Ask most people to picture jasmine and they think of something simple: a small white flower, sweet and clean, the smell of a summer hedge at night. It is none of those things. Jasmine is the most technically difficult flower in perfumery, the most carnal, and the most quietly dishonest, a bloom that cannot be distilled, that keeps producing scent for a day after it is torn from the vine, and whose entire beauty depends on a molecule that, on its own, smells of mothballs and decay.

Not one jasmine. Two souls.

There is no single jasmine, and there is no such thing as jasmine essential oil. Two species carry almost all of fine perfumery between them, and they do not smell alike. Jasminum grandiflorum, Spanish jasmine, the jasmine of Grasse, Egypt and India, is the warm one: fruity, tea-like, honeyed, soft. Jasminum sambac, Arabian jasmine, and in this part of the world melati putih, is the intense one: greener, headier, almost rubbery, with a narcotic weight that can fill a room. One is a watercolour. The other is a held breath.

What no bottle labelled "jasmine oil" will tell you is that neither is captured by distillation. The flower is too delicate; steam tears the fine molecules apart before they reach the condenser. Jasmine has to be coaxed out cold, by solvent, or, in the old way, by fat.

Why jasmine must be taken cold.

Heat is jasmine's enemy. The delicate esters and the living, animalic top of the flower collapse under a still, so perfumery reaches the scent two other ways. The modern route is solvent extraction: mountains of blossom are washed with a hydrocarbon that dissolves everything waxy and fragrant into a concrete, a solid, khaki-coloured paste. The concrete is then washed with alcohol, chilled, and filtered until the plant waxes drop out and only the fragrant liquid remains: the absolute, jasmine in its most concentrated, wearable form.

The old route explains the flower's strangest secret. Before solvents, jasmine was captured by enfleurage, fresh flowers laid by hand on trays of purified fat, replaced night after night, until the fat was saturated with scent. It worked for one reason almost unique to jasmine: the flower does not die when you pick it. A jasmine blossom keeps manufacturing and releasing fragrance for a full day after harvest, breathing perfume into the fat as though it were still on the vine. Enfleurage is not extraction so much as a slow, patient theft from a flower that has not yet noticed it is dead.

"You do not pick jasmine in daylight. By the time the sun is warm, the best of the flower has already left."

Grandiflorum, sambac, and the Indian juhi.

A note on what these three are, and are not. Grandiflorum, sambac and auriculatum are three different species, different plants. Concrete, absolute and attar, met earlier, are not flowers at all but three different methods of capture. Any of the three species can be turned into any of the three materials: there is sambac absolute and sambac attar both, from the one flower. Which plant, and which method, are two separate questions.

The molecule that makes it living, or dead.

Pull a jasmine absolute apart and it is not one smell but forty or more, and the pretty part is easy to find. In grandiflorum, benzyl acetate, nearly a third of the whole, gives the fruity-floral lift most people call "jasmine," while benzyl benzoate, another fifth, is a nearly odourless heavy oil that acts as the fixative tail, holding everything down. Around them work the character molecules: linalool for softness, cis-jasmone, the molecule named after the flower, for warm floral roundness, jasmine lactone for a peach-and-coconut creaminess, and the jasmonates that lend that luminous, almost weightless radiance the whole flower seems to float on.

Then there is the molecule that does the real work: indole. It is a minor fraction, only one to three percent, and on its own it is repulsive, the smell of mothballs, of tar, of something faintly fecal, the very molecule the body produces in the gut. In jasmine, at the dose the flower chose, it does the opposite of repulsive. It gives the scent its body heat, its carnality, the sense that you are smelling skin and flesh and not a hedge. This is jasmine's central paradox, the same one that runs through orris and civet: the molecule that makes the flower beautiful is the one that, turned up a fraction too far, makes it rot. Great jasmine lives on the knife's edge of that dose.

Everything by hand, and nothing by machine.

Jasmine is expensive for reasons that never change, because none of them can be mechanised. The flowers open at night and must be gathered before the morning heat, one blossom at a time, by hand, by people bent over the plants in the dark. They cannot be distilled, so every drop passes through the slow, wasteful chemistry of concrete and absolute. And the arithmetic is merciless.

