Four Frangipanis

We’ve been having monsoon weather here. Yesterday, it rained as hard as I’ve ever seen rain, including Pacific storms and hurricanes. It could be that a recent desire to spray myself with several fragrances at once is a response to the dramatic weather. (Or maybe not.) I have been craving florals, though, tropical ones, like this.

Frangipani is stealthy. There never has been a flower named “Frangipani,” botanically. The Frangipanis were people, a notable patrician family in Italy, prominent from around 1000 to the 1600’s. The Marchese di Frangipani concocted (or, more likely, had concocted) a perfume used to scent gloves. The perfume featured orris, spices, civet and musk. The gloves became known as “Frangipani gloves.” That name became associated with the tropical flower Plumeria after French colonists in the West Indies noticed a flowering tree whose scent reminded them of the gloves. The variety shown here is P. bicolor. There are many others.

The blossom blooms at night to lure the enormous Sphinx moth, and other moths. It produces no nectar, though. In the act of poking around looking for nectar, the frustrated moths pollinate the flowers. 

There is much folklore and custom associated with frangipani. In Polynesia, a flower worn over the right ear means unattached and looking for, uh, love; over the left, the opposite. In Bangladesh,frangipani is associated with death; in the Phillippines, ghosts and graveyards. 

What I found interesting about this flower was the wide range of scents I smelled when trying four fragrances made with it; two upscale and two not. 

Chantecaille Frangipani:  A white-flower fragrance for sure; there’s some orange blossom here, too, possibly a bit of jasmine, and what I think is Tahitian vanilla in the drydown. It’s heady, but heavy -- must be difficult to do that -- and has slight green notes, but the overall effect is that of a perfect bridal perfume: pretty and sweet, frangipani’s high road.

Ormonde Jayne Frangipani EDP: This is a very different treatment of the flower from that of Chantecaille. It’s clear, fresh as morning, with a definite hint of green. I smell magnolia, too, and Ormonde Jayne’s characteristic iso-e-super, which makes it a little woody in the early stages. It dries down a bit sweeter, but is never sweet. I’d say this is more Ormonde Jayne and less frangipani, and could be unisex.

Hei Poa Frangipani: Hei Poa is a French company that makes scents of Polynesia. A friend had a bottle and decanted some for me. It’s pleasant, a little boozy at first, some spice peeks out, and then: wham! Here is the heavy tropical flower, with much less finesse than either of the above. I think this is sold in tourist areas and airports in the South Pacific, particularly Tahiti, for moderate prices. The bottle was great -- hand-painted flowers and a big cork dome on top. I’ve been wearing this at night lately.

Maggie’s Pharmacy Frangipani Oil: Maggie’s Pharmacy is a funky shop near downtown Memphis that sells oils, essences, teas, herbs, handcrafted jewelry -- you get the idea. I loved the place. I bought several things from them, and the proprietor gave me a big handful of dried oakmoss, gratis, which I’m tincturing now. Anyway, this frangipani oil is initially musty and a little lemony, and the flower appears only when heated by skin. Like the Hei Poa, it is heavy, unmistakably tropical, and somehow darker than any of these -- it is an oil, of course -- and eventually it turns a little soapy, although it retains the musty quality. 

In Nigel Groom’s “New Perfume Handbook” there is an old recipe for a frangipani perfume that doesn’t list frangipani at all! Instead, there are synthetics: jasmine, lilac, orange blossom, benzoin, musk ketone -- interesting. 

All of this made me want to search out some frangipani absolute. I’d like to smell the real thing, but am not planning a trip to the tropics anytime soon. It seems to lend itself well to other ingredients -- the Ormonde Jayne and the Chantecaille hardly seem made with the same flower, although the other two do. (Of course there are so many kinds. The plot thickens.)

I’ll look around for some absolute. 

Do you have a favorite frangipani? 

Photo ©Johnfoto, used under license from Dreamstime.com.

