The jasmine plant has dark green foliage and delicate white flowers. To ensure the highest quality aromatic compounds, it is necessary to pick the flower and extract the oil right when it blooms. Jasmine flowers bloom in the early morning before the sun rises. They are carefully harvested by hand before dawn (usually around 2:30 am) about six months after planting. Harvesters – most of whom are women – are given a certain number of plants to pick from each day. The harvest season starts around June and can last for several months.

The flowers are too fragile to steam distil. Instead, a solvent extraction method is used to produce the absolute. An absolute requires wax and paraffin to be separated out from the volatile aromatic compound to make the final product more potent.