Magickal Realism

The perfumers and bath and body creators who use synthetics (i.e. fragrance oils) presumably have good reasons for using them. Usually, the reason is purefly financial: synthetics are produced cheap and let’s face it, most big-name perfumers are trapped in the corporate spiral so cheap the materials must be. Sometimes, it’s for a legitimately ethical reason: using the synthetic options may prevent the actual plant from going extinct through overuse.
Sometimes the scent can’t be found in nature to begin with.

I get it, I do. I just won’t do it - I like my naturals, well, natural. What’s alternately amusing/irritating me is this “praise synthetics/slam naturalism” bent I’m seeing more and more of out of the big-names in the perfume industry. The reason it’s tweaking me is that I can smell their fear, and it’s pure, superstitious, baloney fear, the kind that led to people getting stuffed in Iron Maidens during the Inquisition. These superstitious are frothing forth from men who claim “scientist” in their job title. Apparently “unscientific” is the new “heretic” among perfumers. Should I fear someone from Quest Chemicals is going to show up at my door and haul me off for perverting people with natural materials? Will my oils be cataloged and hidden in some basement with secret passageways that lead to the Vatican? Geez, I thought I had enough to fear living under a regime run by George Bush. It’s a sad day - I openly practice witchcraft, and I’m less fearful and superstitious than these science types.

I’ve been staying away from the synthetics debate because I haven’t researched synthetics that thoroughly, and I just don’t know the materials as initimately as I do natural materials. But this completely unsubtle movement against naturals has my hackles up: there’s something going on behind the scenes, and the syntheticists are scared, so scared that they’re bullying and slamming every naturalist they can. Perfume and Flavorist has started a series called In Praise of Synthetics. In an interview on National Public Radio on January 21st, Chandler Burr felt it necessary to close his interview with an unasked-about and ompletely unnecessary slam against the naturals movement. It’s not the first time he’s made that slam, either, even though from what I gather, no one was asking then, either. IFRA has been doing its darnedest to make synthetics our only chemical option in perfume creation, going so far as to issue unresearched data indicating natural materials are far more allergenic than they actually are (and conveniently ignoring the nature of allergy and the way that allergy works.)What makes much of this naturalists-stalking so ridiculous and Inquisition-like is that even among artisan perfumers, those of us actively in business as natural perfumers are something of a rarity - so much so that we don’t really have accurate numbers for how many of us there are. To get down to the numbers you would have to sort out people who make perfume only as a hobby (I would guess that’s most of us) from smartasses with an eyedropper and a few oils (next level) from those of us actively in business. Among those of us who are actively in business, you would have to separate the essential oil suppliers from the specialists.

I would place myself under that last group of specialists and I suspect my circumstances are still nontypical. Most home bath and body makers in the US are in soap, because soap is where the money is at here. Those of us still specializing in perfume are micro-businesses; our market share is people who are either perfume collectors who purchase equally from artisan naturalists and big name companies, or who have a deep-seated animosity towards syntheticists and their ilk that no amount of praising synthetics is going to unseat.

So far, I’ve left synthetics alone, just because I prefer not to use them. But the way the big chemical makers are carrying on is smelling like a superstition-driven witch hunt. So excuse me, I’m going to go hug my all-natural perfume organ now.