Lavender Absolute | Featured Note For April, & Beltane

With this message we celebrate this year's Beltane, situated midway between the Vernal Equinox and Midsummer. Historically & ritualistically celebrated in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, Beltane served to mark the beginning of summer and to protect the cattle, crops and people, and to encourage growth. As Beltane favours fire and ash for its protective powers, Lavender Absolute, with its forest-driven scent, burns bright with verdant growth and potentiality. Let us celebrate the eve of this new celestial chapter with the Absolute, the true scent of lavender in perfumery, and evoker of the purple, fragrant sprawl that adorns the French mountainsides.

Lavandula angustifolia—or true lavender—is, as the latter name suggests, the genuine lavender scent, as opposed to Spike Lavender or other hybrid Lavandins. It is a very fragrant shrub that can grow over six feet tall, with broad evergreen leaves and mauve flowers produced on spikes, thriving in Mediterranean climates with wet winters and dry summers. Produced around the world, our lavender absolute is sourced from France, and is the ultimate for use in natural perfumery.

True Lavender has the capacity to survive in otherwise averse environments.

A (virtual/visual) pillar of resilience, the true lavender, though not commonly twinned with Beltane, seems like the right scent to celebrate on its eve, named by some as the "spring time festival of optimism" that brings fertility rituals to the forefront, and emphasizes growth under the waxing power of the sun. Sweeter though less floral than its oil counterpart—the most popular oil in the United States, of note—the absolute is a semi-viscous liquid of a dark brown to green colour, with a very rich, herbaceous odour. In dilution, it is very similar to the scent of its originary flowering shrub. It is also of note that the two are not interchangeable in chemical compounding, despite their molecular similarity.

The Absolute acts as the resolute mask of unpleasant perfumery aromas.

Its woody-herby undertone and coumarin-like sweetness not only acts as the best scent-screen or mimic of its botanical source, but is incomparable in its capacity to mute less desired odours that are part of perfume compounds. Like Beltane, the Absolute is immutably growth-oriented, irreverent to past or decay.

Lavender Absolute is used any citrus, forest or herbaceous-forward scents.

Lavender absolute is used in a variety of citrus colognes, along with chores, fougeres, new-mown hay bases, along with forest notes and herbaceous scents of this kind. It blends well with oakmoss, labdanum, vetiver, pine needles oils, patchouli, coumarin, and sage clary. It is, as well, one of the secret ingredients in our Ghost Pine perfume.

A symbol of purity, Lavender's latin root is 'lavare,' or, to wash—a vector of ablution, or catharsis.

While the Lavender Absolute speaks of its own bruised-coloured growths, luxurious coating mountainsides in its indulgent shade and odour and the promise of further bloom, it must also speak of starting anew, and while it may not account for the past left behind, surrounding it are potentials not taken. This speaks to the richness of the present, our existence and concepts of the multiverse, and accepting the presence of death in paths not chosen in order to best embrace life, as T. S. Eliot underlines in The Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages—

[...] the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

On this Gaelic Beltane, bless these estival beginnings with the flowering Lavender Absolute.