The summer breezes permeate the air with fragrances of jasmine and hibiscus, refreshing our senses to the world without and within us.
The aroma lingers as we pursue the scents of a paradise regained.
Though its dominant presence is unmistakable, it is unable to hear it, taste it or touch it. What it is, is the enticing scent of subtle, soothing, seductive perfume, a bit of magic in our everyday lives; an essential component since our primeval existence.
Pre-occupied with his quest for food, early man believed the greatest sacrifice he could offer his gods was his most precious possession, a slaughtered animal.
To mask the stench of burning flesh he burned sweet-smelling leaves and woods to deoderise the carcass.
Perfume, from per fumare, is an accurate description of how the fragrant aromas reached worshippers through the smoke of the burning sacrifice. In time, those fragrances in themselves became the symbolic substitute for the offerings.
The transition from incense to perfume occurred some 6,000 years ago in the Middle East. Enticed by their pleasures, Egyptians and Sumerians literally bathed themselves in oils and alcohols of herbs, flowers, trees, and plants, jasmine and honey suckle, iris and lilies, frankincense and myrrh. Egyptians used balms for religious ceremonies and their women applied a different scent to each part of the body.
Cleopatra bathed in milks and rosewater, slathered her hands with oils of roses, crocus and violets and massaged her feet with almond, honey, cinnamon and orange —blossom lotions. Even the sails of her boat were coated with perfume oils so that Mark Anthony could catch a whiff of her arrival.
The Ancient Greeks learned of Egypt’s euphoric perfumes and the Romans expanded their balmy bouquets with Middle Eastern citric oils of tangerine, orange, and lemon. They also acquired cedar, pine, ginger, and mimosa.
Emperor Nero was partial to roses spending the equivalent of $266,019 for rose oils, rose water and rose petals at one single night. At his wife’s funeral in 65 AD, more perfumes was doused, splashed and sprayed, “more than the entire country of Arabia could produce roses in a year”.
For the next few hundred years, perfume-making was chiefly an Oriental art, as the early Christian Church scorned such excesses of “decadence and debauchery”. Perfume returned to Europe with the Crusaders from Palestine in the 1200s. England and France adopted the trade. One of the costliest perfumes was rose attar extracted from the oils of the damask rose. Two-hundred pounds of feather-light rose petals produced a single ounce of attar.
European interest in the magical aphrodisiac was rekindled and new elements were introduced by Eastern apothecaries. Small portions of certain animals’ sexual and glandular secretions were found to be intoxicating by humans. Though nauseating and revolting, in miniscule amounts mixed with other oils were greatly pleasing. How this was first discovered is still a mystery.
The father of the industry in modern times is Jean Baptist Farina, an Italian barber who arrived in the city of Cologne, Germany in 1709. Farina had a concoction of lemon spirits, orange bitters, and bergamot fruit that was highly pleasing. He named it after his adopted city calling it the water of Cologne or Eau de Cologne. The city became the most famous city throughout Europe.
In the 1800s some members of the Farina family established a branch of the business in Paris. The two cousins Armand Roger and Charles Gallet assumed the new name of the cologne, as Roger and Gallet, widely popular to this day.
Since the 19th Century the French have dominated the perfume business, thanks to the city of Grasse in Provence, centre of the flower and herb industry. Grasse is the capital of the Perfume Kingdom and France now has 50 per cent share of the world market, $16,626, 204 billion in revenues.
The end of WWI saw the beginning of mass production of French perfumes. Scientific advances created synthetic products that replaced hard to find ingredients, with the exception of flowers, the basic components of all perfumes. A hungry American market was opened to perfumes and France flourished.
Hundreds of thousands of perfumes are on the market today, approximately, 17,000 scents and anxious for more. The Egyptians were on to something since those favourite notes continue to lure our senses.
Our olfactory system, specialised sensory neurons, are responsible for processing smells, closely commuted to the limbic system in the brain. This part of the brain controls emotions and memories and can trigger strong responses and influence social interaction. Perfume is a way to express or relieve feelings and none has revolutionised the perfume industry as one Gabrielle Chanel.
In 1921, Fashion designer Coco Chanel introduced the most renowned fragrance of all time. She called on prominent perfumer Ernest Beaux to create “a woman’s perfume with the scent of a woman”. It took five tries before Chanel landed on her fifth choice. She chose
the fifth bottle on the fifth day of the fifth month. As 5 was her lucky day, she called her perfume No. 5.
Chanel No. 5 has been the highest selling product since its launch a century ago. Currently reaching five per cent of the world market share, it sells a bottle every 30 seconds.
When the love goddess of the century Marilyn Monroe was asked what to wear for bed, her replied was: “Why, Chanel No.5, of course.”
Scents are your best friends.
“Smell is a word, perfume is literature.”
Jean Claude Ellena (1947-)
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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