Has Vetiver gone to the dogs? Grrr, not exactly...

From the author of the Smartdogs' Weblog 6/10/10 entry, called Animal Attraction

I like to experiment with essential oils. I love perfume. Good perfume, not cheap drugstore stuff. And essential oils not only give me a way to experiment with different scent combinations, I can also use them make my own scented soaps and cleaning products.

One day as I was playing around with mixtures of different scents while surrounded by a pack of curious dogs, I thought “I wonder what the dogs think of these?”

Anyone who’s spent a bit of time with dogs understands that they don’t make the same kinds of value judgments about smells that we do. Seriously. In case you have not already noticed the obvious, your dog adores smells like shit and week old garbage and rotting flesh and he probably thinks that smells like fabric softener and Glade air freshener are utterly revolting.

It’s easy to find scents where dogs and humans disagree. I wanted to see where the dogs and I agreed. So I collected a dozen or so vials of essential oils and four dogs (the number I had on hand) and conducted an informal experiment. I put a drop of each oil on a small piece of paper then held the sample out toward each dog in turn and let each one decide whether they wanted to explore it more intimately or not.

The results were interesting.

Being courteous beasts, the dogs politely and carefully sniffed each sample offered. They seemed to react neutrally to most of the scents, generally taking a quick, cautious sniff or two then looking at me inquisitively. All four turned up their noses at eucalyptus and avoided it. Three expressed similar distaste for tea tree and two for violet. Wintergreen made one dog sneeze; the other three refused to sniff it. I didn’t force the issue. They showed a somewhat marked interest in sandalwood, patchouli and ylang-ylang, taking a few extra sniffs and pausing thoughtfully between them.

All the dogs were mesmerized by three scents – vetiver, frankincense and oak moss. Vetiver was the clear winner. All four were entranced by it. They didn’t just take a few polite whiff of the sample – they inhaled slowly and deeply, and then paused to process the aroma between each sniff. Charlie even tried to follow the bottle into the cabinet.

While an interesting little experiment, I didn’t intend to follow it up. That is, until last week, as I browsed the beauty products while waiting for my stylist.

A row of fragrances in the Aveda aisle caught my eye. I sniffed each one cautiously. Most were a lot sweeter and more citrusy than the scents I prefer, but one hit the jackpot. Chakra 1 is a blend of vetiver, frankincense (olibanum) and patchouli, strong and woody but not overpowering. Although it wasn’t something I’d ordinarily buy, it was relatively inexpensive and, given the results of my recent experiment, I suspected that the dogs might enjoy it. So I brought a sample home.

I’m glad I did. Chakra 1 has been a big hit with the beasties. When I apply it they sniff me like a freshly decorated hydrant. And if I spritz a little on one of the dog beds, the boys will roll on it in evident ecstasy.

Because the dogs and I seem to share a preference for grassy and woodsy fragrances, I decided to test their reactions to my perfume collection. While distinctly unimpressed by most of the products, Muschio di Quercia was the paws down favorite and young Charlie displays a clear and consistent interest in Privet Bloom (lemon, bergamot and verbena on top; white hyacinth in the middle, and base notes sea grass and cucumber).

It appears that I’m not the only one checking my critters' reaction to fragrance, or even the first. Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal has the details:

Zoos have long spritzed perfumes and colognes on rocks, trees and toys in an effort to keep confined animals curious.

In 2003, Pat Thomas, general curator for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo in New York, decided to get scientific about it. Working with 24 fragrances and two cheetahs, he recorded how long it took the big cats to notice the scent and how much time they spent interacting with it.

The results left barely a whiff of a doubt. Estée Lauder’s Beautiful occupied the cheetahs an average of just two seconds. Revlon’s Charlie managed 15.5 seconds. Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps took it up to 10.4 minutes. But the musky Obsession for Men triumphed: 11.1 minutes. That’s longer than the cats usually take to savor a meal.

Ann Gottlieb, the “nose” who helped create Obsession, believes that a a number of factors in the fragrance might render it irresistible.

