Vanila Vanilla: The Black Gold of Perfumery

Most people know vanilla from ice cream, candles and the air freshener hanging from a rearview mirror. The pod a perfumer buys has been sweated in wool blankets and dried in the sun for months. By then it smells closer to cured tobacco than to dessert: dark, leathery, a little boozy.

3 min

An orchid from the tropics

Vanilla is the fruit of an orchid, Vanilla planifolia, native to the wet forests of central Mexico. The Totonac people of Veracruz cured the pods first: splitting them, sweating them, sun-drying them over weeks until the green fruit turned black and pliable and the air around it thickened. The Aztecs prized it enough to demand it as tribute. When Cortes brought the pods to Spain in the sixteenth century, European courts rubbed the extract into scented gloves and folded it into sugar pastes. They wanted more. For two centuries, they could not get it. Every attempt to grow vanilla outside Mexico failed, because nobody understood that a single bee species, the Melipona, handled pollination in the wild. Without that bee, the orchid flowered and produced nothing.

What vanilla smells like

Vanillin is the main molecule, sweet and balsamic. A cured pod holds a few hundred others, and they pull the smell toward leather, dried fruit and smoke. Each of the three main origins smells different.

Madagascar Bourbon is roughly three-quarters of world production and the darkest of the three: creamy and heavy, with a note of raisins kept in rum. Tahitian vanilla is lighter, floral and anisic. Mexican vanilla, the original, is spicier and woodier, with a smell of dry bark. A perfumer picks one for what the formula lacks, and the choice changes the whole base.

Madagascar and the hand-pollination problem

In 1841, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond Albius, on the island of Reunion, discovered that you could pollinate vanilla by hand using a thin stick to lift the membrane separating the anther from the stigma. That technique, essentially unchanged, is still how every vanilla flower on earth gets pollinated outside Mexico. Each flower opens for a single morning. Miss it, and no pod forms. A skilled worker pollinates between one and two thousand flowers per day during the brief flowering season. After harvest, the green pods are blanched in hot water, then wrapped in wool blankets to sweat for weeks, then sun-dried for months. The whole curing process can stretch to nine months. No other spice demands this much handwork per kilo, and the price swings violently with every cyclone season in Madagascar.

How perfumers use it

In a formula, vanilla almost always goes in the base. It evaporates slowly and holds back the lighter materials above it, so the perfume lasts longer. At a high dose it is the whole perfume, a sticky gourmand that fills a room. At a low dose nobody names it: it softens a leather and warms an amber.

Two PREMIEREPEAU perfumes use vanilla in opposite ways. In Insuline Safrine, Madagascar vanilla absolute is in the base with cinnamon bark from Sri Lanka and a roasted hazelnut accord, and the result is warm and close to pastry. In Albâtre Sépia, the same Madagascar planifolia meets patchouli and an ink accord, which take the sweetness out of it. There it smells mineral and dry.