The Comoros archipelago sits in the northern Mozambique Channel, between the east coast of Africa and the northern tip of Madagascar, in waters warm enough to grow coral and volatile enough to grow coups d’état. There are four main islands. Three of them, Grande Comore, Mohéli, and Anjouan, form the Union of the Comoros, one of the smallest and poorest countries in Africa. The fourth, Mayotte, is a French overseas department.
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The flower is Cananga odorata, ylang-ylang, and the oil extracted from its blossoms is one of the most important raw materials in the global perfume industry. The Comoros produce between sixty and seventy percent of the world’s ylang-ylang essential oil.
The tree is not native to the Comoros. It was introduced from Southeast Asia by French colonial botanists in the mid-nineteenth century, as part of a deliberate project to turn the archipelago into a source of aromatic raw materials for the perfume industry of Grasse.
The tree itself is fast growing and undemanding. It produces flowers year round, with peak harvests from November to March. The flowers are picked by hand, always early in the morning, when the concentration of volatile compounds is highest. The chemical composition of ylang-ylang flowers changes measurably over the course of the day.
The distillation of ylang-ylang is unusual in perfumery because it is fractional. Rather than collecting the entire distillate as a single product, the distiller separates the oil into grades, or “fractions,” according to the order in which different compounds emerge from the still. The first fraction, the “Extra” or “Extra Supérieure,” is the lightest, most floral, most volatile, rich in linalool and benzyl acetate, and it commands the highest price. The subsequent fractions, First, Second, Third, are progressively heavier, darker, and less floral.
This fractionation system creates a hierarchy of value that maps, with cruel precision, onto the economics of the Comorian supply chain. The Extra fraction represents a small percentage of total yield but commands the overwhelming majority of revenue.
The significance of ylang-ylang for fine perfumery is difficult to overstate. The Extra and First fractions possess a floral character that is at once lush, creamy, exotic, and faintly narcotic. Ylang-ylang’s most famous deployment came in the early 1920s, when a Russian-French perfumer used it as a key component of a composition commissioned by a couturier. The perfume, launched in 1921, became the most commercially successful and culturally significant of the twentieth century.
The Comoros’ economic dependence on ylang-ylang is not a figure of speech. Ylang-ylang oil, alongside cloves and vanilla, accounts for the majority of the country’s export revenue. The fragility of this arrangement is compounded by climate change. In April 2019, Cyclone Kenneth caused devastating damage to ylang-ylang plantations.
Efforts to address the inequities exist: fair trade programs, cooperatives, training initiatives. But these efforts operate within a structural reality that limits their impact. If Comorian ylang-ylang becomes significantly more expensive, buyers have options: Madagascan ylang-ylang, lower quality but usable; synthetic alternatives, which keep improving; or reformulation strategies.
A distillery on the island of Anjouan, near the town of Bambao, where ylang-ylang flowers arrive before dawn in woven baskets carried on the heads of women who have been picking since four in the morning. The women who pick the flowers earn roughly two dollars a day. The oil they produce sells, at Extra grade, for between two hundred and three hundred dollars per kilogram on the international market.
The perfume industry’s relationship with ylang-ylang is, in this respect, identical to its relationship with Haitian vetiver. Value is created at the origin and captured at the destination. The rhetoric of luxury, of rare materials, of craftsmanship, of ingredients sourced from exotic places, depends on the existence of those places and the people who live there, but it does not, as a rule, enrich them.
This is not an argument against using natural ylang-ylang. It is an argument for honesty about what that use entails. Every bottle of perfume containing Comorian ylang-ylang contains, in a sense, the entire economy of a small island nation: its labor, its climate, its political instability, its vulnerability to cyclones and market fluctuations.
The ylang-ylang tree, unlike the civet cat in its cage, does not suffer. It grows. It flowers. It is harvested and it flowers again. The moral weight of the story lies not in the extraction of the material but in the distribution of its value.
The flower does not know. It flowers because that is what flowers do. The rest is ours to answer for.
This material at Première Peau: Nuit Élastique. Seven extraits at 20%, one collection. The Discovery Set brings all seven together in 2 ml.
