> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.losiam.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Smoke Before Scent: Inside the Sourcing of LOSiam's Aromatic Litsea Absolute - URL: https://www.losiam.com/aromatic-litsea-absolute-co2-extraction/ - Published: 2026-09-21T06:00:25.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-22T08:31:49.000Z - Description: Most Litsea cubeba oil is steam-distilled from fresh berries. Ours starts with berries smoked by a Hmong family on Doi Inthanon, then extracted with CO2 instead of steam — a different material entirely, IFRA-conformant and ready for evaluation. - Author: Thomas POUPLIN - Tags: #litsea cubeba, #Rare Ingredients, #CO2 extraction, #Northern Thailand Sourcing, #IFRA Every perfumer's library holds a bottle of Litsea cubeba. Sold as May Chang, it is one of the most reliable citrus-aldehydic materials in the natural palette: cheap, abundant, steam-distilled from fresh berries by the ton across Vietnam and southern China. It does its job well and rarely surprises anyone. This is a different story. It starts on a mountain, in a family's smokehouse, with a spice that was never meant for perfumery and ends with an absolute that carries notes the standard oil has never produced. ![](https://www.losiam.com/content/images/2026/08/20240704_114852.jpg) ## A Village on Thailand's Highest Mountain Doi Inthanon rises just under two hours from our lab in Chiang Mai — Thailand's highest peak, its upper slopes cool enough to grow strawberries and coffee alongside the wild botanicals of the surrounding forest. Litsea cubeba grows here too, but no one in the local Hmong community harvests it for its essential oil. They harvest it, once a year, as a spice. Known locally as *Ta Krai Ton*, the berries are picked, then dried and smoked over an open wood fire — a technique that belongs to the household, not to any industrial process. Once cured, they are ground into Laap, Northern Thailand's iconic minced-meat salad, where their citrus-camphor bite is prized for cutting through fat and gaminess. It is domestic knowledge, passed down without ever touching a fragrance brief. ![](https://www.losiam.com/content/images/2026/08/20240704_124852.jpg) Sourcing this material meant something different from a standard purchase order. It meant driving into the hills, meeting the family who tends the trees and runs the smokehouse, and agreeing to work at their pace and on their terms — one harvest window a year, June through August, no more volume than the mountain and the tradition allow. We didn't ask them to change anything about how they prepare the berries. We simply asked to buy what they already made, and to be honest about what we intended to do with it. ![](https://www.losiam.com/content/images/2026/08/20240704_113410.jpg) That distinction matters more than it might seem. It would have been easy to "improve" on the process — standardize the smoking, mechanize the drying, scale the batch. We chose not to. The smoke in this absolute is not a fragrance effect we engineered; it's a fingerprint of a specific family's fire, on a specific mountain, in a specific week of the year. Reproducing it anywhere else, at any other time, isn't really possible — which is exactly what makes it worth reproducing faithfully in the lab. ## Why CO2, and Why It Matters Here Once the smoked berries reach our facility, the choice of extraction method was the second decision that shaped this material — and the one most likely to interest a perfumer evaluating it on paper. Fresh Litsea cubeba is almost always steam-distilled: a fast, cheap, high-yield process well suited to a citral-heavy essential oil where volatility is the whole story. Our starting material is different in kind, not just in degree. Smoking and drying concentrate a broader range of compounds in the berry — the phenolic, leathery, wood-fire notes sitting alongside the classic citronellal-citral backbone. Steam distillation, run at temperature over time, tends to favor the light, volatile top notes and can thin out or flatten exactly the heavier, smoke-and-leather register that makes this raw material worth extracting differently in the first place. ![](https://www.losiam.com/content/images/2026/08/20240329_093412.jpg) We extract with solventless supercritical CO2 (SFE) instead. Run at lower temperatures and without any organic solvents, SFE is gentler on thermally sensitive and heavier aromatic fractions, and it leaves no solvent residue to strip out afterward. Practically, this means the absolute retains the tension between its two halves — a citrus top that still reads unmistakably as Litsea, sitting over a base that a classic distillation would have smoothed away. For a material whose whole interest lies in that contrast, the extraction method isn't a technical footnote; it's the reason the material exists as something worth a perfumer's attention. ## Olfactory Profile The absolute opens exactly where a trained nose would expect May Chang to open — a vibrant, citronella-forward freshness — before diverging. The heart moves into rosé geranium and a spicy nutmeg facet, and the dry-down is where the material earns its name: a clean, leathery accord threaded with wood-fire smoke, closing on an unexpected warmth of candied ginger. ![](https://www.losiam.com/content/images/2026/08/20231003_152815.jpg) For a perfumer, it reads as a way to bring genuine, naturally sourced smoke and leather character into a citrus-forward accord — without reaching for synthetic smoky bases, and without importing the heaviness that whole smoked-wood materials can bring. It sits comfortably alongside oud and leather accords looking for a citrus lift, or in gourmand-woody structures that need a naturally smoky top rather than a purely sweet one. ## Regulatory Status Aromatic Litsea Absolute is IFRA-conformant, with a fully documented allergen profile — evaluated and ready for use in fine fragrance formulation, not a promising raw material still waiting on paperwork. ### Technical data - Botanical name: Litsea cubeba - Extract part: Roasted, dried fruits - Form: absolute - Olfactory family: citrus · leathery · aromatic - Process: solventless supercritical CO2 extraction (SFE) - CAS: 68855-99-2 - EINECS: 90063-59-5 - FEMA: 3846 - Regulatory status: IFRA-conformant, allergen profile validated - Harvest window: June–August - Origin: hand-harvested, Hmong village, Doi Inthanon, Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand --- *Aromatic Litsea Absolute is produced in limited quantity, tied to a single annual harvest. Perfumers interested in an evaluation sample can request one directly from LOSiam.*