Jasmine blossoms must be picked carefully, one by one, to keep their oils. "When we are collecting, we need to balance between collecting quickly and at the same time not to press the flowers hard so they won't lose their oils," Faraj continued. "The best thing to do is to collect the mature white-coloured buds; they will still blossom anyway after being picked within a few hours." The small, pink immature buds should be left for another day or two.

Blossom picking from the metre-high jasmine shrubs is laborious, and in many televised interviews, pickers have expressed their frustration about their wages. Faraj shares this frustration. "Jasmine picking is not financially rewarding for young men like me; we look for other better paying jobs. We pick jasmine all night and then we sell what we pick to the wholesale collector [who sends them to the factory] for 30 EGP [£1.44] for a kilogram of blossoms. A person picks an average of 3kg of blossoms making 90 EGP [£4.31] a day, which is little," he explained.

The low price for picked blossoms can be attributed to competition with India, the second largest producer of jasmine after Egypt. Another reason, however, could be the complexity of extracting jasmine absolute – the substance used in perfumes – from the blossoms, which undergoes a two-step process: first, the blossoms are mixed with hexane, a colourless and odourless volatile petroleum derivative, to extract jasmine concrete, a butter-like intermediary product that contains both jasmine absolute and wax. Then, the jasmine absolute is separated from the wax using ethyl alcohol.

During this process, the weight of jasmine blossoms shrinks significantly. "To pick a kilo of blossom, a picker needs to collect between 4,000 and 6,000 individual blossoms," Fakhry said. "I need one tonne of blossom – about 6 million blossoms – to produce about 2.6 or 2.7kg of jasmine concrete ... and that concrete yields [1kg of jasmine absolute]".