To continue my story about the mystery that is fragrance production ...

Once the flowers are picked they must be processed in five to six hours before they rot. This means that immediately after the pickers are done with their two plus hours of morning picking, the flowers are weighed. This is a very important part for the pickers because they are paid by the weight of the flowers they pick. Again, this is all done with very old-school tools and methods.

They toss the flowers onto a large scale with manual levers to get the precise weight (see Mul weighing flowers in the photo above). Their amounts are all tabulated in a large paper book (no computers in sight). After they are all weighed, they are placed into large metal crates and driven over to the small factory, which looks like a barn with large, well-aged metal equipment -- not glamorous or high-tech at all.

I'm still shocked that such a beautiful thing like perfume comes out of such a basic, farm setting -- but maybe I'm naive.

Check in tomorrow to see how the extracting and distilling works ...