Impression:
Fade:
A cornerstone of our Progressive Botany Vol. I Collection, Trimerous is one of our most-loved fragrances thanks to its overall impression of comforting, blanket-soft sturdiness. On application, it bursts forth with clean yet soft-edged juniper and bergamot. This freshness swirls and surges continuously with heady florals, given piquancy with pink pepper flashes. Rich, smudgy shadows soon come through with wear – musky, buttery, fermented. A fragrance bound to draw people in.
Setting the Scene: A Promise, Whispered in Three Parts
Once upon a time, a promise was made to the noble Iris, to honour three slivers often overlooked.
The forgotten, muted and discarded were to be brought into effervescent, buttery light. Treated with cashmere-soft care. Edges rounded and undulating surfaces polished until they glistened with dappled luminescence.
Careful hands, weathered with age, tended the fragile rhizome – and a new kind of beauty was born.
Raw Material: Orris
Orris materials are some of the most prized and costly products available to the perfumer. Using abundant amounts is fairly rare as the cost and potential supply limitations can be prohibitive – the cost per kg can exceed $50,000! Thankfully, sensible amounts of orris can impart the characteristic profile of the material, and can be very effective in both a reinforcing or functional role within a formula.
Orris products are extracted from the rhizome of the perennial Iris plant, namely Iris Pallida and Germanica. The full processing of the Iris rhizome is lengthy, demanding and requires the harvester and distiller to possess great skill, intuition and fairly esoteric knowledge. It’s the kind of work that is passed down through generations. Once initially processed, the washed and decorticated rhizomes are then expertly dried for three years before distillation. The end product – orris butter (oil) – also requires a skilled perfumer and perfume manufacturer, as this fickle material can produce some potential production issues due to the acid content.
Our perfumer Euan spent over ten years studying orris before finally completing Trimerous. Orris is a frustrating material that lulls you into a false sense of knowing!
Trimerous is an orris-centric formula, however the facets that are focused on are those often discarded (or overlooked) by perfumers in favour of the more obvious. Trimerousleans into the inherent acidic and buttery aspects, the fermented and effervescent qualities and deploys the finest orris butter to exalt the entire formulation. The fragrance could be thought of as a ‘holographic’ orris: it rises from the skin and produces a soft halo around the wearer.
Those with a keen nose will be able to pick up little orris-y tones across many of our perfumes. Orris does take central stage in Trimerous but its presence in Healing Berry is vital, adding realism to berry profiles both in perfumery and flavour work…
(Yes, orris is used in flavours too. Ka-ching!)