Resource material from The New Perfume Handbook by Nigel Groom, ISBN 0 7514 0403 9.

Full disclosure time: The Ormond Jayne sample was given to me a couple of years ago by Ormonde Jayne. The Chantecaille sample was handed out to participants at SniffaPalooza, fall 2010. The Hei Poa came from a friend and the Frangipani Essential Oil was purchased by me at Maggie’s Pharmacy, Memphis, TN.

Perfume and Pink Pepper

A reminder: Deadline for the samples drawing -- see February 11 post for details – is March 1st, midnight US E.S.T.! Leave a comment to enter.


Two of the most esteemed perfumers working today – Jean-Claude Ellena and Geza Schoen, who creates scents for Ormonde Jayne – use a lot of pink pepper. This is one of those surprising ingredients of perfumery. I remember sampling a bit of Ellena’s Rose Poivree, passing wrist under husband’s nose and hearing “Is that…pepper?”

Well, as a matter of fact, yes.

Pink pepper (shall I bore you with the botanical name? Oh, ok: Schinusterebinthifolius Raddi), like other peppers, is technically a fruit borne by a tree. The pink pepper used in perfumery and cooking is cultivated on the island of Reunion, a French territory near Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Pink peppercorns get their "heat" from the terpene carene, which is similar bur not exactly the same as piperene, the “heat” in black, green and white pepper.

Mammals like us have a special nerve tract that responds to irritation while eating or sniffing – the trigeminal nerve. The brain then interprets this irritation or pain as “heat” and, in many cultures, pleasure. Capsaicin, the heat in New World peppers like Tabasco and cayenne, fires it up spectacularly. (Carbon dioxide, the fizz in soft drinks, stimulates it too.) The piperene or carene in peppercorns produces a more subtle heat, complemented by other flavors existing in the fruit.

Primary research (taste): Upon smelling a container of whole pink peppercorns, I get mostly a haylike scent. Upon biting into a few, there’s a burst of pepperlike flavor and a little heat – the piperine/carene – then sweetness. That is quickly eclipsed by a bitterness and an odd, pinelike note, then fruitiness. As I chew, the bitterness returns. Then the fruitiness. The various flavors don’t ever really meld; they continue to appear in sequence, until finally only a sweetish, slightly fruity aftertaste is left. It lingers for a long time. Ultimately, only the mild pepper taste remains, with a slight bitter edge.

The two fragrances that I most associate with pepperiness are Ormonde Jayne’s “Zizan” and L’Artisan’s “Poivre Piquant.” (I don’t currently have a sample of the latter, but definitely remember it!)

Primary research (smell): It is clear to me, on sniffing the top notes of the Zizan, that there is a slight but pleasurable irritation, which has to be involvement of my trigeminal nerve. (There is a similar, but more subtle, effect with “Man,” another Ormonde Jayne scent using pink pepper, and “Isfarkand.”) A quick look at some research on olfaction and trigeminal response reveals that they are linked, and do influence each other; in fact, trigeminal response is usually lowered in people with no sense of smell.

So we have another kind of stimulus entering the fragrance gestalt – slight irritation of a nerve tract that the brain often reads as pleasure. This expands olfactory enjoyment in what seems to me a most modern way.

I’m not sure who the first perfumer to use pink pepper was, or what the first scent to use it was. The tree grows all over the temperate world. My guess was that it was first culinary and then adopted for perfumery. Certainly, it appears in some of the most interesting and innovative scents.

I wonder what they’ll think of next.



Some fragrances using pink pepper (Basenotes lists 82) are: Ormonde Jayne’s Isfarkand, Champaca, Man, Orris Noir and Zizan; A Rose Poivee, Eau de Merveilles and Angeliques Sous la Pluie, all by Jean-Claude Ellena, Timbuktu and Poivre Piquant, and Red Tea by Bulgari.

In culinary terms, pink pepper can be used on or in almost anything, including chocolate.

Photo of Brazilian pink pepper from Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages, http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/