Some evenings I spend on the internet thinking about things I might do once this storm has passed but let us face the music, it’s unlikely to happen any time soon. Lately to stave off boredom from lockdown in Sydney I come to work and when I am not cutting, packing or sending or, dare I say it at the detriment of my own reputation, spruiking my own wares, when all that is done, I make perfumes and research things on my iPad whilst I listen to music and contemplate what the fuck happened to our lives? This tiny pissant of a thing really has wreaked havoc on our overprivileged Sydney lifestyles where we gaze at the harbour, at ourselves, at the blue horizon from white sandy beaches and generally just live better than most other people in this world. We live so well that I often wonder why so many people suicide in this city. In fact not far from our Studio is one of the most popular sites from which people take their final trip, jumping off the cliffs to a rocky watery death at the base. You often hear sirens every day heading up there either to prevent one or to clean up the mess. It never gets reported you see, because suicide seems to beget more suicide so they conveniently leave it out of the papers and instead publish a line at the bottom of news article which would indicate suicide by suggesting you can call Lifeline if you are in a mental storm and can’t find a way out.
Assuming I manage to stave off depression and get through this unusual time I have planned in my adventures a trip to Madagascar. It’s name reminds me of the way Whoopie Goldberg as a hyena insisted on the name ‘Mufasa’ being repeated in the wonderful first version of The Lion King.
Why Madagascar ?
Well about 88 million years ago it broke off the land mass of Africa and now resides about 500 kilometres east off the coast of modern day Mozambique. It’s about 590 million square kilometres of land that has been evolving on it’s own without the interference for much of that time by humans. So much so that 90 per cent of it’s flora existing exclusively on this rich island, an island which is the fourth largest in the world. There are over 14,883 species of plants that evolved here exclusively which makes scientists refer to it as the 8th continent. To the right of Madagascar is Réunion and Mauritius, to the left is Comoros. But it is much much larger than these other three.
It was first populated by Austronesian peoples that arrived from present day Indonesia by canoe. It is today populated by about 19 recognised ethnicities but it is the Merina people that have dominated it’s culture and have in the past been the ruling class of people.
Well, frankly, you know how I love the French and everything French, well, they had a big impact on the island. Madagascar was once a colony of the French until eventually it sought it’s independence in 1957.
But it’s the French that have added a great deal of influence in the island’s rich history. The people in fact either speak French or Malagasy, the native tongue. It was the French that brought a lot of the agriculture to the island. Though they had been trading in the area since the 1700’s, it was in 1896 that they formally annexed the island and sent the existing royal family into exile. Then they set up cultivating it for cropping and it is the agriculture of Madagascar that fascinates me as much as the place itself.
Madagascar, you see, is the largest producer of quality vanilla pods in the world as well as another perfumers great asset, Ylang Ylang. And I wish to talk about these both within the context of perfume. And it is for this reason, rather than any other, that I wish to visit this place which has me curious not only about it’s history but what might happen to it in the future if it is not given great stewardship.
Madagascar is home to 26 million people which is the size of the Australian population, but you never seem to hear too much about the place in the news. It is made up of roughly 19 different ethnicities and in the north east much of that population is described as Betsimisaraka. These people cultivate much of the land which is heavily involved in a variety of crops from rice to pineapples, avocados, bananas and more - but one of the biggest gross revenue producing crops is Madagascan vanilla. It represents over 850 million US dollars of the countries trade and roughly 30% of the global 2.5 USD billion trade of vanilla each year. But, more importantly, it is the most sort after. Madagascan vanilla is the considered to be the most premium vanilla you can source, known for its often smoky bourbon-esque aroma which is unlike all other vanillas.
The process of cultivating vanilla is also painstaking and requires a great deal of labour. The production in vanilla, which comes predominantly from the north east, is also not very accessible to those that wish to visit. From the capital Antananarivo you must take 2 flights, a 2 hour speed boat ride and then 30 minutes in a canoe. The reason that this remote location is so good at producing vanilla is precisely that, it is remote and has not been deforested significantly by agriculture, thus creating a perfect milieu in which to produce this rare and sort after commodity. The north east coast is a near perfect mixture of native rain forests, coastal breezes that hover around 25 degrees Celsius with constant humidity and good quality soil that the vanilla orchid thrives.
But just because the vanilla orchid thrives in this region does not mean that you can harvest vanilla in great quantities. I have been trying to find a similarity to the production of vanilla and I cannot. I feel it ought to be it’s own analogy. I believe there is a firefly that comes out once every thirty years and has 12 hours to mate and then dies again. Something like that. Vanilla, whilst not quite as romantic, is similar in that vein. The vanilla orchid is a vine that usually wraps around another tree, it can grow almost 300 feet long. In order to produce the vanilla bean the flower must be pollinated. Since vanilla (Vanilla Planifola) is not native to Madagascar, this is problematic. You see, in Mexico there is a specific bee named the Melipona bee which specifically is able to access the very difficult to reach stamen of the vanilla orchid, and the only natural way to harvest vanilla is to have this bee pollinate another vanilla orchid is for that pollination to occur precisely within the 12 hour period that the vanilla orchid becomes receptive to pollination. Can you imagine this? You wait a whole year for a flower to appear and for it to then become fertile for a twelve hour period requiring a one single type of bee which can do the job? This already must give you an indication of why vanilla is so expensive to produce.
