Historical Formula Index

A cassie-and-tuberose floral bouquet, animalic-anchored — the civet tincture is what keeps five separate floral extracts from reading as flat or thin.

A near-pure amber accord decades before "amber accord" was standard vocabulary — ambergris and musk tinctures dominate by volume, with rose and vanilla as the only florals present, in tiny amounts. The direct ancestor of the amber family covered in Academy Chapter 26.

Four florals in equal 1-quart measures over a musk/ambergris base — a textbook example of the "layering" technique Academy Chapter 30 describes, just under a different name.

Eleven essential oils in a single alcohol base, no macerated tinctures at all — a genuine cologne-family formula (see the "Cologne" landmark accord in Academy Chapter 26), built purely from citrus and herb oils rather than florals.

A dense white-floral bouquet — cassie, jasmine, orange flower, and rose all at equal weight — with orris root doing the fixative work ambergris does in the other formulas here.

Genuinely striking against Academy Chapter 26's chypre skeleton (bergamot/oakmoss/labdanum): this 1892 "chypre" has neither bergamot nor oakmoss in it at all — a reminder that "chypre" meant something looser before Coty's 1917 Chypre de Coty fixed the bergamot-oakmoss-labdanum template that later defined the family.

One of the few formulas here with an explicit process note in the original: "Macerate for two weeks, and filter." A small, sparse recipe by the standards of the others on this list — six ingredients instead of a dozen.

The simplest formula in this set — three ingredients only. A rose-softened cedarwood, closer to a modern niche "woody" composition than almost anything else in Askinson's book.

Askinson is explicit that this doesn't actually smell like real lily of the valley — a rare moment of a 19th-century formula book admitting the "match the flower" premise doesn't hold, since lily of the valley has no essential oil that can be extracted at all (true to this day; it's still built entirely from other materials in modern perfumery).

Askinson notes this style was "much admired in England." A five-ingredient rose-and-citrus formula with an ambergris/orris base — plain by comparison to the twelve-ingredient bouquets elsewhere in this set, and reads closer to a modern minimalist composition.

Tonka bean at double the volume of every other single ingredient — the one formula in this set where a single material is deliberately overdosed the way Academy Chapter 11 describes Beaux overdosing aldehydes in No. 5, just decades earlier and with a natural material instead of a synthetic.

Like lily of the valley, real lilac yields essentially no usable essential oil — this is a reconstruction from unrelated florals, not an extraction. Askinson's own note: the civet dose is adjustable "according to the desired permanence of the perfume," i.e. more fixative for a longer-lasting version.

The genuine article — this is the actual "Jockey Club" formula referenced by name (without the recipe) in other 19th-century perfumery books. Sixteen ingredients: five flower-pomade extracts as the floral base, then a long tail of oils and tinctures in small amounts each. Note "musk-root" here is a plant material (Angelica archangelica or Ferula sumbul, both historically called musk-root for their musky odor), not animal musk — the recipe uses both that and true musk tincture as separate ingredients.

A second, independent 1892 "chypre" — same conclusion as Askinson's version above, and even more so here: no bergamot-oakmoss-labdanum skeleton at all, no oakmoss whatsoever. Both books call very different formulas "chypre" a full 25 years before Coty's 1917 Chypre de Coty locked the family to a specific accord.

Compare against Buckingham Flowers and Bouquet de l'Alhambra above, both also cassie-and-jasmine led — the actual differentiator here is the orris root tincture at nearly double the volume of anything else in the formula, plus licari oil (an obscure historical material not identifiable in this project's current materials database).

The largest formula in this whole index — seven flower-pomade extracts and eleven more oils/tinctures, eighteen ingredients total ("a thousand flowers"). Orris root tincture alone outweighs every other single ingredient, doing double duty as both scent and fixative across a formula this complex.

Jasmine dominates by a wide margin (300 parts against the next-highest floral at 200) in an otherwise fairly conventional five-flower bouquet — the lemon and verbena oils are the only real top-note lift in a formula that's heavily weighted toward heavy florals and fixatives.

One of the few formulas here named directly for its dominant resinous material — opopanax (a resin related to myrrh) appears as both oil and tincture, unusual in this set where most materials show up in only one form. Not identifiable in this project's current materials database, so it's left unlinked rather than mapped to something close-but-different.

"New-mown hay" is a genuine historic accord name that survived into the 20th century (Piesse's own gamut lists "Vernal Grass (New Hay)" — see the Odophone). This version leans on reseda and tonka bean for the hay-like sweetness rather than true coumarin, the material that would come to define the effect in later fougère-family formulas.