sixteen thousand flowers per day

not quite a perfume post

Since, apparently, 1987, Chanel has had its own exclusive gardens in Grasse, France. There, Chanel grows many of the flowers it uses for its perfumes, which are picked carefully to preserve the greatest amount of scent. According to one article, each flower picker will pick about 16,000 flowers per day. Everything in these gardens, that same article notes, is done by hand:

The Grasse crops are 100 per cent organic (with no chemical fertilisers used), and everything is tended to by hand, from weeding to picking – all 10 tonnes of jasmine, and three tonnes of tuberose a year.

Once picked, weighed, and sorted, the flowers must undergo a process of steam distillation and so on, until they create the pure ingredients that will be used in perfume.¹ All of this happens very quickly, as the flowers will begin to lose their scent once they are picked. Even though Chanel No. 5 does not, itself, smell very much like the flowers it contains (or at least, it doesn’t to me)—it doesn’t exactly smell li…