Completed The Secrets of Scents II

[Tazrae]

Timestamp: 81st of Fall 520 A.V.

Continued From: The Secrets Of Scents I

Tazrae was meeting with Tegan later that day. He was going to help her follow the instructions in the book on how to make an essential oil. The promised oil would be lavender and she was a bit excited by that. However, she wanted to do more studying in the book she had before they met at sunhigh. Bree’s snoring company made Taz smile and she moved from where she was to lean against the Ixam’s curled up flank so the warm scales would be at her back and make a perfect rest. The Ixam, eyes half-lidded, nuzzled Taz’ shoulder then settled into the sand again, perfectly happy to be a backrest for a the young Innkeeper.

Taz turned back to the book and began reading once more.

“Perfumes are the finishing touches to our grooming routine. We rise, cleans ourselves, apply makeup, do something with our hair, and then apply perfume. People often don’t give much thought to perfumes, but the truth of the matter is that perfumes are extraordinarily complex. The reason why perfume is used is just as complicated. Some individuals use perfume to boost their self-esteem or to become more attractive to any potential mates. Others might wear perfume to mask unpleasant smells either of their own body or of their environment. Scents are tied to memories… memories which can more easily recalled in the presence of a scent. How many people celebrate holidays by baking a certain type of food and the scent of that food immediately recalls the memories of those holidays? Knowledge is power and the knowledge of scent is in and of itself an strong power. Both men and women partake of fragrances. In fact, they are broken down into multiple groups.” Tazrae read out loud and looked thoughtful as she ran her hand down the list.

Types of Scents Citrus: This is a scent that is primarily composed of citrus fragrances. Floral: Scents made from the essential oils of flowers. Fruity: These are scents that feature the aromas of fruits other than citrus, such as peach, blackberry, strawberry, banana. Gourmand: Scents with contain notes like vanilla as well as compounds that mimic food scents. These types are often called 'edible' or 'dessert' perfumes. Green: This scent is made up of woodsy herbal smells. Oceanic: This type of scent is used to mimic the smell of the ocean.

She continued on with her reading, and the book itself got deeper. “A person’s reaction to smell is primal in nature. Such reactions are more on par with animals, the human brain olfactory responding instinctually to the scents it receives.” Taz read on, getting a full understanding of how much emotional experiences worked in the world of perfume. There were deep emotional responses, and those responses – as far as Tazrae could tell – affected individual people vastly differently. One couldn’t expect one scent to affect a hundred people one way. The way perfume worked is that it was more than likely one scent would affect a hundred people a hundred different ways.

[Tazrae]

The soft snore behind her reminded her that Bree was catching a nap, so Tazrae refrained from reading aloud and took her study to the quieter side of reading silently.

It was a fascinating thing. Especially given that the more Taz read about perfume and its manufacturing, the more she understood that perfume was made up of three notes, and those three notes controlled all the rection. Taz couldn’t help but wonder why perfume was compared so similarly to music. Did the sound and smell link that closely? It seemed the term note was a metaphor to simply describe how scents interacted with each other in a perfume mixture. And once she thought that way, she realized the similarity was pretty heavy. The three-part smell was made up of a top note, a heart or middle note, and a base note.

The top notes appear immediately when the perfume was opened or applied. Top notes were light small scents that faded quickly. They were notes or scents to give an impression. And Tazrae had to laugh when the book equated them to a frothy beer and coined them ‘headnotes’. They lasted about fifteen chimes from the time of application but then faded, making way for the heart notes. The heart notes appear after three or four bells or as the top notes fade. They are the quality and depth of the fragrance. They become the heart or core of the scent. They were the notes most people remember most about the perfume.

Finally, the base notes arise. They move in four or five bells after the perfume was applied. They are the scents of the fixatives which hold and boost the strength of the lighter top and middle notes, anchoring them on the skin and allowing them to thrive. They tend to be musky, watery, mossy, and woody scents. Base notes never change and are often called solid notes because of their steadfastness. It was almost impossible to smell a base note initially because they are often masked by top and heart notes accordingly.

All perfume was classified into scent families. Tazrae ran her finger over the list of families and tried to understand the difference between the types of scents and the families. It was immediately clear to the young woman that scent family was comprised of types and just another way to categorize the scents into organizable means.

