Leather

Leather in perfume is an accord, not an extract: there is no oil to be pressed from a hide, so perfumers build the smell of tanned skin from smoke, resin, bitter green molecules and a little sweetness. Done well, it smells less of a new handbag than of a bridle that has been oiled every Sunday for years.

Where it comes from

The link between leather and perfume is old and practical. Tanning smelled foul, and in sixteenth-century Spain fine gloves were steeped in flower waters, spices, civet and musk to cover it; the scented leather became known as peau d’Espagne, Spanish leather. Perfumed gloves reached England from Spain and Venice and were given as gifts at court. In Grasse, a tanning town since the twelfth century, tanners had long used local plants such as myrtle to soften the smell, and the town came to have a guild of master glovers and perfumers. When taxes on leather and competition finished the gloves in the eighteenth century, the perfume stayed.

Russia supplied the other half of the story. Russia leather, a bark-tanned hide worked with birch oil on its flesh side, was a prized export in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: water-resistant, supple and recognisable by its smoky smell alone. Bookbinders and saddlers wanted it, and perfumers later borrowed its scent under the name cuir de Russie.

What it smells like

A leather accord can be dark or soft. The darker kind is smoky and tarry, with a dry, slightly medicinal edge, like a tack room with a stove lit in the corner. The softer kind, suede, is matte and powdery and sits close to the skin, with the smoke turned right down: the inside of a riding glove rather than the saddle.

How perfumers make it

Birch tar is the oldest material. It is made by heating birch bark, usually silver birch (Betula pendula), without air, so that it breaks down into smoky, phenolic compounds; perfumers use a rectified, purified grade in very small amounts. Isobutyl quinoline, a synthetic molecule in use since the early twentieth century, gives the bitter, earthy, green-leather note found in many classic chypres. Saffron-like synthetics bring a warm, spiced leatheriness with a hint of tobacco, and castoreum, labdanum, tobacco and saffron have all played their part. A suede accord leans instead on powdery, iris-like ionones and soft musks, with only a trace of the darker materials.

In our fragrances

Saddle Room is our leather fragrance, and a leather without swagger. Hay absolute and supple suede form the heart, threaded with the faintest smoke of birch tar, and the drydown settles on tonka, creamy sandalwood and a leather accord that smells of care and use. The hay is there for a reason: a tack room before the meet smells of both. We wrote more about it in Notes from the Tack Room.

Racing Green keeps its leather for the end. After galbanum, cut grass and vetiver, the base arrives slowly: supple saddle leather, oakmoss and dry cedar, like a steering wheel that has seen fifty summers. To try the two side by side, there is the Discovery Set.

All the notes