Savitri: The Story of a Botanical Perfume
The tale of Savitri begins on a train ride from Mumbai to Jaipur, Rajasthan. I was traveling with my mentor, on a tour of the regions aromatic treasures.
We had talked for hours as usual, from the moment we sat cross-legged on the worn blue vinyl of his lower bunk. In the beginning, the harsh slums of Mumbai passing outside the window made an incongruous backdrop for another lively conversation about the hopeful humanitarian projects that my mentor was developing.
“If you know the ways of nature, you can create wealth,” Ramakant had said. A long discourse on numerous medicinal and aromatic plants followed, each a source of physical healing, economic enrichment and ecological regeneration. Gradually, my eyes became heavy with fatigue, yet my teacher went on with one story after another. I wrote what I could but gradually sleep overtook my senses.
Suddenly his voice brought me back to full alertness.
“The ancient perfumers of Kannouj,” he was saying, “ discovered that the most beautiful combination of two fragrances was…”
I looked up expectantly, pen in hand.
“…vetiver and rose,” Ramakant stated.
From that simple piece of history would come many discussions about these two beautiful, complex and apparently quite different oils; eventually it would be the inspiration for Floracopeia’s first botanical perfume.
Early the next morning we passed through the town of Kota, then entered an area of the Rajasthan Desert renowned for its vetiver.
Vetiver oil, my mentor informed me, is generally distilled from fresh cultivated roots. The local variety, however, is made by first soaking the dried hair-thin wild-harvested roots for one day then hydro-distilling them. This makes the oil much thicker than a typical essential oil, because it contains many components that are semi solid at room temperature. This ruh khus, “essence of vetiver” as it is called, rather than the more commonly known and encountered vetiver oil, would become one of Savitri’s two ingredients.
About a week later we would meet the second ingredient: rose oil.
My encounter with the rose of Rajasthan was not only an enchanting olfactory experience; it was also a sublime symbol of what is possible when human wisdom works harmoniously with nature.
The farm where this rose grew was like Eden. Wandering under its trees laden with fruits, past the sweet well water drawn from the underground Sarasvati River, though rows of a multitude of vegetables and herbs, admiring the profusion of roses ready for harvest, smelling the blossoms of neroli perfuming the air and tasting the sour medicinal amla and succulent mangoes, an epiphany dawned on me: intelligent agriculture is all we need to create heaven on earth.
The farmer, Babu Lal, was once poor like his neighbors, depending on one crop of wheat; now, he was on his way to becoming a wealthy man, and this forty acre garden was becoming a model for all of Rajasthan.
“These new projects utilizing herbal medicines and aromatic plants are the only way poor countries will be restored to their glory,” Ramakant commented. “Here there is food for the mouth, fragrance as food for the nose, beauty as food for the eyes, and birdsongs as food for the ears.”
He pointed to the mountaintop rising above us, where a small building perched on its rocky peak.
“That is the temple of the goddess Savitri,” my mentor said. “This is a sacred valley, and Savitri is attracting the flowers.”
And so the perfume Savitri got its name.
The rose oil used in Savitri comes from Rosa bourbonica, known also as the Edward rose and Barahmasi or Haldi rose in the local language. The oil is distilled in the fields directly after plucking and then decocted in large copper pots over the low heat of cow dung or wood fires. The combination of using fresh-picked flowers and low heat prevents the destruction of fragile aromatic compounds that would otherwise be lost to drying and higher temperatures.
The resulting rose decoction is then filtered through membranes that concentrate the oil, resulting in an oil-rich hydrosol. This hydrosol is then poured through columns of silica crystals that act as a natural adsorbant, holding the oil so that only pure water comes out the bottom of the column. This particular technique took ten years, eight Ph.D. students and truckloads of hydrosol to develop, as different oil molecules adsorb at different rates with different types of silica and different lengths and size of columns.
After the oil has adsorbed to the silica, it is washed from the crystals with organic ethanol (C2H5) from sugar cane, which is then separated from the oil using low heat of a rotary evaporator. What remains is the pure essential oil. Because of the low temperature filtrationand separation method, this oil contains a significantly higher percentage of beta-damascenone, the trace compound that gives rose oil its fragrance, than ordinary rose oils distilled at higher temperatures and pressures.
The exact ratio of rose to vetiver remains the secret of Floracopeia. In truth, it changes slightly from batch to batch, as every year the qualities of the ruh khus and the Rosa bourbonica extract change slightly due to seasonal factors. We like to think of these variations as the influence of Savitri, the goddess who is the radiance of the sun, who blesses each rose in a unique way.
Listen to David Crow Tell the story of Savitri by Clicking Below
[podcast]http://www.floracopeia.com/audio/savitri_story_1.mp3[/podcast]
Tags: Ramakant, rose oil, rose perfume, ruh khus oil, savitri, vetiver oil