Ylang Ylang

"Researches on the Essence of Alangilan (Unona odoratissima).—This essence, lately introduced into the market, commands the price of 2500 francs per kilog. It is extracted by distillation from the flower of a tree found in Jamaica. The specific gravity of the essence at 0-150 is 0980. A column of 5 cm. in depth deflects a ray of polarised light 14° to the left. It distils over entirely between the temperatures of 160° and 300°, without leaving a carbonaceous residue behind. It is insoluble in water, partially soluble in alcohol, and entirely soluble in ether. After partial saponification with potassa it yields benzoic acid."

In the absence of all suggestion of personal or animal odors, in its most exquisite forms in the fragrance of flowers, olfactory sensations are still very frequently of a voluptuous character. Mantegazza [Fisiologia dell' Amore, p. 176.] has remarked that it is a proof of the close connection between the sense of smell and the sexual organs that the expression of pleasure produced by olfaction resembles the expression of sexual pleasures. Make the chastest woman smell the flowers she likes best, he remarks, and she will close her eyes, breathe deeply, and, if very sensitive, tremble all over, presenting an intimate picture which otherwise she never shows, except perhaps to her lover. He mentions a lady who said: "I sometimes feel such pleasure in smelling flowers that I seem to be committing a sin." It is really the case that in many persons—usually, if not exclusively, women—the odor of flowers produces not only a highly pleasurable, but a distinctly and specifically sexual, effect. I have met with numerous cases in which this effect was well marked. It is usually white flowers with heavy, penetrating odors which exert this influence. Thus, one lady (who is similarly affected by various perfumes, forget-me-not, ylang-ylang, etc.) finds that a number of flowers produce on her a definite sexual effect, with moistening of the pudenda. This effect is especially produced by white flowers like the gardenia, tuberose, etc.

Another lady, who lives in India, has a similar experience with flowers. She writes: "A scent to cause me sexual excitement must be somewhat heavy and penetrating.- Nearly all white flowers so affect me and many Indian flowers with heavy, almost pungent scents. (All the flower scents are quite unconnected with me with any individual). Tuberose, lilies of the valley, and frangipani flowers have an almost intoxicating effect on me. Violets, roses, mignonette, and many others, though very delicious, give me no sexual feeling at all. For this reason the line, 'The lilies and langours of virtue for the roses and raptures of vice' seems all wrong to me. The lily seems to me a very sensual flower, while the rose and its scent seem very good and countrified and virtuous. Shelley's description of the lily of the valley, 'whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale/ falls in much more with my ideas. I can quite understand," she adds, "that leather, especially of books, might have an exciting effect, as the smell has this penetrating quality, but I do not think it produces any special feeling in me."

This more sensuous character of white flowers is fairly obvious to many persons who do not experience from them any specifically sexual effects. To some people lilies have an odor which they describe as sexual, although these persons may be quite unaware that Hindu authors long since described the vulvar secretion of the Padmini, or perfect woman, during coitus, as "perfumed like the lily that has newly burst." [Kama Sutra of Vatayayana, 1883, p. 5. ]

When we are concerned with the fragrances of flowers it would seem that we are far removed from the human sexual field, and that their sexual effects are inexplicable. It is not so. The animal and vegetable odors, as, indeed, we have already seen, are very closely connected. The recorded cases are very numerous in which human persons have exhaled from their skins—sometimes in a very pronounced degree—the odors of plants and flowers, of violets, of roses, of pine-apple, of vanilla. On the other hand, there are various plant odors which distinctly recall, not merely the general odor of the human body, but even the specifically sexual odors. A rare garden weed, the stinking goosefoot, Chenopodium vulvaria, it is well known, possesses a herring brine or putrid fish odor —due, it appears, to propylamin, which is also found in the flowers of the common white thorn or mayflower (Cralcegus oxyacantha) and many others of the Rosacece—-which recalls the odor of the animal and human sexual regions.