botanical perfume –
perfume made with all plant-based ingredients– including essential oils & absolutes that are derived from fruits, flowers, roots, berries, seeds, resins, spices, bark, etc.
conventional perfume vs. botanical perfume
Conventional commercial perfumes are manufactured with synthetic ingredients (that means man-made in a laboratory) and oftentimes contain known carcinogens, hormone disrupters, and skin-irritants, including: formaldehyde, parabens, phthalates, petrochemicals, etc.
On the other hand, organic botanical perfume is created from blending pure ingredients derived from nature and do not contain any of the aforementioned toxic additives.
ESSENTIAL OIL VS FRAGRANCE OIL:
essential oil – natural oil derived from nature (plants)
These are highly concentrated and volatile, meaning that they evaporate quickly, and inherently possess therapeutic qualities for the body, mind and soul.
Sometimes a huge amount of plant material is required to yield very little essential oil. For example, it takes approximately ten thousand pounds of rose petals to produce just one pound of rose essential oil. Hence the higher costs of some natural products.
Essential oils are finite (limited) and thus very precious– and that’s one reason why it’s so important that they are sustainably harvested.
fragrance oil – synthetic oil man-made in a laboratory
These oils are the artificial version of natural scents. Their intention is to mimic the scent of nature.
They are produced because they are cheaper than many essential oils and can be controlled to always have the same exact scent—unlike essential oils that have a natural variance (see below.)
These oils do not contain the intrinsically therapeutic properties that natural essential oils do and in fact oftentimes contain known carcinogens, hormone disrupters, and skin-irritants. They are the unfortunate reason why many people are allergic to or bothered by perfumes.
Fragrance oils are primarily what’s used to scent widely-available commercial perfumes. So if you’re using a commercial perfume said to have “notes of rose” it most likely doesn’t contain even a drop of actual rose essential oil, but rather a cheaper fragrance oil made to mimic the real stuff.
To be clear, Stella Deer products NEVER contain fragrance oils– only organic or wildharvested 100% pure plant-derived essential oils that are ethically harvested.
carrier
Because essential oils are highly concentrated, they cannot be used directly on the skin and are thus diluted in a carrier.
The carrier is literally a substance to “carry” the scent for you and allow you to put it on your skin.
The carrier can be alcohol (almost always when it comes to commercial perfumery) or a scentless oil such as jojoba.
Stella Deer botanical perfume uses jojoba oil as the carrier rather than alcohol (which can be drying.) Jojoba oil as a carrier allows the scent to linger a bit longer on your skin than one made with alcohol as well.
jojoba oil – a scentless oil derived from the seeds of a desert shrub; not technically an oil but a liquid wax; not only carries the scent in a perfume but also nourishes the skin
sillage – a perfume’s fragrance trail, left behind in the wake of the wearer
This is the difference between a perfume you can smell a block away and one that blooms only within closer proximity of the wearer.
Some perfumes have much stronger sillage than others, but this has nothing to do with the quality of the perfume- rather it is a characteristic of it. There are those that fill up a room and others that wear closer to the skin making them more intimate.
Botanical perfumes tend to have a softer more minimal sillage, diffusing themselves more modestly. They are not the type of pervasive perfume that’s going to take up an entire theater. Rather, they fill the wearer’s personal aura projecting a trail of perhaps a few feet. They don’t scream or pull for attention or vie to interject themselves into every far crevice of the perfume wearer’s environment. Instead, they tease more playfully and linger more softly– projecting a more elusive afterglow.
of interest: variance
The ingredients in botanical perfume are plant-based and sourced from all over the world. Just like how vegetables grown in your garden might taste slightly different year to year (juicer tomatoes for instance, or sweeter or less sweet strawberries), the plant-derived ingredients used in botanical perfume are also affected by the weather & other growing conditions of where they are cultivated.
They may also slightly differ depending on when and where they are harvested, how they are processed, and the extraction method itself. And even if the same processing and extraction methods are used on a certain botanical, an orange essential oil that was made from oranges grown in the United States will still have a subtly different scent than one produced from oranges grown in Italy.
Variance is just another beautiful way in which mother nature endlessly expresses herself and thus demonstrates in yet another way the true value of botanical perfumes—that they are always truly one-of-a-kind.
Shop our collection of botanical perfumes here to find your perfect signature scent.