of the apple isle on a late summers eve.......
"Avalon"
Scent family: fruity floral
Notes top: apple CO2 and distillate, neroli
midnotes: rose du mai, green mandarin, apple blossom accord
base: labdanum, hay, fir balsam, amber accord
Order your own bottleof "Avalon" here:
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sample $10.0019ml edp spray $48.005ml perfume oil roll on $48.0070ml edp spray $110.0019 ml perfume oil $110.00
