We kill what we love & yet are compelled to do so

Ah the smell of fresh cut grass! So very pleasant.

Fragrances with those woody notes, so very strong. 

Those florals, so very lovely

Our natural environment has blessed us with things that we are attracted to.

All the natural ingredients that make a scent that take us on olfactory journeys are made with care, made with precision, made with love but most of all, they’re made...by death.

You see, we all have in-built defence mechanisms.  In humans & other animals, we have the fight or flight response that has allowed us to survive during the infancy of our evolution.  Unfortunately, in the environment of plants moving fast to escape from predators just isn’t an option. So they’ve devised a different way of protecting themselves.

They emit harmful chemicals when they feel they are being attacked, killed, like eaten by a bug or an animal, or cut by humans, you know, anytime their cell walls are ruptured.  Now very often these chemicals will be poisonous to the predator or at least a deterrent to make the plant taste awful.  Very often these chemicals are volatile compounds which emit a scent.  

As a side note; You know the plants we eat also do this?

I guess they don’t like being eaten, so they try to poison us but because we’re too big it doesn’t really affect us too much, but it does put our bodies under some form of stress called hormesis, which is actually a good thing, but nothing to do with what i’m talking about.

Let’s get back on topic.

All fragrances are born from the death of their ingredients.  When you spray yourself with yours you are literally taunting plants, essentially wearing the blood of their family on your skin.  You may love the smell of fresh cut grass, well that’s the smell of an entire population of that plant being decapitated; that smell is the sound of grass screaming in agony.

Certainly puts a new perspective on that whole ‘natural vs synthetic’ ingredients debate.  Just a reality check, most of the fragrances on the market today are made with synthetic ingredients, yes even the uber expensive ones have synthetic ingredients in them.

But what’s to become of the death of fragrant plants?

Did they deserve to die because they smelled so nice?

Was that beautiful flower just asking to be picked, because of its beauty?

Why do we kill the things we are attracted to?

Is it a desire for ownership? Possession?

Or is it that from death, we give new life a chance?

We may kill the things we are attracted to, but we’re also slaves to their ulterior motives.  Case in point, lavender (Lavande Imperial).  We may kill it in enormous numbers every day, but we also clear out entire countrysides to replicate it, take great care of it & allow it to flourish in a way that it could not have without our subservience.  There’s probably more lavender now than has ever been in the entire history of this world.

This extends to all things that are attractive in our environment.  But in terms of the fragrant things, they have not only been rescued, but most have had their genes strengthened, so that their appearance & scent is cultivated to its full capacity.  We, as a collective human species, have worked tirelessly to not only cultivate the land for their continued existence, but we have also toiled laboriously to propagate the ones that most attract us.

So think about the next time you wear a fragrance, it just may be wearing you in return.  When you wear a fragrance, you just might be advertising to the environment of the plant world of the popularity of their kind, showing their family members that whilst some of them had to die, those deaths mean a certainty to their own existence, as long as they remain attractive. 

And as long as we remain attractive to our environment, it will mean a certainty to our existence.