Living Flower Technology

I dip in and out of perfumery, I have done for years. I am in no way a perfumer or an expert but I love spending time playing around with essential oils. It’s a pretty odd pastime for me as I do not wear perfume myself. The closest I get is wearing a perfumed deodorant, my preference for which are usually in the more masculine / woody resinous and musky categories - in short, I like men’s deodorant. Don’t get me wrong, I like perfume but I do not like the commitment of carrying a scent around with me all day.

When I do feel the urge, I mainly play around with essential oils. This comes in handy as this experimentation is useful for my cosmetic formulations.

I recently found out about Living Flower Technology, a technique of capturing a flowers fragrance while it is still alive and attached to the stem. You may think this is an odd thing to do, but if you know about how how a plants aroma changes over the course of a day, or even how it changes almost instantly from being ‘alive’ to being harvested, you would understand that to capture the scent of a living plant is a pretty neat idea.

Plants have their own biorhythm or circadian rhythm (1). In the animal kindom the circadian rhythm refers to our internal body clock. This clock is closely linked to the 24 hour clock. For instance we feel sleepy when it gets dark and day light tends to trigger waking. Connected to this are the different functions that correspond with when we rise and fall, the complex physiological processes that kick start out bodies (hormones) in the morning and make us feel sleepy at sun down. This isnt a peculiarity of the animal kingdom, it is also a part of the plant and fungi kingdoms.

Consider the rose petal. Essential oil distillers pick their rose buds during the early hours of the morning when the scent is strongest. They then have to rush them to the distillery so they can catch as much of the fragrance molecules as possible. However, what people are not often aware of, is that the scent changes as soon as the rose bud is cut from the stem.

Living flower technology, a technique developed by International Flavor and Fragrance captures the natural aroma of the flower. To do this they place a glass bulb over a blooming bud with a needle placed close to the head. The head-space, or scented atmosphere around the flower, is then captured by tip of the needle. It takes approximately 30 minutes to get an accurate reading of all the molecules; the results of which are recorded and analysed by a computer and a fragrance profile created. This allows the fragrance to be re-created over and over again.

How clever is that?!

You can find out more about Living Flower Technology here, here and here.

References:

(1) Fenske MP, Imaizumi T. Circadian Rhythms in Floral Scent Emission. Front Plant Sci. 2016;7:462. Published 2016 Apr 13. doi:10.3389/fpls.2016.00462