A Living Composition

Cultural context

Who was the person who decided to take a clove and press it into an orange? That moment changed the smell of European interiors for three hundred years and created a portable scent talisman that inspired the House of DeuxPies first edition release.

The word pomander is derived from the French pomme d'ambre, where apple of amber began as medicine. It referred to solid or compartmented balls filled with fragrant substances like ambergris, musk, civet, resin and spices filled these decorative balls.

In a world that understood disease as bad air, these balls of aromatic materials held to the nose were prophylactic and for prayer. Cardinals carried them on golden chains and plague doctors pressed them to their faces in a sense as the infamous bird-beak masks were essentially wearable pomanders, stuffed with herbs and spices like lavender, cloves, and camphor. Elizabeth I received one as a New Year's gift and kept it close.

The smell was protection, status, and beauty all simultaneously. Protection came from the cloves, described even today as a powerful antioxidant and so the premise was the same. Beauty, status and protection wee the pillars behind this object.

The materials were not accessible to all, so by the sixteenth century an interpretation of the pomander was made as a domestic object using often a bitter orange and cloves. They were made in autumn when the citrus was at its most fragrant and the long dark of winter was approaching.

You pressed the cloves in by hand, one by one, in patterns. Perhaps in spirals or grids or with the initials of someone you loved. You rolled the finished orange in a mixture of spices and orris root and then waited. The orange dried and shrank around the cloves over weeks and months. The smell deepened and changed. What began as sharp citrus and fresh spice became something darker, more complex, more itself. A properly made pomander lasts decades. Some survive centuries. It was a 6-8 week process.

Then, quietly, the craft disappeared, as synthetic air fresheners arrived and craft from nature was perceived as little more than a cottage industry. The slow domestic art of scent, such as the kind that required patience and attention and the willingness to make something that would outlast one fashionable season, fell away.

Plant / material

Citrus aurantium, or the bitter orange, arrived in Europe from the Arab world centuries before its sweeter counterpart. The fruit was too sharp to eat, but its rind held a dense, aromatic oil that deepened as it dried.

At a time when scent was protection from illness as much as pleasure, the bitter orange became a vessel for that. Studded with cloves, it released its perfume slowly over months, its sharpness softening into something warmer, spiced, gently and persistent that also cleansed the air.

The clove, Syzygium aromaticum, came from the Maluku Islands in what is now Indonesia and was one of the most traded spices in human history, worth more than gold at certain moments on certain routes. Together with the bitter orange they create something neither could achieve alone.

The orris root, which is the dried rhizome of Iris pallida, is cultivated in the hills around Florence and acts as a fixative for this traditional pomande. It binds the volatile oils and slows their release. Orris has its own smell. A powdery, cool, slightly earthy, like violet and carrot and something ancient. It is why a well-made pomander radiates not just of orange and clove but something more complex underneath. Orris takes three years of drying before its characteristic irone develops. The Florentines have been growing it for centuries and it's one of the most expensive materials in perfumery.

Cinnamon, the inner bark of Cinnamomum verum from Sri Lanka, adds warmth. Nutmeg adds depth. The proportions are important and the quality of the materials of course also matters. But it is the patience of making each pomander that matters most.

Molecules

Limonene (orange peel). Bright, lifting, familiar
Eugenol (clove). Warm, spicy, slightly medicinal
Irone (orris root). Powdery, violet-like, the fixative
Cinnamaldehyde (cinnamon). Warm, sweet, antimicrobial
Linalool (various). Floral bridge, rounds the composition
Myristicin (nutmeg). Dry, woody-spiced, with a faintly resinous warmth 

The result is a warm, spiced composition. Warm, clove-dark, and gently radiant that settles into the room and then as a surprise, sometimes when least expected, announces its tenacious self.

In the world

The nose

Now

Bottles