Immortelle keeps its colour and its scent long after it is cut. That is where the name comes from, and it is a rare trick for a flower.
The plant is Helichrysum italicum, a small silver-leafed shrub that grows wild across Corsica, Sardinia and the Mediterranean scrub, thriving on dry ground where softer plants give up. English speakers call it the everlasting or immortelle flower for the same reason.
Smell the absolute and you will not think "flower" at all. It reads as warm golden hay, honey and burnt sugar, with a clear streak of maple syrup and curry. There is fenugreek in there, a little tobacco, a dried-fruit sweetness. It is one of the most distinctive materials in perfumery once you have met it.
Getting it is slow work. The flowers are steam-distilled for oil, or solvent-extracted for the richer absolute, and it takes more than a tonne of blossom to make just under a kilo of oil. Corsica now supplies most of the fine-perfumery material, after the older Balkan supply was cut off in the 1990s.
The honest part is the curry. Neat, immortelle can smell savoury, almost like a spice drawer, and that puts some people off on the first sniff. Perfumers use it in small doses, folded into vanilla, tobacco or amber, where it turns into a soft maple warmth rather than a curry hit. Used well, you would never name it.
Immortelle works as a heart and base note, and it lasts, which is why it anchors so many cosy autumn scents.
If you want to meet immortelle on skin, it sits in the heart of our Solana, a golden apricot-and-coconut gourmand and our take on Byredo Sundazed, built in the UK at 35% extrait. Browse the rest of the Byredo collection.
