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By Any other Name?

© Adriela Sakamoto

One summer afternoon in the not-so-distant past, I wandered into the house with a handful of carefully selected roses and offered them to my spouse for his nose's approval. I had already been sampling the bounty, and was almost giddy from the deep, heady perfume. He, on the other hand, took one whiff and recoiled in disgust, leaving me standing there in utter disbelief. From his reaction, one would have thought I'd offered him a sampling from the compost pile.

Upon further experimentation, I found that any strong fragrance garnered a similar reaction from him. Not only that, but he seemed to find delight in flowers that to my nose were just this side of loathesome, Jacob's Ladder being one that springs to mind.

I also recall seeing Iceberg described in some gardening book, as being a rose with no fragrance. Typo? Perhaps. Or perhaps the writer simply could not smell this rose. That's why, when someone asks me what rose is the most fragrant, I advise them to explore the roses deemed most fragrant, and then decide for themselves.

Each nose is different, and each of us interprets odor differently. To my husband, my lovely fragrant roses were nasty and overly sweet, while to me, they were an incredibly complex mix of fragrances layered and mingling with one another in an absolutely delightful dance of perfume.

Up in the roof of your nasal cavity, lies the means by which you are able to discern scent at all. Olfactory hairs, otherwise known as the ubiquitous nose hairs, pick up chemical signals and change them to nerve impulses. These are passed along to the olfactory nerve, which passes them further along to your brain, where your brain deciphers it, remembers it, rejects or embraces it.

I find this amazing, truth be told. Of course we don't all have the same number of nose hairs, so some of us have noses like bloodhounds and some of us wouldn't know a dead horse if we tripped over it.

Five Hundred and Forty aromatic elements are found in the rose, with the primary constituent being citronellol. However, it is beta-damascenone and beta-ionone that provide the most bang for the buck, despite their relatively small quantity in the total mix.

Perfumers have ways of actually analyzing and then grading the elements, according to their contribution to the scent. They can break the scent producing elements into seperate units, and recombine them, which is an art unto itself. In fact, most perfumes have essences of roses in their complex mix, even though we may not be able to discern that.

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