Perfume means to smoke through—then chemistry took over
Perfume mixes scented oils or manufactured aroma molecules with a fixative and a solvent to make bodies, objects, or air smell good. Ancient texts and digs show early use, and one of the first chemists on record was a Mesopotamian perfume maker named Tapputi. Modern perfumery leapt ahead when nineteenth-century chemists began making smell molecules commercially.
Perfume is a blend of fragrant essential oils or aroma compounds with fixatives and solvents, usually liquid, used to give bodies, animals, food, objects, and rooms a pleasant smell. The word comes from the Latin perfumare, 'to smoke through'. The craft began in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and possibly ancient China, and was later refined by the Romans and by Muslim scholars.
Tapputi, named on a cuneiform tablet from the second millennium BC, distilled flowers, oil, and calamus with other aromatics, filtering the mixture and returning it to her still several times. In 2003 archaeologists at Pyrgos, Cyprus, found what are thought to be the oldest surviving perfumes, more than 4,000 years old, in a 300-square-metre workshop holding at least 60 stills. In Pompeii, the businesswoman Gavia Severa made and sold perfume for a living.
In the ninth century Al-Kindi's Book of the Chemistry of Perfume and Distillations set out more than a hundred recipes and 107 methods, and the Persian scholar Ibn Sina pioneered distilling oils from flowers, beginning with the rose, the technique still most used. After Muslim rule reached Spain in 711 and southern Italy in 827, Al-Andalus became a major producer. Florentine monks recorded recipes from 1221, around 1370 Hungarians made Hungary Water, scented oils in alcohol, for Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, and in 1693 the Italian barber Giovanni Paolo Feminis created Aqua Admirabilis, now called eau de cologne.
Modern perfumery dates from the late nineteenth century, when compounds such as vanillin and coumarin were first synthesized commercially, opening up scents natural materials could not supply. Growing flowers for their essence, begun in the fourteenth century, became a major industry in southern France, and Italy and France remain the hubs of European perfume design and trade. Strength is graded by concentration: parfum holds 15 to 30 percent aromatic compounds, eau de parfum around 15, eau de toilette around 10, and eau de cologne just 2 to 3.
Source: Perfume
