The Perfume Islands: Comoros Ylang-Ylang, Colonial Plantations, and the People Behind the Scent

Social Justice · African History & Culture · Sacred Plants & Spiritual Wellness

A Flower Picked Before the Sun Gets Hot

The Comoros archipelago sits in the Indian Ocean off northern Mozambique, as Agence France-Presse located it in 2025. A U.S. State Department background note on the Comoros names its four islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan, Mohéli, and Mayotte, and records that three of them form the independent Union of the Comoros while the fourth, Mayotte, remains under French administration.

On these small islands grows most of the world’s ylang-ylang, the flower of the tree Cananga odorata. A 2018 story from the World Trade Organization’s Enhanced Integrated Framework put Comoros ylang-ylang at about 60 percent of global supply. Agence France-Presse reporting carried by The National described the archipelago as the world’s top producer of the essential oil, turning out 30 to 40 metric tons a year, mostly on Anjouan, an island that was home to some 350 distilleries. A report for the French Development Agency, cited by AFP in 2025, counted around 10,000 ylang-ylang producers in the country, most of them on Anjouan.

The work has a rhythm the perfume counter never shows. Flowers must be distilled soon after picking, so small family stills sit close to the fields. In one Anjouan cooperative described in the EIF story, roughly 250 women pickers, 50 planters, and 47 men who run the stills all contribute to a single chain. Women gather the blossoms; the stills are tended through long hours of heat and steam. This is skilled, inherited agricultural knowledge, and it is the real beginning of every ylang-ylang perfume.

How an Asian Tree Came to the Mozambique Channel

Ylang-ylang is not native to Africa. The tree originated in the Philippines, and its name is usually traced to a Tagalog phrase often glossed as “flower of flowers,” according to the same AFP report. The report explains that the French introduced the tree to Réunion in the 1700s, and that in the early 1900s its cultivation spread to the Comoros and Madagascar.

The flower arrived with an empire. France’s first foothold came in 1841, when the governor of Réunion negotiated with Andrian Souli, the Malagasy ruler of Mayotte, to cede the island to France, according to the Library of Congress’s country study of the Comoros. Protectorate treaties with the rulers of the other three islands followed in 1886. In 1908 all four islands became part of France’s colony of Madagascar, and in 1912 the last sultan abdicated. The State Department note summarizes what followed: French settlers, French-owned companies, and wealthy Arab merchants built a plantation-based economy that, by the time the note was written, used about one-third of the land for export crops. A plantation named after the French naturalist Léon Humblot was still operating when AFP reported on the ylang-ylang trade in 2015.

The Library of Congress study is blunt about what colonial rule built. French companies established cash-crop plantations in the coastal regions while food-crop cultivation was neglected, leaving an economy dependent on exporting vanilla, ylang-ylang, cloves, cocoa, copra, and other tropical crops. Most of the profits from those exports were sent to France rather than invested in the islands’ infrastructure, and the Shirazi elite kept a prominent role as large landowners. Colonial rule ended the institution of slavery, the study notes, but the economic and social differences between former slaves and free people, and between their descendants, persisted. That is the soil the perfume trade grew from: land held in few hands, food crops pushed aside for export crops, and profits that left on ships.

The Malagasy thread runs through this story as well. It was a Malagasy ruler who handed Mayotte to France, and the colonial government later concentrated public services on Madagascar, a policy the Library of Congress study links to the migration of large numbers of Comorians to the larger island. When the Comoran parliament declared independence in 1975, Mayotte’s deputies abstained, the State Department note records, which is why Mayotte sits outside the Union today. Across the water, Madagascar stands with the Comoros and Mayotte among the world’s top ylang-ylang producers, according to AFP’s 2025 reporting.

Flowers for the Bride, Oil for the Hair: Ylang-Ylang at Home

Long before a bottle is labeled for export, ylang-ylang lives inside island households. In 2024, researchers led by Oumaynou Daroueche published an ethnobotanical survey of cosmetic plants in Mayotte in the journal Heliyon. They interviewed 35 recognized experts, called fundi, across 14 communes of Mayotte’s main island, working in French, Shimaore, and Kibushi. Of 83 plant species documented, ylang-ylang, known locally as langilang, was among the ten most cited, with 75 recorded uses: fragrance, perfumed oils, massage, softening the skin, care after hair removal, and a general sense of well-being.