Taz made a careful note of them:

• Floral: smells like flowers
• Fruity: smells like fruit, including citrus
• Green: fresh grass or leaves
• Herbaceous: like any variety of herbs
• Woody: like different types of wood
• Amber: like tree resin
• Animalic: bodily smells
• Musk: like a substance made by the musk deer
• Oriental: amber and spice

Perfume was decidedly diluted. Tazrae wondered why. As she leaned back against the warm Ixam as it snoozed, she learned categorically why. If one didn’t dilute perfume with alcohol, the smells would be completely congested and would scent all at once. It was hard for her to understand that until the book made the comparison to an orchestra. If the perfume wasn’t diluted to spread the notes of the perfume out, it would be like hearing an orchestra play all the notes to a symphony all at once. The scent would lose its meaning, become muddied, and there would be no enjoyment.

[Tazrae]

There were only three components to perfume. They were made up of essential oils, ethanol, and water. Ethanol was colorless odorless alcohol used to form that part of the mix. It was a must that whatever alcohol was used have no scent to it so the perfume oil was never interfered with. Water was just to dilute the mixture itself. Ethanol, it turned out, was simple grain alcohol that she could make on her own with her still easy enough.

Tegan could probably show her how, Taz thought, as she turned the page and continued her research.

The liquid perfume was made up of a mixture of alcohol (ethanol), water, and the scents that evaporate at room temperature. Perfume oils, for example, were made of fragrance that was dissolved in eighteen percent alcohol and two percent water. That made perfume oils the most intense of the types of fragrance made with eighty percent of it being pure scent. But her reading indicated perfume oil was just a base for the making of the perfume itself. Perfume, for another example, was fifteen to forty percent perfume oil cut by seventy-five percent water. Cologne was even more watered down, Tazrae discovered, only holding three to eight percent of perfume oils.

Type	Percent Aromatic Compounds
Perfume Oils	80% +
Perfume	15 - 40 %
Spirit	15 - 30 %
Cologne	3 - 8 %
Splash/Aftershave	1 - 3 %

The book went on to talk about the materials used in perfumery. It seemed fruits, spices, resins, gums, leaves, balsams, grasses and flowers were the most common. They were often essential to compose the head and heart notes. Most perfumes, the book said, were made with floral essences, because it was extremely difficult to source the materials for other essences. Taz was confused as to why and read on. Animals produced products made in perfumes too. The young Innkeeper wasn’t comfortable with the thought, but read on anyhow to find out what sort of ingredients were used. It seemed Ambergris from sperm whales and musk from male deer were common. But all kinds of animal parts could be used for scent and had been in history, killed for their oils when plant harvests were poor.

“Extraction Methods” Tazrae read, looking thoughtful as the Ixam behind her shifted, lifted a paw in sleep and scratched at an ichy patch of skin on her nose. The heavy tail of the creature flicked a fly off a flank then wrapped itself around Tazrae, tucking her more closely into the body of the slumbering lizard. The young Innkeeper smiled, leaned back, and rubbed her head back and forth for a moment in affection, sliding her already curly hair across Bree’s smooth scales. “Love you too, Bree…” Taz said softly, then went on to start reading about extraction.

“To separate the oil from plant parts, the oil must be extracted various ways. The easiest of this was expression. Expression was just a fancy name for squeezing the plant material until its oil released.” That was what an oil press was for, certainly enough… expressing oil. Taz learned two more terms as well. Enfleurage and maceration. The two methods used grease or warmed fats to extrude the oils. One could boil the plants as well then subject them to steam to get at the oil… a method Tazrae recognized immediately as steam distillation. That made the purest form of oil, she knew, and it made sense since it was one of the biggest sections.

[Tazrae]

She almost dropped the book though when she learned that a small bottle of rose perfume made in Syilras took over six hundred roses worth of oil.

“By the Gods…” Taz swore, wondering if there were easier perfumes to start with and if the end result was worth the trouble of growing that many roses. But as she opened her mind and thought about Syka, she realized things bloomed here in profusion. If a tree was getting ready to flower, it flowered for months and replaced its petals as often as they dropped sometimes littering the jungle floor for seasons. “There will be enough raw material here.” She decided, talking out loud and now more determined than ever to experiment with perfumes.

