Usually the problem is not the rose. It is everything that has been put with it.

Rose is one of the most used materials in perfume, and probably the one people most often say they cannot wear. The complaints are nearly always the same four. It is too sweet, it is too heavy, it is powdery, or it smells of soap. "Like my grandmother" covers all four at once.

We think those complaints are fair. We also think they are aimed at the wrong thing. Each one describes something perfumery has done with rose, and none of them describes a rose very well. This post goes through where those smells come from, what a rose smells like when it is growing outdoors, and what we did about it when we made Jura Rose.

Most of us rarely smell a rose

Start with the roses in shops. Most roses sold as cut flowers have little or no scent. A paper in The Plant Cell says it plainly: most modern cut-flower varieties lack a distinct fragrance. Modern cut roses have been bred heavily for appearance, stem quality and vase performance, and somewhere along the way fragrance was often lost.

In 2015 a French team writing in Science identified a crucial part of the mechanism. Scented roses use an enzyme called RhNUDX1 in the pathway that makes geraniol, one of the characteristic molecules of rose scent. In the strongly scented variety 'Papa Meilland', the gene was expressed thousands of times more strongly than in the faint-scented 'Rouge Meilland'.

So for a lot of people the word "rose" does not bring a flower to mind. It brings to mind things that have been scented to smell of rose: soap, hand cream, drawer liners, Turkish delight, somebody else's perfume. If you dislike rose, there is a fair chance that those are what you dislike.

Rose oil is not the flower either

The real material also changes on its way into a bottle. Natural rose reaches the perfumer mainly in two forms. Rose oil, or otto, is made by distilling damask rose petals with water. Rose absolute is made by washing petals with a solvent, and it is the usual form for May rose, the rose grown around Grasse. Both take an enormous weight of petals for a small amount of extract, which is why both are expensive.

Neither smells quite like the flower, and two molecules show why.

The first is phenylethyl alcohol, which is the soft, slightly honeyed smell of the petal itself. It dissolves in water. During distillation most of it stays behind in the water, which is sold as rose water, and only a little ends up in the oil. The absolute keeps it. That is one important reason the oil smells brighter and sharper and the absolute smells rounder and heavier, though they come from the same petals.

The second is β-damascenone. A classic analysis of Bulgarian rose oil, made by Kováts at ETH Zürich, gives extraordinary numbers. Odour units compare how much of a molecule is present with how little the nose can detect. Citronellol makes up about 38% of the oil but only about 4% of its calculated odour units. β-damascenone makes up just 0.14% of the oil, but about 70%. It smells of cooked fruit, somewhere between stewed apple and plum jam, and it is barely detectable in fresh petals: it forms from other compounds during processing. So the jammy side of rose, one of the things people object to, is partly created after the flower is picked.

None of this is a fault. It does mean that even a perfume made with real rose starts from something a step away from the flower in a garden.

Where the four complaints come from

What gets added to the rose matters more than the rose material itself.

Complaint	Where it usually comes from
Powdery	Violet and iris notes. The key synthetic violet materials, the ionones, were first synthesised in 1893, and rose with violet became a standard scent of lipstick and face powder.
Sweet or jammy	Fruity rose molecules related to damascenone, often with raspberry or lychee, and in newer perfumes vanilla or praline as well.
Soapy	The main rose alcohols are cheap and survive in soap, so soap has been scented with them for generations. It is soap that smells of rose, not the other way round.
Heavy or old-fashioned	Many of the big twentieth-century rose perfumes, which paired rose with patchouli, amber, musk and other weighty materials and were made to be noticed across a room.

The ionones deserve a line of their own, because powdery is the complaint that has least to do with rose. They are sweet and soft and they have been in cosmetics for over a century. Yves Saint Laurent's Paris, from 1983, leans on them. If rose smells to you like the inside of a handbag, you are smelling violet as much as rose.

The grandmother part is simpler. Whatever one generation wears smells old to the next, and for a long time a lot of people wore rose.

We should say that plenty of these perfumes are very good and plenty of people love them. They are just a particular idea of rose: indoor, dressed up, warm. It is the idea most people have met, and it is not the only one.

What a rose smells like outdoors

A rose on the plant reaches you differently from a concentrated extract. Geraniol and citronellol give much of the familiar bright, rosy character, with citrus and green edges. Phenylethyl alcohol gives the softer petal effect. Then there are the leaves and stems around the flower, which no extract of the petals contains, and outdoors all of it reaches you diluted by moving air, as we found with heather.

The best-known rose in Scottish writing is this kind. Burns reaches for a rose "newly sprung in June": a living, fresh flower, not a perfumed idea of one.

The wild rose of the Scottish coast is the burnet rose, Rosa spinosissima, also called the Scots rose. It is a low, very thorny shrub that grows on dunes and sandy heath, with cream-white flowers from May to July and near-black hips afterwards. It is often described as Scotland's most emblematic native plant after the thistle, and by tradition it may be the origin of the Jacobite white cockade. Descriptions of its scent tend towards honeyed rather than powdery.

If you stand next to a rose near the sea, the rose is only part of what you smell. The rest is seaweed, wet sand, grass and cold sea air. That mixture is what we mean when we say a fresh rose.

Corran Sands

Jura has about 250 people, roughly five or six thousand red deer and one main road. The name is usually traced to the Norse for deer island. Corran Sands is about four kilometres north of Craighouse on the east side, looking across the Sound of Jura to the mainland. It is a long pale beach with a slow tide.

We should be clear that Jura Rose is not made from roses picked on Jura. What the place gave us was the brief. We wanted a rose that would smell right if you were standing on that beach, and a warm, powdered, indoor rose would not.

What we did differently

The notes in Jura Rose are citrus and geranium first, then May rose, rose petal and frangipani, with moss underneath.

Geranium does a lot of the work. Geranium oil contains some of the same molecules as rose, citronellol and geraniol among them, but it is greener and slightly minty. Putting it next to the rose pulls the rose towards the leaf and away from the jam.

Citrus gives the first few minutes their brightness.

The base is moss. We don't frame the rose with violet, iris or vanilla, the materials that most often make a rose powdery or sweet. The movement from a bright citrus opening through flowers into a dry, mossy base puts Jura Rose in the chypre family. Classical chypres are built on the contrast between citrus and a mossy, resinous base, and they tend to be dry rather than sugary.

Frangipani is the one note that has nothing to do with the Hebrides. It is there because a rose with only citrus and green notes round it can turn thin and sharp, and it needs something soft in the middle.

On skin it is bright at first and gets softer and greener after about an hour. It is still plainly a rose. If it is rose itself you dislike, and not the things usually added to it, this will not change your mind.

Choosing a rose for someone who says they hate rose

This applies to any brand.

Find out which complaint it is. Someone who says "too sweet" and someone who says "like soap" are avoiding different things.

Then read the notes, as a rough guide rather than a rule. Citrus, geranium, green notes, tea, pepper, moss and vetiver tend to mean a fresher rose. Violet, iris and anything described as powder usually mean the lipstick kind. Raspberry, lychee, vanilla and praline tend towards sweet, and patchouli with amber or oud towards heavy.

Try it on skin and wait before deciding. The first few minutes are dominated by the most volatile top notes, and if a perfume opens with citrus, that first impression can be quite different from the rose that comes through later.

If you are buying a present and cannot test it on them, buy small first. We sell 2 ml samples of all seven perfumes at £4 each, and the price comes off a full bottle later.