The same study describes a preparation called matcha manu kantru, a name from the Anjouan language combining the word for oil with a phrase meaning “it smells good.” Coconut milk is cooked down until it becomes oil, then steeped with aromatic plants that include vetiver root, frangipani, jasmine, pandanus, rose, basil, patchouli, and ylang-ylang flowers. According to the researchers, the finished oil is bottled and worn as fragrance at weddings. The authors also warn that rapid urbanization is putting this traditional knowledge at risk.

We find something deeply familiar in that detail. The same flower that luxury houses buy by the liter is, in Comorian and Mahoran homes, a wedding scent, a hair and skin oil, a way of making the body and the gathering beautiful. The knowledge came first. The market came later, and it did not invent the flower’s value; it simply learned to price it.

The Price of a Flower

Ylang-ylang is one of the backbone materials of French perfumery. Chanel’s perfume research director Christopher Sheldrake told AFP that N°5 contains around 10 percent ylang-ylang oil, making the house one of the biggest buyers of Comorian oil. The same AFP report calls ylang-ylang a key ingredient of many other perfumes, and the EIF story likewise names it as an ingredient in N°5.

Now follow the money back up the hill. Ibrahim Bacar, who inherited an eight-hectare plot from his father, told AFP that he sold a kilogram of flowers for less than one euro. He knew the buyers earned far more from the oil. “I take the little they give me,” he said. Pickers in high season gather 25 to 40 kilograms of flowers a day, and one worker told AFP the job paid about 50 euros a month. In 2013 and 2014, the whole country’s ylang-ylang oil exports were worth only about 1.5 million euros a year.

Comorian growers and entrepreneurs have been clear about what they want. Ibrahima Sittina Farate, an agronomist with three hectares of trees and her own still, told the EIF that her 500 trees produce about 10 metric tons of flowers a year, yielding roughly 100 kilograms of oil that can sell for more than $100 a kilogram, and she spoke openly about wanting to break from old ways of doing things. Houria Said Muhammed built a small lab, NectaLab, that turns local oil into Comorian beauty products. The EIF story notes that both women are held back by middlemen, distance from markets, and lack of financing, and that the Comorian government is aiming for a larger share of the world ylang-ylang market.

This is the heart of the justice question. The value of Comoros ylang-ylang is created on the islands, in the soil, the picking, and the careful work at the still. Most of the value it earns is captured elsewhere, in blending houses, brand names, and retail markups. Naming that gap is not an act of pity. It is simply an accurate description of a colonial trade pattern that has outlived the colony.

Wood, Water, and the Mountains of Anjouan

Distilling flowers takes heat, and on Anjouan heat has mostly meant wood. In a 2025 AFP interview published by Premium Beauty News, Comoros environment minister Abubakar Ben Mahmoud said the country lost 80 percent of its natural forests between 1995 and 2014. On Anjouan, with more than 700 residents per square kilometer, forest has been cleared for farmland, for carved wooden doors, and for fuel. The French Development Agency report cited in the same article found that wood is the cheapest fuel for distillation, with about 250 kilograms burned for every liter of oil. One exporter told AFP that high electricity prices would make electric distillation ten times more expensive, not counting long power cuts. As early as 2015, Chanel told AFP it was trying to get its suppliers to plant their own trees for firewood.

The cost reaches the rivers. Bastoini Chaambani of the Comorian environmental organization Dayima told AFP that Anjouan had 50 rivers with strong year-round flow in 1925, and fewer than 10 that flow continuously today. Forests act like a sponge that feeds streams and aquifers, a hydroclimatologist explained in the same report. When the hills lose their trees, the island loses its water.

Comorians are leading the response. Mohamed Mahamoud, who has grown and distilled ylang-ylang near Bambao Mtsanga for nearly 45 years, told AFP that he halved his wood use by switching to stainless steel stills and an improved oven with doors and a chimney, and that he now fuels them mostly with mango and breadfruit wood from trees he grows himself. The Anjouan-based organization Dahari launched a reforestation program with farmers known as “water guardians,” who sign five-year conservation contracts to replant or rest their land in exchange for compensation. Any honest conversation about Comoros ylang-ylang has to include the forest, and it has to credit the Comorians already doing the repair.

