About Us

White Lotus Aromatics is located in beautiful Port Angeles, WA "where the mountains greet the sea."

White Lotus evolved as a natural adjunct to the Fragrant Harvest Project, which commenced in India in 1996.  Since then Christopher has made numerous trips to India, traveling throughout the country to meet with farmers, distillers and extractors,and research scientists working on aromatic crops and their natural distillates and extraction. These journeys paved the way for offering pure essential oils, CO2 extracts, traditional attars, absolutes, carrier oils and, most recently, incense to the fragrance community. The hunt for the highest quality oils led naturally to expanding our interactions with distilleries and extraction units to countries outside of India and now we are directly procuring natural essences from Bulgaria, Madagascar, South Africa, Ethiopia, Hungary, France, Italy, Bosnia and several other countries.

We focus our attention on a select number of organic and wild harvested essential oils, hydrodistilled essences, CO2 extracts, attars, ruhs, and absolutes.We have done our best to select only the highest quality, purest oils available from our distilling and extracting colleagues around the world and hope that our customers, old and new, will find in our aromatic palette precious essences that will serve their needs.

Suzanne and Christopher McMahon handle all the operations of White Lotus Aromatics--sourcing, ordering, invoicing, packing. Managing the business ourselves allows us to maintain a direct relationship with our customers while moving forward with the creative projects the interest and inspire us.

Christopher handles sourcing and has traveled extensively in India to gain a practical understanding of the inner workings of India's ancient and modern fragrance industry. In order to make this world accessible to others, he has assisted Ramakant Harlalka with three aroma tours in India for fragrance enthusiasts. He enjoys tremendously interacting with distillers/extractors around the world and has helped sponsor the extraction of Blue, White, and Pink Lotus Absolute in India, Templin/Fir Cone Essential Oil in Bosnia, Geranium Sur Fleur Essential Oil in South Africa and the distillation of traditional attars in India. He issues by email an informative Fragrant Harvest Newsletter.

Suzanne manages the books, has intermittent bright ideas, and hops in whenever a little organizing would save the day. She was previously head of the South/Southeast Asia Library at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a B.A. in German and an M.A. in Hindi literature.

The Welch corgis belong to Christopher's mom. They aren't regular employees, but do odd jobs for treats.