Beeswax

Beeswax: The roundness and animalic quality of the honeyed note. Everyone knows the delicious taste of freshly harvested honey melting in the mouth, stirring the gourmand sense of smell with its warm, sweet fragrance. Beeswax, produced thanks to these delicate little worker bees, also happens to be a natural raw material used in perfumery. Particularly rounded and easy to blend with numerous notes, it is certainly the softest and most velvety animalic note of all… Perhaps it is no coincidence that Guerlain chose it as the symbol of the house.

Beeswax absolute: a historic animalic note in perfumery

Thanks to the renewed favor of natural products and raw materials in perfumery, certain notes are making a successful comeback even after a period of neglect. This is the case with beeswax and its absolute.

From its very first bottles, Guerlain used the bee to decorate the delicate flacons of Eau de l’Impératrice, and went on to depict the pretty little pollinator time and again, whether on the illuminated designs of its bottles or in the juice of its finest perfumes. Thus beeswax, far more than just another animalic note, plays on its various facets to illuminate perfumes across several decades.

Of course, it is no longer called an animalic note, a term that echoes too closely the needless deaths of civets or musk deer for the sake of simple perfumes. Yet the honeyed note remains irresistible and relatively easy to produce, since it is extracted from nature and from the hives that also produce the famous honey nectar. While beeswax cannot become an essential oil, when in contact with solvents that enhance the material, it becomes an absolute, creating the deliciously gourmand fragrance we know.

The honeyed note: the warmth of beeswax and floral perfumes

Quite logically, there are as many varieties of beeswax absolute as there are varieties of honey. The raw material produced by the pretty pollinator therefore allows for the creation of an extremely wide range of olfactory possibilities. Moreover, honeyed notes can also be found in flowers such as honeysuckle, mimosa or broom, as well as in synthetic molecules. The possibilities of the honeyed note thus seem endless.

As already mentioned, the house of Guerlain holds a particular attachment to the bee and to beeswax. It is therefore quite logical that a great number of its perfumes bear notes of it, more or less pronounced. As a fine symbol of this attachment, L’Instant pour Femme is a Guerlain fragrance developed by Annick Goutal, created to shape the famous Guerlinade around the idea of a citrus honey. This same creator also composed, in 1985, a sumptuous floral perfume built around beeswax paired in the base notes with white musks and sandalwood.

Beeswax would seem better suited to floral perfumes than to other olfactory families. However, one should not forget that orientals also offer beautiful accords with this so tender beeswax, as seen in Chypre Rouge and Un Bois Vanille by Serge Lutens. Chypres, too, have certainly not had their last word, revealing a more virile side through the pairing of beeswax and castoreum notes. Beeswax, though increasingly scarce, has every chance of continuing to fascinate creators with its endlessly multipliable facets.