“Perfumery is a lot of experimentation.” The book went on to talk about how the crafting of perfume took hundreds of bells and thousands of experimental mixes before the perfect mix could be found and copied. Ingredients must be readily available for such endeavors or it would be a defeatist endeavor. On top of that, fresh ingredients must be used or else scents would change or degrade over time and if one perfected the perfect mix out of aged ingredients then it would be hard to replicate the formula again unless one kept detailed notes on the preparation or storage of the inferior aged ingredients. It was enough to make Tazrae’s head spin.

And then it blew her mind honestly because she turned another page to read on and found out that the recipes to perfumes were highly sought after and jealously guarded. So once someone developed a perfume that was considered amazing, the recipe was protected with life and liberty and passed down through perfuming families over time since they were developed. Tazrae wondered what a perfuming family was and whether there were any in the cities she’d lived in. It almost sounded like nobility, which was unheard of in Syka and even in the post Valterrian times.

But Syka being here gave her a chance to develop some truly unique scents. And she wondered if she could make a lasting legacy out of her simple budding curiosity. Syka needed more exports, something that could be homegrown and exported for coin that would benefit the Settlement and maybe bring more tourism or business to the place. They were small and Tazrae had no interest in the small getting larger, but the settlement needed trade to survive. She knew enough about business to understand that.

Taz yawned, starting to feel the effects of the warm lizard at her back and the soothing speckled sunlight filtered through the trees. It didn’t keep her from turning the page though and reading more… just a bit more before the nap she knew was coming overcame her.

“Perfumes smell because of evaporating. That means one needs to take care of the application of a perfume. Dab gently instead of rubbing in perfume vigorously. Creating heat upon application will evaporate the top notes and weaken the overall smell.” Taz yawned again, looking thoughtful, and skimmed down to read more.

[Tazrae]

“Storage.” She muttered, and then her eyes crossed the handwritten page, studying about what happened when perfumes were stored. It seemed that any heat could damage them, even the heat of sunlight. The warmth of fire or a cupped hand, or even be carried around in one’s pocket could damage the scents. They instead needed to be stored in dark bottles in dark cool places. Taz would have to come up with a root cellar or something for storage of oils and such… which wasn’t hard to plan. She could dig something out of the land or put a basement under one of the facilities. Plans were already forming in her mind as she stretched one last time and managed to turn the page again. She was almost through the little book, though there were recipes in the back for starter fragrances.

There was just a small footnote left. It seemed as Tazrae read on, that a person's body temperature and the oil content of their skins had an enormous impact on the way a perfume would cling to them and smell. On a person with warm dry skin, top notes evaporated faster than on a person with cool and oily skin. She decided everything would be fine in Syka, where she suspected that people here had a higher temperature and more oily skin both… a balance that could be struck for sure.

She closed the book then, knowing Tazrae had learned about as much as she could for now from the book. It was set carefully aside as the girl rolled, leaning against the slumbering Ixam with her side now, not using her as a backrest. Taz threw her arm over the scaled form, burrowed her head in the crook of Bree’s front leg, and stretched out. It was time to take a nap. The world would wait for a bell or two while she took a small break from the day and caught up on her dreams.

For even now, they were filled with exotic scents, serpents, and even an outdoor shower she needed to build. That would come next, she decided, then maybe a new root cellar to store perfumes. As she drifted off to sleep, Tazrae smiled slowly. Bree lifted her head, twisted her neck, and nuzzled her rider a moment before leaning her snout on an outflung foreleg and falling back to sleep.

Word Count: 2576

[Tazrae]

Tazrae-

Perfumery +5, Psychology +2, Research +5, Aromatherapy +2

Perfumery: Types of Scents, Psychology: A Persons Reaction To Scent, Perfume: Emotional Ties To Scent, Perfumes: The Three Parts Of Scent; head notes, heart notes, and base notes, Perfumery: The Scent Families, Perfumery: The Importance Of Dilution To Spread Notes Out, Perfumery: The Three Components of Perfume – essential oils, ethanol, and water, Perfumery: Types of Perfumes – Perfume oils, perfume, spirit, cologne, and splash/aftershave, Perfumery: Materials Used In Making Perfumes, Perfumery: Expression, Perfumery: The Secrets Of Recipes, Perfumery: Perfumery Families & Legacy, Perfumery: Evaporation Causes Scent, Perfumery: Storage Principles, Perfumery: The Effect Body Oil and Body Temp Has On Perfume Longevity,