What the Science Says About Ylang-Ylang and Calm

Ylang-ylang is widely sold as a relaxing oil. The honest place to begin is not the label on the bottle but the broader evidence on aromatherapy, because that is where the most careful reviewing has been done. Nobody can truly be blinded to a scent, which makes fair, placebo-controlled studies of any essential oil hard to design and harder to interpret.

A 2019 evidence map from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, reviewing 26 systematic reviews of aromatherapy, found that essential oils were potentially effective for a handful of outcomes, including blood pressure reduction in hypertension and stress in healthy adults, but with low to moderate confidence in the evidence, and that there was insufficient evidence of efficacy for the other conditions examined. The map looks at aromatherapy as a whole rather than at ylang-ylang on its own, so it cannot say how much of any calming effect belongs to this particular flower. The fair reading: ylang-ylang may help some people feel calmer in the moment. It is not a treatment for high blood pressure or an anxiety disorder, and it should never replace care that is working.

Skin Sensitization: The Part the Labels Leave Out

The same compounds that make ylang-ylang beautiful can make skin react. A central European dermatology network, the IVDK, analyzed patch tests from 2000 to 2008: of 15,682 patients tested with at least one essential oil, ylang-ylang oil was the most common trigger, with positive reactions in about 3.1 percent. It came ahead of lemongrass oil at 1.8 percent, jasmine absolute at 1.6 percent, and sandalwood and clove oils at 1.5 percent each.

The researchers recommended that people with a suggestive history be patch tested with the important essential oils, and with the actual products they had been using. For anyone who uses the oil at home, the practical lessons are simple: never apply it undiluted, be cautious if you already react to fragrance, keep it away from broken or irritated skin, and stop at the first sign of redness or itching.

Solidarity Without Saviorism

Ubuntu Village does not work in the Comoros, and we will not pretend otherwise. We tell this story as learners and as kin across the African world, because the pattern it reveals is one we recognize everywhere plant knowledge meets a global market: communities hold the knowledge and do the labor, while distant buyers set the price.

Solidarity here does not mean rescue. It means asking where your oil comes from and what the grower was paid. It means favoring Comorian-owned brands and cooperatives when you can find them, and pressing fragrance houses to publish their sourcing and pay fairly. It means crediting the distillers, pickers, organizations like Dahari and Dayima, and researchers like Daroueche and colleagues who are already telling and changing this story. And it means holding the science honestly, enjoying the scent for what it is without asking it to be a cure.

The next time you smell ylang-ylang, let it carry you somewhere true: to a hillside on Anjouan in the early morning, to a wedding oil simmering in a Mahoran kitchen, to a forest that Comorians are working to bring back. The flower is not only luxury. It is lineage.

If this changed how you think about the scent in your perfume, share it with someone who loves ylang-ylang.

Sources

• Agence France-Presse (2015). Production of secret to Chanel N°5 under threat in Comoros. The National.
• Agence France-Presse / Premium Beauty News (2025). Comoros: Push to turn ylang-ylang distillation to greener practices. Premium Beauty News.
• Ramsay, D. (2018). Comoros in bloom. Enhanced Integrated Framework, Trade for Development News.
• U.S. Department of State (2008). Background Note: Comoros. U.S. Department of State (archived).
• Metz, H. C. (Ed.) (1994). Comoros: A Country Study (French Colonization). Library of Congress, Federal Research Division.
• Daroueche, O., Dimassi, A., Bertrand, C., & Chassagne, F. (2024). Exploring traditional cosmetic flora from Comoros islands: An ethnobotanical survey in Mayotte. Heliyon.
• Freeman, M., Ayers, C. K., Peterson, C., & Kansagara, D. (2019). Aromatherapy and Essential Oils: A Map of the Evidence. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Evidence Synthesis Program.
• Uter, W., et al. (2010). Contact allergy to essential oils: current patch test results (2000-2008) from the Information Network of Departments of Dermatology (IVDK). Contact Dermatitis.

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