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Perfumery has always glorified the floral and for centuries perfumers have sought ways to extract the essence from real flowers to incorporate into their creations. With many flowers this quest has met with considerable success, with a few commercially viable products produced that are still used in modern perfumery: rose and jasmine being the primary examples.

Our luxury Lily of the Valley scented candle next to a white flower.

One flower that has always eluded extraction is the Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis) or Muguet*: distillation yields very little of an unpleasant smelling oil not a bit like the dense, exotic scent of the fresh flowers.  Solvent extraction and even modern CO2 extracts have similarly been completely unable to capture the scent.  This is because the flower produces the scent only at the point of release – none is stored in the flower – so it cannot be extracted.  The flower itself only contains pre-cursor chemicals from which the scent is formed directly into the air.

Yet many people will be familiar with the scent of Lily of the Valley, not through smelling the fresh flowers, but from perfumes containing or replicating its scent.

You can find wax melts, wax melt gift packs, electric wax warmers with spring scents, reed diffusers and diffuser refills and tea lights on this web site all mimicking the scent of Lily of the Valley.  https://owlchemy.co.uk/

Texy supplied by one of our suppliers, Pell Wall.