The vast majority of available perfumes may be considered ‘synthetic fragrances’. Perfumes made entirely or primarily with synthetic ingredients. These ingredients are favoured by perfume makers worldwide for three reasons: They’re cheap, they’re identical every time, and they’re easy to work with.

At Ffern, we exclusively make natural perfumes; fragrances comprised of natural ingredients whose ultimate purpose is to capture the immense complexity and beauty of the natural world, and connect the wearer to nature.

Synthetic fragrance ingredients are single-molecule chemicals created in a lab, whereas natural fragrance ingredients are blends of up to 500 molecules, and will vary depending on the growing conditions, the harvest timings and the specific chemotypes of the ingredient - no two sources of a given natural ingredient are the same.

If you combine ten synthetics into a fragrance, you have just ten different molecules - if you combine multiple natural oils into a fragrance (we use upwards of twenty in some of our work), then the molecular complexity of the final mixture is orders of magnitude higher - there can be many thousands of different molecules in the fragrance.

This immense molecular complexity is the source of the beauty of natural fragrance-making.

It enables the constant evolution of natural fragrances - the high molecule count allows for much more molecular interaction, and as a result the fragrances evolve in the barrel, in the bottle, and on the skin. In this sense, they are very much alive.

The molecular complexity also enables spectacular depth - when a natural fragrance reaches your nose, your olfactory neurons bind with the constituent molecules and send signals to your brain. With a natural fragrance, this is happening with all of the different molecules at once, so the complexity of the smell, its ability to trigger memories, and its potential for nuance is greatly increased.