Lily of the Valley

Cartier Pur Muguet

ideogram.ai

It is hard—especially if, like me, you’re not trying—to escape the feeling that a divine agency governs the smells of flowers. The beauty of rose, of gardenia, of lily-of-the valley seems evolutionarily over the top, particularly when hyacinth and oleander show you that it can be done on the cheap-and-cheerless. Why bother with these exquisite compositions when a knockoff will do? At some point, you come to an intellectual fork in the road. Either (a) pollinating insects are actually fragheads and heatedly discuss among themselves the merits of different cultivars, locations, and vintages, or (b) some of the Devas involved in early design choices were expert fragrance biochemists, and weak management let them run riot.

Lily-of-the-valley (henceforth muguet) is an outlier even in this company. Alone among the best, it has the pure and unique character of youth. No other flower says freshly minted beauty like muguet. The French remember its existence only once a year, on May 1, when everyone buys a sprig. May 1 is also the anniversary of an 1886 strike by workers in Chicago asking for an eight-hour workday. The message of muguet de mai is therefore a strange superposition of worker’s rights and advent of spring. This fits well with the fact that major revolutionary events in France typically occur when the weather improves: 1789, 1848, 1968.

On May 1, France is awash with muguet. I picture the places all over France where muguet is cultivated, packed and ready to go. One of them supplies fully 20% of French muguet. The smell there must be out of this world, and I imagine the timing is as stressful as a clash of cymbals in a symphony. One day late, and you’ve wasted months of work. Amazingly, you can’t even buy remaindered muguet on May 2 (I tried). You would think that leftovers would at least end up in Grasse to make muguet absolute, and you’d be wrong. The yield is too low, and the extract does not really smell like muguet¹.

Chemistry could, in principle, fix the problem, as it has done many times. Get a ton of muguet, extract the stuff as gently as possible, run it through a gas chromatograph, smell every peak as it comes out of the pipe, figure out which one smells like muguet, determine its structure, and hand the baby over to the chemists. The great fragrance chemist Mans Boelens tried that in 1981. He and colleagues collected the flowers from 20,000 stalks and dunked them in 28 litres of pentane for 90 minutes. After boiling off the pentane under low pressure, they were left with 3 ml of oil. Analysis detected 70 identifiable components. None smelled like muguet, and one could therefore assume that the smell was the result of a combination of the 70 in the right proportions.

But that was not the whole story. In a twist that gives me goosebumps every time I read it, Boelens states, “According to our perfumers, at least one peak in the olfactogram […] had a very strong character of muguet. […] Lack of sufficient material prohibited isolation of this component.” Get this: a tiny, unidentified component of muguet oil carried the smell! Why did Boelens not pursue this unicorn to the ends of the earth? The answer is that when he wrote this, perfumery had a perfectly good muguet material in hydroxycitronellal. No one needed a fancy-pants new muguet material when you had the cheap, lovely smelling "hydroxy," as everyone familiarly called it.

The name hydroxycitronellal is faithful to the structure: the carbon structure shared by citronella materials, with an added hydroxy (-OH) group at one end and an al-dehyde (H-C=O) at the other. The smell is pretty much the sum of its parts. If only the aldehyde were present, it would smell of lemongrass. If only the alcohol were present, it would smell rosy. Put both in, and you get the lemony-rosy effect of muguet. Aldehyde and alcohol are functional groups, and they impart their smell character on whatever carbon structure they’re attached to. Also, there aren’t that many of them, and they govern the chemistry of the molecule.

Now for the bad news. Aldehydes are chemically reactive, and hydroxy is a weak odorant, meaning you have to put in a decent slug of it if you want a muguet fragrance. As I have explained before, those are the two conditions that cause a material to be banned, and sure enough, hydroxy was restricted in use by various agencies. That killed Diorissimo, the reference muguet fragrance composed in 1956 by Edmond Roudnitska. Naturally, hydroxy wasn’t all there was to it, and Roudnitska famously planted muguet in his garden and spent a lot of time on his hands and knees comparing his smelling strip to the real thing to get all the other facets of muguet just right. Diorissimo was miraculously good and is now terrible.

On to Pur Muguet. Mathilde Laurent is fighting with one hand tied behind her back and is forced to recreate the illusion of muguet mostly by juxtaposing other facets of the real thing as if to elicit a memory by misdirection. Green florist notes, a banana ester, a solid, opaque white flowers accord, all add up to an empty muguet-shaped space. This is likely the absolute best someone with her transcendent gifts can do, and it will smell great except on May 1, when the real thing intrudes. I would like to see an annual Muguet Olympics where perfumers battle for the best reconstructions. Until we figure out what Boelens’s ghostly peak was, Laurent would win Gold.

1. The stuff that’s sold on the Web as muguet absolute is in fact snake oil.