“It’s a combination of this lickable vanilla heart married to this fresh green top note—it creates tension,” she says. The cologne also has synthetic animal notes like civet, a musky substance secreted by the cat of the same name, giving it particular sex appeal, she adds. “It sparks curiosity in humans and, apparently, animals.”

According to Basenotes.com, “Obsession for Men” includes topnotes of mandarin and bergamot; heart notes of lavender, myrrh, sage, clove, nutmeg and coriander and amber, musk, sandalwood, vetiver and patchouli as base notes.

Combining Obsession’s formulation data with the results of my informal research on my dogs, I’ll say that if I was interested in animal attraction I would experiment with scents featuring simple sweet heart notes like vanilla, orange and lemon combined with strong animal and woody basenotes, like topnotes lemon, bergamot, verbena; white hyacinth as a middle note and base notes sea grass and cucumberMuschio di Quercia – a deep, woodsy scent that my dogs adore.

Musings about Vetiver fragrance and melancholia

A damp Honolulu evening, my wandering fingers, and an insatiable appreciation for the smell of all things Vetiver led me to the Forest Rat's musings:

« Furry Little Creatures
Trees to Thoreau to Terroir

Lately I have been noticing a lot of connections among things. I think about one thing and, while researching it, I run across other interesting things that often connect to something else I've been thinking about.
Well, a couple of posts back (Silent Skies) I was hanging around a woodpile, watching the evening deepen. I commented about the unique scent of the freshly cut logs:
“To me locust wood has an earthy, mossy, slightly sweet, and almost but not quite musty scent. It reminds me of the wonderful sweet perfume of the flowers that cover the tree in white raiment each spring, only it is muted and mixed with the dark richness of the soil that feeds the tree’s inner life.”
At the same time I happened to be reading “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” I reached the end of the book and read a reprint of Emerson’s eulogy following the death of Henry Thoreau, which includes this observation:
“He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight - more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness.”
Interesting. I was just thinking about the scent of wood and its earthiness. I thought I'd look into just what makes earth (dirt, soil, mould) smell the way it does.
Even though we might not know what causes it, we've all smelled it: the smell of a freshly plowed field, or the smell of the soil when you dig a hole in the garden to plant a tree or a rose bush, or the scent on the air after a summer downpour (which smells like worms).
That scent is caused by a chemical called geosmin and it is produced by bacteria in the soil called actinomycetes. No one knows why the bacteria produce this compound or why humans find it pleasant. However, I ran into this interesting tidbit - this “friendly” bacteria can serve as an antidepressant which leads researchers to wonder whether we should spend more time playing in the dirt.
This led me to an article about how bacteria in the soil alter the composition of certain essential oils. Investigators have learned that they can alter fragrance by controlling "food" for bacteria, and conclude: “This finding may go some way to explain why the properties of Vetiver oil change significantly depending on the environment in which the Vetiver was grown.”
This path lead me through tangled vines of related words to the french word terroir. Terroir brought me back to the soil. Terroir seems to translate to something like “a sense of place” or “a taste of the soil” or, as one author wrote: somewhere-ness. It's a quality imparted to a crop, grapes in particular, by the locale in which it is grown. So some might say that part of what makes a great French wine great is that it comes from grapes grown in France, in a particular French vineyard, and maybe even in a particular section of a particular vineyard in France.
Although terroir is a complex and controversial concept in the wine world, I just like the idea that places have a taste.
In Silent Skies I wrote:
“Each species of tree has its own unique scent, just as each one has a unique grain pattern, color, and texture. Veteran woodworkers can identify species of wood by smell alone, the same way oenophiles can identify vintages. If you think about it, wooden barrels figure prominently in winemaking, and the type of wood used is critical to imparting just the right flavors and aromas.”
This was before I learned about terroir. Maybe the scent of the wood, like the taste of a wine, depends not only on the species of tree, but also on the plot that reared it. Maybe locust wood near my home has a slightly different scent than wood from Pennsylvania - I’ll bet that it does.
MDW
P.S. Another quote from Thoreau where he mixes his senses: “I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regiments. Dead trees love the fire.”