Surely, you have heard the popular phrase, "Stop and smell the roses", typically this means you should take it easy, slow down, and enjoy the pleasures in life before they pass you by. When you are walking through a flower garden or someone gives you a beautiful bouquet of flowers, what is the first thing you do? Unconsciously without even being aware of it, you smell them. Many of us love the smell of flowers and when we purchase our own flowers, we do so because we enjoy the smell. This is how perfume developers entice us to buy their particular fragrances; by using the flower smells we love the most.



Perhaps, you didn't know, but flowers are a very important aspect in any fragrance. Perfumes are developed using many different sources such as bark, fruits, grasses, herbs, tobacco, wood, leather, chocolate, and resins. While perfumes are made of any mixture of the preceding things, the fragrance is formed by use of a flower. Every flower type has a scent to its own and can affect perfumes in different manners. To get technical, one flower can give out many different smells and aromas. A good example of this is the rose, while in general roses typically smell the exact same, the different varieties each have a unique smell, even if it various only slightly from the others.

Because flowers come from many different areas of the world, there are many factors that go along in creating fragrances and perfumes, with the unique scent that each has. Some factors that affect fragrances include alkalinity, soil acidity, pollution, pesticides, and weather, all effect how any particular flower will smell. Using roses again as an example, they are grown all over the world in the United States, Bulgaria, and France, each of these areas are well known for producing roses specifically for use in various perfumes. Some flowers such as the ylang-ylang, grown in Southeast Asia, can only be grown in specific areas of the world.

When a manufacturer creates specific fragrances, it isolates the flowers essential oils. The essential oils are what gives each flower and plant their wonderful smell. There are many different flowers used in the production of fragrances and perfumes, some of the most used included orange flowers, jasmine, roses, and ylang-ylang.

Find a favorite flower of yours when determining which fragrance is right for you. Research on fragrances is fun, because all you have to do is follow your nose to your favorite.