Sawa سوا

The soliflore began late last year, during the remake of White Rose.

The idea then was a series: one material, returned to again and again, each perfume a different reading of the same flower. It was the right idea and the wrong shape. New materials arrive weekly. Choosing what to leave out would have slowed the work to nothing.

So the series became a single perfume instead. Every jasmine in one bottle rather than one jasmine at a time.

Around twenty variants, gathered from across the globe. Some are common and well known. Some are not: polyanthum, nyctanthes arbor-tristis, the flower that opens after dark. Some differ not by species but by how they were taken from the plant, because a flower rendered by enfleurage and the same flower rendered by solvent are not the same material. The most prized in the blend is a sambac distilled from petals alone, no leaf or stem permitted in the pot.

The difficulty was never the gathering. Jasmine is a light material. It lifts, and it goes. Composed the usual way it sits on something heavier, and the heavier thing does the work of holding it in place. Here there is nothing to sit on.

The solution was the jasmine co-distilled over Mysore sandalwood, the largest single material in the formula. The sandalwood fixes, but it arrives already carrying the flower. The pillar is made of the same thing as the roof.

My love for jasmine knows no end. This is that love in a bottle.