Perfumes, Past And Present

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31548, 9 December 1967, Page 2

Perfumes, Past And Present

Perfumes are finding their way more and more into our lives. Where once women would scent hankies with a bag of lavender, we now have scented tissues. We have scented shampoos, soaps, even letter paper can be

scented Perfumes can come from flowers, from leaves, and from stems. We get exotic sweet smelling oils from trees, and from bark, and even roots. Seeds are used to give that desired touch, and fruits. In the early Egyptian temples incense was burnt and the kings of Israel were anointed with pleasant smelling oils. Today not only gods and kings enjoy perfumes. But the years involved in perfecting some perfumes, made up of ingredients from many exotic lands, keep them a luxury.

Then the first toilet water or citrus fruit oils and alcohol was produced by an Italian in Cologne, Germany. The first Frenchman to set up shop selling “eau-de-Cologne” in Paris did so in 1789.

In the twentieth-century perfume manufacture there is a blending of natural products from animal sources such as musk and civet, and vegetable sources in the form of essential oils and pommander, with aromatic products (both chemically made synthetics and by-products from oil and coal, etc). Isolates, fixatives and alcohol are also used in a complicated processing which requires a maturing time, as with the production of a good wine. The trend today is more towards abstract perfumes than the exact replica of the scent of a growing flower.—(Central Press features).