The figures come straight from the fields that supply the classics. In Grasse it takes roughly eight thousand hand-picked flowers to make a single kilogram of blossom, and a gatherer bent over the rows collects about three hundred and fifty grams of them an hour; it takes something like a tonne of flower to yield a kilogram of absolute. Chanel, which has grown its own jasmine on the Mul family's thirty hectares since 1987 to guarantee supply, reckons the essence of about a thousand blossoms goes into every thirty-millilitre bottle of Nº5. Years of the plant, a harvest that races the sunrise, an extraction that returns grams for kilos. Jasmine is not costly because it is rare. It is costly because there is no shortcut through a flower that insists on being taken slowly, in the dark, alive.

What it actually smells like.

Warm. That is the word grandiflorum earns, fruity, tea-like, honeyed, with a soft radiance that reads as sunlit rather than heavy, the friendliest of the great white flowers. Sambac is the other temperature entirely: green, dense, almost rubbery at the top, banana-skin and crushed leaf, opening into a narcotic heart that people describe as heady, intoxicating, too much. Under both runs the same animal warmth, the indolic thread that keeps jasmine from ever being merely pretty. It smells of skin, of night air, of a flower that has not decided whether it is clean or not, which is precisely why it has anchored feminine perfumery for a century.

The flower half of perfumery is built on.

Jasmine is one of the two flowers, the other being rose, that fine perfumery cannot do without. Grandiflorum is the beating heart of Chanel Nº5 and the reason Jean Patou's Joy was once sold as the costliest perfume in the world. Its luminous jasmonate radiance, isolated and made synthetic as Hedione, was let loose in Dior's Eau Sauvage in 1966 and now hides in an astonishing share of everything on the shelf, lending its transparent glow to fragrances that never announce jasmine at all. Sambac, at full narcotic strength, carries Serge Lutens' À La Nuit, three jasmines and almost nothing else, and lends its heady weight to Mugler's Alien. From temple garland to modern radiance, it is everywhere, seen and unseen.

The jasmine molecule hiding in half your bottles.

In 1957, a Firmenich chemist named Édouard Demole isolated methyl jasmonate, the molecule behind jasmine's luminous lift, and by 1958 had synthesised a stable, affordable cousin of it. He named it Hedione, from the Greek hedone, meaning pleasure. On its own it barely smells of anything: a faint, transparent, watery jasmine-magnolia, more light than scent. Its gift is what it does to everything around it. Hedione makes a fragrance radiate, lifting and spreading the other materials so a perfume seems to glow and fill a room rather than sit on the skin.

Edmond Roudnitska poured a then-shocking dose of it into Dior's Eau Sauvage in 1966, and modern perfumery changed. Today Hedione, and its rarer high-purity captive Paradisone, appear in an enormous share of everything on the shelf, often at a few percent, invisible, doing the same job in a men's cologne and a rose soliflore alike. It is the ghost of jasmine: not the flower, but the flower's radiance, extracted as an idea and lent to the whole industry. When a scent seems to breathe light, this molecule is usually why.

What is really in your "jasmine."

Because the pretty molecules can all be made in a laboratory, benzyl acetate, Hedione, cis-jasmone, jasmine lactone, a measured drop of indole for the carnal edge, most fragrances sold on jasmine contain little or no natural absolute at all. They are reconstructions, and good ones: a convincing jasmine can be built entirely from synthetics, brighter and cheaper and more stable than the flower. There is no shame in it; it is how jasmine becomes affordable, and how a note this expensive can appear in a thirty-dollar bottle. But when a perfume genuinely leans on jasmine absolute, grandiflorum for warmth, sambac for the narcotic dark, you are smelling something no lab has fully caught: a flower still breathing after it was picked, indole and all.

"The flower does not stop when you cut it. It keeps giving its scent to the dark, as if memory were something it could exhale."

At HoM Haute we are drawn to jasmine for the obvious reason and a closer one. The obvious reason is that nothing else is so alive on the skin, carnal, radiant, impossible to fake completely. The closer reason is melati. Jasminum sambac is Indonesia's puspa bangsa, the flower of the nation, named on World Environment Day in 1990 and fixed in law by presidential decree in 1993, chosen for what it has always meant here: purity, sacredness, sincerity. It is strung by hand into ronce melati for the hair of Javanese and Balinese brides, folded into the small daily offerings left at temple gates, and laid at funerals in the same white breath, the scent of the beginning and the end, of vows made and of grief. It is a flower this country already keeps its memories in. For a house built on the belief that fragrance is memory, there is no flower closer to home.

Where we have used it.