Champa/Champaca Blending Ideas

I recently had the good fortune to receive a bottle of champa/champaca from India of reliable quality. It's a very interesting smell, hard to describe - it is certainly floral but has a strong leathery facet, some fruitiness and greenness, and an animalic character - overall, delicious and highly narcotic/erogenous. It almost has the character of frangipani flowers on the tree after a few hours on the strip at certain concentrations.

Anyway, it's not something I've used before or have any experience with in fragrance. Does anyone have any fun suggestions for accords/blends to try with it? I have ideas inspired by the frangipani aspect to make a tropical dirty floral (like a raunchy vacation) but am curious to hear any input.

Champaca Absolute blenders

Mine is unusable. Too wintergreeny.

It blends absolutely beautifully with cypriol and labdanum, but be careful because that can easily get very hippie-at-a-festival vibe pretty quickly. Balance it with tobacarol, veraspice or suederol.

Thanks for the responses.

I'm curious to see how it performs with cypriol, although I don't trust my material - it's primarily terpenic and very harsh/green. But maybe trace would work. I'm lacking in the latter three compounds but will see what might work in its place - it gives me a direction of thinking for sure. I find these ultra narcotic flowers like tuberose, jonquil and champa tough to tame - they always want to end up as very dense 80s feminine animalics.

The first time I picked up a quality champaca was when I was given a traditional formula for the old incense Nag Champa. If you haven't smelled it, check it out. It is essentially pure hippy flavor, but a really interesting balance between cypriol and champaca (with a bunch of flankers) and, while not sophisticated on its own, it can be an incredible jumping off point for oriental/spice bases

MarloFig said:

The first time I picked up a quality champaca was when I was given a traditional formula for the old incense Nag Champa. If you haven't smelled it, check it out. It is essentially pure hippy flavor, but a really interesting balance between cypriol and champaca (with a bunch of flankers) and, while not sophisticated on its own, it can be an incredible jumping off point for oriental/spice bases

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Very familiar with Nag Champa. That could be a good idea to go for although I'm not a massive fan of that incense in general.

I like using Champaca Absolute with Guaiacwood, balsams and other narcotic floral notes. My favorite mix so far is when I combined it with chrysanthemum ingredients like Chrysanthemum Absolute, Tagetes Oil, Chrysanthemum Oxide, and Chrysantheme. I also made another blend with patchouli, extra-indolic jasmine, civet, and warm, animalic musks, which turned out quite good as well.

ambrinolforthechildren said:

I'm curious to see how it performs with cypriol, although I don't trust my material - it's primarily terpenic and very harsh/green. But maybe trace would work.

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I'm not a big fan of Cypriol either, but at around 5% in a thick amber accord is very pleasant.

ambrinolforthechildren said:

I recently had the good fortune to receive a bottle of champa/champaca from India of reliable quality. It's a very interesting smell, hard to describe - it is certainly floral but has a strong leathery facet, some fruitiness and greenness, and an animalic character - overall, delicious and highly narcotic/erogenous. It almost has the character of frangipani flowers on the tree after a few hours on the strip at certain concentrations.

Anyway, it's not something I've used before or have any experience with in fragrance. Does anyone have any fun suggestions for accords/blends to try with it? I have ideas inspired by the frangipani aspect to make a tropical dirty floral (like a raunchy vacation) but am curious to hear any input.

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I made the Waterfall demo formula from Fraterworks @jfrater recently and it is gorgeous (red champaca abs. is in it). It smells very fresh, watery, tropical vacation (rainforest/jungle rather than salt/beach/sunscreen). It's bang on accurate calling it waterfall - it smells like what I imagine a waterfall in some tropical paradise would smell like.

Link to the formula:
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0682/1448/9400/files/waterfall989953.pdf?v=1709316069

Had a quick crack tonight, drawing on a Samsara inspired fragrance with some modifications. It worked out really well. Viciously green on the open, really quite soapy, super clean and somewhat refined. I'm now curious to see what champa would do in really jasmine forward compositions where the jasmine is completely substituted out.

Edit to say: "Lavender Vintage" refers to a unique gift I received of some vintage lavandin from France, extremely old and formerly unopened. It's very nice. I modified an ambreine accord to increase labdanum slightly (as per Marlo's suggestion).

I'd recommend making this formula, although I know it's somewhat involved. It also involves a ton of Mysore sandalwood which I'm fortunate enough to have in ample supply, but a quality base would do here I'm sure. I'd suggest halving the amount of cis-3-hexenyl acetate to reduce the green punch on open and bring it up to this level if it were desired - it's really growing on me and less of an issue on skin.

DamedInBlack said:

I made the Waterfall demo formula from Fraterworks @jfrater recently and it is gorgeous (red champaca abs. is in it). It smells very fresh, watery, tropical vacation (rainforest/jungle rather than salt/beach/sunscreen). It's bang on accurate calling it waterfall - it smells like what I imagine a waterfall in some tropical paradise would smell like.

Link to the formula:
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0682/1448/9400/files/waterfall989953.pdf?v=1709316069

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Not thank you for being this other guy among many that makes me want to spend my whole salary on Fraterworks.

This sounds so gorgeous.

this looks really lovely!

50 Scents of Grey said:

Not thank you for being this other guy among many that makes me want to spend my whole salary on Fraterworks.

This sounds so gorgeous.

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Haha, I'm not the only one blowing my salary on Fraterworks, then! It's an addiction I am ok with having, though. It really is a truly gorgeous formula; I highly recommend! I've never made reed diffuser blends, but it would be fantastic in one. Just on the test strip yesterday it made any room I took it into smell so much fresher. I love it!