What Is the Oriental Family?
Oriental means oriented toward the East. In perfumery, it refers to perfumes using fragrance materials, chiefly spices, produced in the East and brought to Europe. In particular, these perfumes turn Europe’s fantasies and images of the East, especially India and Arabia, into scent, giving an impression of mystery, sensuality, exoticism, and warmth.
The oriental, or “Eastern,” world of scent in Western perfumery lies rather to the “West” when seen from Japan.
Satori Osawa
The Characteristics of Oriental Notes
Oriental notes are characterized by the addition of vanilla, amber notes, patchouli (in Japanese), sandalwood (in Japanese), resins (such as myrrh, labdanum (in Japanese), and benzoin (in Japanese)), and musk (in Japanese), together with spices.
When floral elements are added, the result is called floral oriental, or floriental. Florientals are orientals with fewer animalic or balsamic elements. Blending in materials such as incense produces what is called a soft oriental.
There are also types called spicy oriental and woody oriental, and gourmand (in Japanese) belongs to the oriental family in the broad sense.
Guerlain’s Jicky (1889) is said to have been the first perfume in history to incorporate oriental elements, while it was Guerlain’s Shalimar (1925) that moved the market enough to establish oriental as a category.
Oriental perfume is to perfumery what the Baroque style is to architecture.
Frédéric Malle
Are There Two Types of Oriental Perfume?
To get technical, oriental perfumes can actually be divided broadly into two groups according to their formulas: those using the “ambreine accord” and those using the “mellis accord.”
The ambreine accord, created by the chemist Samuelson, combines bergamot (in Japanese), vanillin, and coumarin with warm civet (in Japanese), woody notes, and rose (in Japanese) essence. Note that ambreine is different from, and has no connection with, ambrein, the principal constituent of ambergris (in Japanese).
This basic structure was first used in Coty’s L’Ambreine (1906), and has been used in fragrances such as Guerlain’s Shalimar, Must de Cartier (1981), Obsession (1985, Calvin Klein), and Musc Ravageur (2000, Frédéric Malle).
The mellis accord, meanwhile, is made by combining the rich floral-smelling material benzyl salicylate, patchouli (in Japanese), clove (approximately equivalent to eugenol), and lily of the valley (in Japanese) with other spices such as cinnamon, woody notes, and coumarin.
This accord is used in Estée Lauder’s Youth-Dew (1953), Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium (1977), and Chanel’s Coco (1984). These are often called spicy orientals.
Oriental perfumes evoke for me an image of a sensual world into which people can escape: jet-black wood and cognac decanters adorning a room draped in luxurious fabrics.
Tom Ford
From Oriental to Amber
At the end of June 2021, Michael Edwards, a world-renowned authority in perfumery, argued that the category oriental was too vague, could be misleading, and was not a technical name, and proposed changing the category name to “amber” rather than oriental. The thinking is that oriental is out of step with the times. It seems likely that many enthusiasts will come to call it the amber family in the future.
Representative Perfumes
Jicky (Guerlain, 1889, Aimé Guerlain)
L’Origan (Coty, 1905, François Coty)
Emeraude (Coty, 1921, François Coty)
Shalimar (Guerlain, 1925, Jacques Guerlain)
Youth-Dew (Estée Lauder, 1953, Josephine Catapano)
Opium (YSL, 1977, Jean-Louis Sieuzac)
Coco (Chanel, 1984, Jacques Polge, François Demachy)
Musc Ravageur (Frédéric Malle, 2000, Maurice Roucel)
Noir Épices (Frédéric Malle, 2000, Michel Roudnitska)
L’Eau d’Hiver (Frédéric Malle, 2003, Jean-Claude Ellena)
Oriental Lounge (The Different Company, 2009, Céline Ellena)
Portrait of a Lady (Frédéric Malle, 2010, Dominique Ropion)
Hana Hiraku (Parfum Satori, 2016, Satori Osawa): a dry oriental devised for Japanese people.
Le Lion (Chanel, 2020, Olivier Polge)
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