Flowers of Sulfur was made by heating native sulfur in a closed vessel until it vaporized, then allowing the vapor to condense directly onto a cooler surface as a fine, pale yellow powder, a technique called sublimation that produces a much finer, more uniform and more chemically pure product than could be achieved by grinding raw mineral sulfur mechanically. The resulting powder's fine, almost fluffy texture gave it its name, flowers, a term used across alchemical vocabulary for various sublimed products valued for their fineness and purity compared to their coarser starting material. Sublimation as a technique was well established across the alchemical workshop for purifying a range of volatile substances, sal ammoniac among them, and flowers of sulfur stands as one of the clearest and most widely documented examples of the technique applied successfully to a simple native element.
Medicinally, flowers of sulfur was used topically as a mild treatment for various skin complaints, a use with some genuine basis given sulfur's real antifungal and antibacterial properties, applications that persist in modern dermatological formulations even today. Agriculturally it served as a fungicide, dusted onto crops, particularly grapevines, to control mildew, a practical use that long predates any understanding of the fungal biology involved. Like native sulfur generally it also served in gunpowder manufacture, its fine, uniform particle size making it well suited to blending evenly with the saltpetre and charcoal that complete the mixture.