I first came across perfumer Dabney Rose on Twitter where her lyrical tweets about the plants in her greenhouse and gorgeous photographs of harvested flowers add a quiet loveliness to the ongoing chatter. Rose specializes in “flower waters,” or hydrosols, the fragrant distilled water created by steaming or boiling fragrant plants and flowers — she uses a pressure cooker rather than an alembic — and “flower crèmes,” buttery solids produced by enfleurage, the practice of laying blossoms on top of solid fat until it is impregnated with scent.
Like the blossoms they come from, flower waters and crèmes are fragile and ephemeral — most hydrosols will turn within six months — but their scents can be hauntingly true-to-life. When I rub Rose’s hyacinth crème into my skin, what I smell is not perfume, or even the heady indoor scent of potted bulbs, but a growing hyacinth flower wafting from across a sunny yard. It’s an uncanny experience, almost a visitation, and it feels right for the scent to fade after barely an hour.
I wanted to know more about the creator of this beauty, so I emailed Rose some questions…
Enfleurage is the kind of shop that seems somewhat endangered on the streets of Manhattan’s West Village these days: intimate, independently owned, and quirkily specialized in its merchandise. If you’re walking past its open door, you might be lured in by the colorful focal point of brightly tinted and patterned soaps arranged on a central table. Once you’re inside, you’ll realize why this business is particularly well known for its selection of essential oils, which the owner of Enfleurage has gathered from locations around the world.