One tree gives perfumers three separate materials, and neroli is only one of them.
The tree is Citrus aurantium var. amara, the bitter orange, known in Britain as the Seville orange. Its leaves and twigs are distilled into petitgrain. Its fruit peel is cold-pressed into bigarade. Its white flowers, steam distilled, give neroli.
Change the extraction and you change the smell completely. Steam distillation produces neroli: airy, citrussy, green, with honey and orange underneath. Run the same flowers through solvent extraction instead and you get orange blossom absolute, which is heavier, sweeter and far more indolic, closer to the living flower at night.
The yield explains the price. Trade suppliers put it at roughly 850 to 1,000 kilograms of hand-picked blossom for a single kilogram of neroli oil.
The name has nothing to do with the fruit. It comes from Nerola, a small town near Rome, and from Anne Marie Orsini, its princess in the late 17th century. She wore the oil on her gloves and put it in her bathwater, and the fashion spread outward from her court. The Perfume Society still credits her with the name.
Now the bit worth knowing before you pay a premium for it. Natural neroli is dominated by two cheap and widely available molecules, linalool at roughly 28 to 44 per cent and linalyl acetate at 3 to 15 per cent. A perfumer can rebuild a convincing neroli effect from those and a handful of others for a fraction of the cost of the oil. That is why a mid-priced bottle can list neroli honestly and still not contain much of the distilled material.
Neroli also does not last. It is a top-to-heart note, so it lifts an opening and then hands over. If a fragrance smells of orange blossom six hours in, something heavier is doing the work.
Neroli does its best work in the first ten minutes. You can smell it lifting the orange blossom in Delight, our take on Kilian Love Don't Be Shy, and cutting the citrus in Swim, our take on Louis Vuitton Afternoon Swim. Both are UK-made sprays at 35% concentration. More in the Kilian collection and the best Don't Be Shy dupes in the UK.