But in the neighbouring island of Réunion during the mid 1800s a young slave boy named Edmund Albius found a way to use a log very narrow stick and a sharp knife to cut open the male and female parts of the stamen and allow them to touch ever so gently so that they might flower without the assistance of the bee native to Mexico. This was the beginning of a business which today would be so lucrative that people would smuggle it, kill for it, and create a group of people in this region called Vanillionaires whose sole source of income is the trade of pure Madagascan vanilla.
Today this region of north eastern Madagascar produces over 4 tonnes of vanilla orchid beans which are processed in the region before being shipped around the world to make food products, perfumes, alcoholic beverages and so on. The price, which hovers currently around 400 usd a kilo but which can go for as much as 800 usd a kilo depending on cyclones and other natural events, is the biggest driver of the local economy, providing jobs for many small farmers because of the labour intensity involved. It allows small farmers to have a thriving income from work which is intense for only a short period of the year.
The job of the farmer is to ensure that as soon as that flower blooms they are working to ensure that each pod is split and joined and they spend a great deal of time marking each pod with either a serial number or a particular marking to that farm because there is a great deal of stealing that occurs in these parts. In fact, so much so that as recently as two years ago a large group banded together to hack apart with machetes a small band of criminals known to steal vanilla.
Once the vanilla pods have been fertilised the green beans are only harvested when they are near rotting. This is the best time for the vanilla bean in order to give off it’s wonderful aromatics. From there they are dried and cured in the sun in order to further enhance their aromatic properties. All in all, from the time the green bean is harvested until it is a brownish blackish prunish looking bean ready to ship is roughly 9 months.
Of course, I love vanilla in my ice cream, rum and cake, but my fascination with Madagascan vanilla was on a visit to a perfume factory outside the hills of Como. When I was leaving the with the team at the that I was commencing work with I noticed in a cabinet a small vial of a perfume which was made for Chopard and titled “Madagascan vanilla”. I asked for a small sample and was allowed to take one. I could never bring myself to wear it, it was so rich and beautiful I would often leave it in my drawer and just occasionally have a whiff. That was at the commencement of 2020.
Towards the middle of 2021 I begun my journey into making my own perfumes. It was a series of events that lead to it. Firstly, a lady arrived at my Studio one day and offered me her services to make candles. Which we did. They were great. But I didn’t have much of a hand in designing the scents. Not enough anyway. Then one day my brother turned up at the Studio and suggested for me a new business proposition - bespoke perfumes using a friend of his that was tinkering around at home. I liked the idea but felt it was a lot of work and then offered him all my connections for him to do it himself, he declined. A few weeks later whilst looking for essential oils for my candles at a business named New Directions in Sydney’s Marrickville I was introduced to a man named Don. He was so helpful, and was explaining to me everything I needed to know. A week later I met with Dimitri Weber from Goldfield & Banks and we discussed everything from Boronia flowers from Tasmania which bloom for just three weeks in a year to sandalwood from Western Australia, to the vanilla he used in his latest fragrance Silky Woods. To say I was hooked would be factual. From that day onwards there has not been a day I haven’t done something with a scent, not a day I have been able to stay away from spraying a perfume. All this was coinciding with my new 5ml and 10 ml travel atomisers that were being developed. I was enveloped in scent.
But what is vanilla to me with regards to scent? I didn’t really understand the impact of vanilla in perfume until I started making it myself. Once I had the perfumers alcohol I needed along with my essential oil collection I started realising that there was an art form to making perfume that reminded me of writing and producing music - something I have a little knowledge and experience of but would hardly consider a talent.
Perfume on the other hand didn’t seem to be quite as difficult as making great music. There were not so many perfume ingredients that you need to get through in order to understand the art form. Citrus, fruit, musk, oud, wood, root, floral - these were the main ones that came to mind as I was going into my basic formulations. It was Dimitri and a blogger by the name of Jeremy Fragrances that showed me what vanilla was to perfume.
In good perfume vanilla is like white ambergris, or sandalwood, or musk - it is the anchor of the perfume. It makes such a wonderful ingredient because it has carrier properties that allow the other ingredients to work their magic. It has the ability to be a top note, a mid note and a base note in perfume. Which basically means it smells going on, it smells going through and it leaves something behind for tomorrow.
So in my experiments I found a video on YouTube about making a vanilla tincture. This is where you split the pods open to scrape out the vanilla beans and then you marinate them in perfumers alcohol for 6 months. So of course, what do you think I did next? I ordered in Madagascan vanilla beans of course. And around this time Sydney went into lockdown for the 2nd time and suddenly I found myself like some madly enthusiastic Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in the book Perfume where I was spending every moment outside of my regular work pouring over badly written notes with very loose measurements as I made one recipe after the other trying to get my head around this art form.
