Turkish Rose
A rich, fresh rose scent with soft sweetness, lemony brightness, and a slightly spicy warmth.
You may know it from Freshly cut fragrant garden roses
Where it comes from
Steam-distilled from Rosa damascena flowers grown mainly in Turkey.
Worth knowing
Turkish rose usually means Damask rose grown in Turkey, not a separate species.
About turkish rose
The Turkish rose harvest is short. Flowering lasts about 40 days, and the picking falls in May and June, with the flowers taken off the bush by a pinching technique so the petals stay fresh. One rose-oil trade blog says a picker gathers 50 to 60 kg of flowers a day and that the petals reach the still before mid-morning.
Most of the crop goes through one organisation. The cooperative Gülbirlik, founded in the 1950s, is the main buyer and processor of roses from the Isparta region, and one source says it handles about 300 tons of flowers a day at peak. Family farms grow the roses and bring them to cooperative-managed distilleries, while a state cooperative regulates how the oil is sold.
The yield is small. A 2005 paper puts it at 3 to 5 tons of petals for each kilogram of oil, and Eden Botanicals gives about 4,500 kg. Givaudan makes a Turkish rose absolute instead, solvent-extracting the concrete, and says one kilogram takes 800 kg of flowers, or 250,000 roses. Turkey's share of the world's rose oil is put anywhere from 40% to 65%, depending on the source.
Perfumers contrast Turkish rose with Bulgarian. Turkish is described as plush, velvety and green, Bulgarian as sweeter, with apple and berry facets. The oil itself is mostly citronellol and geraniol, among more than 400 constituents reported, many of them only in traces. A trade blog puts Isparta oil at roughly 31 to 44% citronellol and 9 to 14% geraniol.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Turkish Rose in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Turkish Rose most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Turkish Rose
Fragrances that list it in their notes, most-rated first.
Houses that use it most
Ranked by how many of their well-known fragrances list Turkish Rose.