Field Notes: A Fresh Strawberry Tincture for Perfumery

Working with live and varying natural perfume materials teaches you patience. They show you where they want to go. I can control some of the conversation - my side, but with any exchange with a living being, there are always surprise inputs and outcomes.

The Fresh Beginning

We are told not to tincture fresh plant ingredients because they contain too much water and that can ruin a tincture. But there are those of us who love to live on the edge and work with materials that are indeed alive and at their peak. As a former food writer and recipe developer and an avid gardener, I long to capture the gorgeous, real smells I witness seasonally in the garden and at the farmers markets that are vastly different from synthetic, lab-derived scents.

This all began with fresh strawberries from Harry's Berries from the illustrious Ojai Certified Farmer's Market. My personal favorite -- Mara des Bois, for eating and scent. I try to on jump them as soon as they appear and it's usually for only 1 or 2 weeks. They are compact, fleeting, tiny bursts of flavor and scent and I find it torturous not to eat all of them but somehow forced myself to place them in a jar and poured over organic 190 proof alcohol. I later added Gaviotas on top and filled the jar to the top. Thus began the fresh summer berry co-tincture of 2025!

On paper, this was a simple tincture — fruit steeped in spirit, given time. But I am learning there is an art to how long a substance wants to macerate and at what concentration. Some things want to steep for a lifetime whereas others need only a few days and your nose doesn't not always tell an accurate story as to what it will become once the solids have been strained as it continues shifting.

The Note I Didn't Expect

After straining, something shifted — my sweet, true berry developed a hint of wine. I love it but I also didn't want it to keep progressing so my first instinct was concern. My second was curiosity. Because the timing mattered here: this note didn't show up while the fruit was still steeping. It appeared once the fruit was gone and the liquid stood on its own for the first time.

That detail changes the read entirely. Long macerations don't sit still just because nothing visible is happening. Water moves. Sugars move. Alcohol and the compounds are slowly drawing out keep finding each other in the dark, long after the "active" part of a process looks finished. What reads as fermentation at first sniff is sometimes just chemistry, unhurried, doing what months of contact naturally does.

I won't lay out exactly how I'm distinguishing if the tincture is in danger of going too far and I need to interject — some of that stays in the studio — but I'll say this: there are ways to tell whether a liquid is still becoming something or has simply arrived somewhere new. I'm using them now.

What Aging Actually Gives You

Ha! well you don't actually know until you're there. There's a version of natural perfumery that treats time as a problem to manage — get the extraction done a very particular way, stabilize it and move on. And there's another version, the one I keep finding myself drawn back to, where time is the wild card ingredient. The deepest, most complex botanical materials I know of — fresh fruits and vegetables, aged resins, long-held absolutes, fermented tinctures, forgotten tinctures nobody rushed — almost all carry surprises in their maturation.

Some perfumers view sediment and plant waxes and surprises as a flaw hiding in the corner of an otherwise clean material. They strain and fret to make sure something appears absolutely clear. But I am not a purist who is looking to erase any sign of nature. It's often the signature of something that is being allowed to finish becoming its new self.

I don't know yet exactly where this strawberry tincture lands. I know it smelled remarkable for a year. I know I love the hint of wine it carries now.

I am learning in so many phases of my life that the instinct to panic, (like the moment a material changes), is usually the wrong instinct. The right one is to slow down and be with it and actually listen and smell what it's trying to say.

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