Now, for years I have been using the wonderful work of Hermes, Creed, Serge Lutens, Frederic Maille and many more in order offer our customers when they open their packages an emotional experience. The web can be impersonal, but when you have a whiff of something that was directly sprayed on your product, that was hand made, hand packed, with, as if often the case, a written note - this - this was chance to make the web very personal. And it worked. The number of times customers wrote in from around the world to ask me what I had sprayed has passed the two hundred mark. It is a wonderful way to get otherwise ghost like international website shoppers to become friends of the company and to make them understand what it is you seek to achieve.
So now here I was tinkering with sandalwood, white ambergris and vanilla to anchor my perfume recipes that were part spice and rum, part fruity, part citrus, sometimes exotic like Champaca and Boronia. And all this time I am building up more and more ideas about what constituted my own favourite scents. I would log onto the website Fragrantica and look at the notes or watch a YouTube tutorial of the colourfully Hawaiian shirted Roja Dove who in 2011 set out to make a fragrance company that was now the darling of England. And it was in these videos and in my own experiments that I stumbled along the other great Madagascan ingredient that I have come to love, Ylang Ylang.
Ylang Ylang is produced in quite a few countries around the world but Madagascan Ylang Ylang is also highly regarded, though perhaps not quite as much as it’s vanilla.
To derive the essence of a fragrance there are a few methodologies but the main two are to steam them and distil the oil or to use a solvent to extract it. In the former, they are known as essential oils, the solvent based ones are known in the industry as absolutes. Vanilla, because it is a seed, is often extracted using a solvent, such as the tincture of perfumer’s alcohol as I described above. Ylang Ylang on the other hand belongs to the former, it is an essential oil derived by placing the yellow flowers of the Ylang Ylang tree producing a scent that is known to be like a smooth Jasmin floral note. The plant is known as Cananga Odorata and it becomes harvestable as a flower only after the 5th year of planting. It takes between 4-6 kilograms of flowers to create but one litre of Ylang Ylang essential oil. Like vanilla, Ylang Ylang is not native to Madagascar, in fact it was first found in South East Asia, but thrives under the same climatic conditions as vanilla, near the sea, near the rainforest, good humidity, even temperatures and a fertile soil - to produce a scent which is often referred to as “rocket fuel” in perfumer or the big “whoosh” like the bubbles in champagne.
Most of the production of Ylang Ylang in Madagascar is on an island off the coast called Nosy Be. But it also occurs in the nearby Comoros islands. It is also produced in central and South America and of course it’s native South East Asia. In recent years it has been gaining in popularity in both perfumes and candles. And there was a reason I was chasing it myself. And this is it, Creed Virgin Island Water.
Now there are so many scents that mean something to me but Creed has particularly had an impact on my life and for two of its scents mostly. Virgin Island Water and Aventus. The latter I have discussed before but to a lesser extent have I talked about VIW.
It was my first Creed scent. I believe I bought it from menswear retailer Harrolds in Sydney’s CBD. It only took one whiff. I’ve never looked back. For me Virgin Island Water is the greatest summer scent that has ever been created. Yes, I’ve tried the ones from Tom Ford and the ocean fresh scents from all the major brands but still, nothing has ever come close to that first whiff of Virgin Island Water all those years ago. There is only one thing that comes to mind whenever I think of it and that is Elizabeth Shur and Tom Cruise in the Bahamas as part of the movie Cocktail. What a period film, what a wonderful bit of cinema were those scenes set to the backdrop of the Beach Boys song Kokomo. Yes, that is pretty much all I think about whenever I smell it. Summer. Sex. A Pina Colada. And what is one of the secret ingredients apart from the white rum backdrop ? Yes, you guessed it, Ylang Ylang.
So now I wish to wind up this blog post and thank you for all listening and I hope that there was some fascinating content somewhere along the line and I hope I did not weave into this post too much of my own personal experiences related to Madagascar but you can probably understand now why I am so itching to get there. Itching to take that flight to it’s capital, those two additional flights, the speed boat ride, the last leg by canoe. There in these noisy streets where music plays and colourfully dressed men and women trade vanilla and have their own lively music, to sit having a glass of spiced rum (I hope they have it there) and to be invited onto a family farm to watch the splicing of a pod, this to me, with or without my Elizabeth Shue, with or without a pina colada or a waterfall by which to make love, this would be my Kokomo. Madagascar, may this wretched fuck of a thing called Covid 19 pass soon so might get to you. And please, until then, look after yourself.
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| a woman sorts vanilla after drying and curing |
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| a green vanilla orchid |
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| splitting the vanilla pod to allow self fertilisation without the need of he melipona bees of mexico |
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| ylang ylang flower |
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| a map of Madagascar and the area from which vanilla is cultivated |
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| locals in the village of north eastern Madagascar |
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| Sorting and grading vanilla |
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| Ylang Ylang |
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| Ylang Ylang |
