When I consider what a true "lilac water" is, I'm conflicted. Poucher's legendary formula dates back to the turn of the twentieth century, and is considered by many to be a marvel of modern chemistry. His late eighteenth century creation reconstructs the headspace essence of lilac flower using a clever workaround to the age-old problem of attempting to create lilac perfumes, namely that lilacs have no yield. Try gathering bundles of lilac flowers for distillation, and what you'll end up with, after agonizing your way through literally hundreds of pounds of flowers, will be a pocket flask full of something that smells very little like the actual bud. This elusive flower doesn't even afford our noses the luxury of enjoying it cut from the tree; wait an hour after snipping and you'll find that its sweetness has dulled, as if the blooms know they've been killed.
This makes synthesis an inevitability. Perfumers have little choice but to reconstruct the smell by cobbling various disparate elements into something that closely approximates the living flower. But what did all of those early-to-mid eighteenth century barbers use? What were the cowboys in the 1850s and '60s being offered after a close shave? Lilac waters were in use back then but they predated the clever chemistry experiments of Pinaud and Poucher's era. The average barber wasn't going to pay a fortune for some enfleurage-made lilac perfume, which would only come in sub-fifty milliliter sizes anyway. We know that perfumery advanced when synthetics were discovered and employed, and by the 1870s that process was underway, but the midcentury toilette waters predated much of the scientific molecular revolution. How then did people make do?
It turns out they didn't. In Ashby, Massachusetts, there is a company called 1812 Apothecary, which is a subsidiary concern of the Second Chance Farm Sanctuary, an animal sanctuary that moonlights as a natural perfumery. I happened across their lilac toilette water on Etsy and bought a large bottle. According to their shop, their lilac water is seasonal, and is only available for brief periods in spring. It isn't entirely clear how they make it, but they claim it is "aged six months and of course made with our own farm-grown lilacs." The ingredients list is very short: spirits, lilac, lilac essential oil. It's that last part that raises my eyebrow, because lilac essential oil is very expensive and doesn't really smell like lilacs. And if there's actual lilac flowers in the brew, how were they "aged" to create this product? Steeped in spirits? Or were they actually given an enfleurage treatment? If the latter, this stuff would be a hell of a lot more expensive than it is.
If the flowers were simply dropped in a vat of spirits and left to sit for months, then the result wouldn't smell anything like lilacs. This is a conundrum, because 1812 Apothecary's lilac water does smell like lilacs. Well, it dries down to the smell of purple lilac, that sweet and unforgettable aroma. But it starts out smelling like a failed natural perfumery experiment, a weirdly dissonant accord of flattened and condensed floral materials that seem to veer slightly into a bizarre zone of cinnamon and tree bark. What I've gleaned from the wearing experience is that the farm-grown lilacs were indeed steeped in spirits for half a year, then filtered into this perfume, and their yield is evocative of being surrounded by flowers that were felled and left in a wet field for a few weeks. Kinda-sorta lilac-floral, but hampered by a borderline-rotten vegetal scent tinged by a lick of geosmin.
Just when I thought the whole thing was botched, the all-natural lilac burned off and transitioned to what must be the "lilac essential oil." Saying that your fragrance contains the essential oil of something that isn't represented by its EO is strange. It also gives the perfumer plenty of latitude to use a professionally-compounded concentration oil of the sort used by any mainstream or niche perfumery, and simply call it an EO because it sounds more "natural." Whatever the case may be, 1812 Apothecary's Lilac Toilette Water dries down to a truly gorgeous powdery-fresh purple lilac, and is probably the best lilac fragrance I've ever encountered. Whatever they're using, whatever their ace of spades secret formula happens to be, it works. I'm here to tell you, I'm pleased with it. If you're like me, and you're obsessed with lilac, this stuff smells absolutely beautiful. Does it smell exactly like living flower? No, but it clearly isn't trying to, and I like that it doesn't. It smells close, and puts its own spin on the idea by imbuing the floral sweetness with a dry and almost chalky quality. It's like Mary Cassatt's Lilacs in a Window interpreted as perfume.
My guess is that the people at Second Chance Farm Sanctuary use some sort of IFF-derived (or similar) compounded concentrate, not a million miles away from Poucher's, and they simply dole it out across a limited number of bottles each year. It wouldn't be insanely expensive to buy a convincing semi-synthetic lilac base that also plays well with a quirky all-natural lilac brew, and it would be a smart approach for anyone trying to revive this genre. If they only used the natural stuff, it would be a complete failure, and would smell for hours like the first eight minutes of this product, i.e., nothing like actual lilac. My guess is this part of the fragrance is what those cowboy toilette waters smelled like back in the gunslinger days. Inject a little modern medicine into things, and suddenly you have a minor miracle. If I were them, I would scale back on the naturals and bump up the "essential oil" component. The result would be worth far more than four bucks an ounce.