enfleurage in June

Use this technique to harvest the scents of the world around you. In June, lilacs and peonies are blossoming everywhere.

tools needed: two glass panes or two porcelain dishes, animal fat or solid vegetable fat (the less scented, the better), flowers of choice, a spatula, perfumery alcohol

step 1: harvest your flowers before the heat of the day

step 2: remove all greenery from the flowers so you are left with just the flowering body

step 3: thoroughly clean the glass panes and your spatula with perfumery alcohol

step 4: spread your solid fat across both sheets of glass, aim for a layer of between 1/4" and 1/8" of fat

step 5: spread your flowers in a thin layer across the glass, making sure to not use too many flowers, as the flowers need to touch the fat or they will rot quickly

step 6: carefully place the glass sheets against each other so the flowers face inwards and let that sit somewhere room temperature for between 24 and 36 hours until the flowers have wilted

step 7: remove the flowers, taking care to remove ALL material besides the fat.

step 8: repeat until the scent has permeated the fat. this can take up to 8 or 9 cycles of the process.

good luck!

About Xandra
Xandra Moss: Junior Apprentice

Xandra is a young woman who loves to travel and has an insatiable curiosity for new skills and ideas. She has lived off-grid in coastal BC on sailboats and on land, travelled most of North America, and is currently practicing and learning permaculture in Europe. Xandra loves to play music, make friends with cats, and is generally enthusiastic about life.

Xandra has created a line of products made from scratch, Luna Obscura, available at Anarres. Perfume is a whole new world for me, something utterly different than previous projects. I am by no means a delicate being, and the process of enfleurage is delicate (and so tedious!). I have broken multiple sheets of glass, and often felt like I just wasn't going to "get it right". I've come up with a printing process for the packaging of my new perfume line Luna Obscura. I'm tired of PLASTIC. Plastic packaging, plastic labels. It's crap. It's 400 years of microplastic in the ocean. Paper labels are awesome but have issues with durability, especially with oils. I wanted something beautiful and, more importantly, something that can be reused and not just thrown away.