June 7, 2024
- Brush: Aurora Grooming LG24 Synthetic ("Lux Emerald Green") #SUBBROOSH
- Razor: Fatip Piccolo Slant Closed Comb
- Blade: Schick Stainless (1)
- Lather: Martin de Candre - Vetyver
- Post Shave: Spearhead - Sea Spice Lime (toner)
- Fragrance: Ramon Monegal - Umbra
Happy to use my Aurora Grooming LG24 Special Edition brush for the second shave in a row. It’s a big year for Auroras, according to recent headlines.
I can’t say that I really “get” vetiver. I’m still developing a nose for it. It’s a complicated smell that usually gets combined with other ingredients and notes, and no two versions of “vetiver” that I’ve smelled thus far have been the same. It’s been interesting to read other’s reactions to vetiver in today’s SOTD thread—I’m glad to know I’m not alone in finding vetiver complicated and at times off-putting.
Before getting into wet shaving I got interested in fragrances. And with fragrances, especially men’s fragrances, vetiver is everywhere. The fragrance I chose today, Ramon Monegal Umbra, is one of the first fragrance samples I ever bought. The description claimed that it combines grapefruit and Haitian vetiver alongside other notes. I expected to like it, but found it’s a beast of a fragrance that makes my eyes burn even when worn in small quantities.
By contrast, Martin de Candre Vetyver struck me as bright, fragrant, “green” type of smell, not unlike mint or menthol. The perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena (see link below) suggests that certain prized varieties of vetiver oil give off “a characteristic scent of matchstick and sulfur.” Strangely enough, during today’s shave I detected other nuances in the MdC soap alongside the green, minty qualities—a kind of underlying burning or smokey smell.
As it happens, I don’t have a vetiver-forward aftershave, so I went with Spearhead Sea Spice Lime. I think the citrus element complements the vetiver in the MdC soap. I was curious as to why, and for this I turn to the authority a recent, exhaustive book on smells, Harold McGee’s Nose Dive, published in 2020. (I recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a lot about smells. Just be prepared—it’s not a book exclusively about pleasant smells or perfumery. The first hundred pages or so discuss the early universe and the origins of life, along with bodily secretions and excretions).
McGee suggests that some of the most frequently used smells in perfumery—smells associated with citrus peel, pine and cedar, and vetiver root (among others)—share underlying molecules known as terpenes or terpenoids. Quantities of terpinene and pinene, for example, help to give lime peel its distinctive scent.
The origins of these molecules seem to lie in ecological warfare between plant and animal species. “It appears that volatile terpenoids may well have been developed for signaling by early land insects, then adopted as insect-confusing defenses by early land plants . . . They work so well against insect pests—and spoilage and disease microbes—that our ancestors enlisted them thousands of years ago to care for their dwellings and their own bodies.” (Nose Dive, p. 163)
Vetiver is especially complex: its oils “have been found to contain more than three hundred mostly unusual terpenoids and their products, including zizaenones. This remarkable diversity appears to result in part from bacteria living in the vetiver roots, where they transform relatively few plant-produced molecules into a more diverse set, perhaps to fend off their own microbial competitors.” (Nose Dive, p. 463)
Today’s featured work in Brush Strokes is by the graphic designer and illustrator Karin Doering-Froger, representing the vetiver plant. It’s one of her many illustrations for the Atlas of Perfumed Botany, with text written by the master perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena. The writing is breezy, engaging, and informative on the subject of fragrances (the link includes two excerpts from the book, one on patchouli and one on vetiver).
#ROTY