Once a month, I try to pull one ingredient out of the current lineup and explain what it actually is, often people have heard the name, but don't know what it is. This time it's palo santo.
Palo santo is a wood, sold as sticks and burned like incense, sometimes for smudging. On its own, it smells resinous and sweet, with a bright edge on top of it that keeps it from reading as one flat heavy wood. It sits in the same botanical family as frankincense and myrrh, which explains why it reads as sacred before anyone tells you its name.
The tree it comes from, Bursera graveolens, grows in the dry tropical forests of Ecuador, Peru, and parts of Mexico. Indigenous communities across that region have burned it for generations, in ceremonies meant to clear a space and mark it as prepared for something. The Spanish who arrived later gave it the name it carries now: palo santo, holy wood. What makes the wood unusual is that it has to die first. The tree is left where it falls and aged for years before it is harvested, because the aromatic compounds that give palo santo its scent only develop after the wood has already gone through its own slow decay.
Perfumers reach for it because that combination, resin and brightness in the same wood, is unusual. Most woods give you one note. Palo santo gives you both at once.
0 comments