Ylang-Ylang Tree

News has been seeping into the U.S. perfume trade that sounds too good to be true. And so it is--except as a Good Neighborly prayer for the future. The news: as substitutes for the rare essential oils and flower "absolutes" of Europe and Asia, Latin American flowers may come to the rescue of the $15,000,000 U.S. perfume industry.

For years the Department of Agriculture's Tropical Station in Puerto Rico has experimented with home-grown smells. Its pretty chemist, black-eyed Noemi Garcia Arrilaga, specializes in extracting the .essence of the coffee flower. Some months ago, Senorita Arrilaga thought she had it. was further encouraged by local distributors who said it had a "pervading tropical fragrance with a come-hither accent." The distributors have yet to persuade U.S. perfume brewers, who fall into two general classes, 1) the topnotchers,. who claim there is no adequate substitute for their dwindling hoards of French, Bulgarian, Chinese and Tibetan essences, and 2) volume producers who claim that any hew product will have to be more than good to compete with domestic substitutes and synthetics already available.*

Nevertheless, in Haiti, a new Government development company, with a $3,000,000 Export-Import Bank Loan, is so fascinated with its $25,000-$50,000 perfume experiments that Nelson Rockefeller's tropical agriculture expert Atherton Lee says "they have to be reminded about the rubber program." Haiti's President, silver-haired Elie Lescot,/- negotiated this loan himself last spring, when he was still Minister to the U.S. Longtime (1922-30) Minister of Education & Agriculture, he has for years taken a keen interest in developing new farm products and markets for his small, crowded, beautiful country. His son Henri studied agriculture at Cornell University in 1937-39, has successfully cultivated in Haiti large areas of lemon grass (source of citral for synthetic violet scent, used mainly in cheap soaps).

Haiti can also grow mimosa, jasmine, tuberose, and the ylang-ylang tree, whose heavily scented yellow-green flowers normally come from the Philippines. The Dominican Republic in addition to all these, can grow the fragrant cassie bush, whose oil is now so scarce that perfumers cannot obtain it for love nor money. There the Jewish refugee colony at Sosua, with funds from U.S. philanthropists, is studying new perfume sources.

Between these high hopes and any important trade with the U.S. lie months, even years, of effort. It takes about two years to get essential oil from the tuberose, three years for jasmine, at least four for cassie or ylang-ylang. And it takes ancient skills and a Merlin's genius to produce just the right oils once the flower is ripe for its "enfleurage." But Latin America has the climate and the cheap labor to make a brave try.

*One lately touted U.S. substitute is the fixative musk, which formerly came only from Asiatic deer and Abyssinian civet cats. Two chemists at Yale and Louisiana State claim to have extracted musk from the glands of the common muskrat (one-third of an ounce of distilled musk from 175 animals). Du Pont also makes a synthetic musk called Astrotone. /-Pronounced Lesko.

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