A SUBTLE ART

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23883, 10 August 1939, Page 18

A SUBTLE ART

PERFUMED PERSONALITY A women passes in the street and leaves a little trail of scent upon the air—a fleeting trace of perfume and she has gone. But we are left with the impression of a complete personality mysterious, elegant, feminine. This strange magic has worked, again' (states an exchange). For perfume is one of the oldest and most powerful enchantments in the world, at once primitive and subtle There is a whole history of perfume waiting to be written, from the ancient Eastern spices, the pomanders and scented gloves of the Renaissance the hair powders and strong musk scents of the eighteenth century, the macassar oil and patchouli and eau de Chypre of Victorian times to all the thousand and one perfumes of to-day They come to us mostly from France these scents; for French worner- take the whole question of perfume very seriously: they use it more often butwith greater discretion than English people do—it is always applied directly to the skin and never soused on to a pocket handkerchief They use it about their homes as well as about their persons. With them scent is never just an extraneous aid to the party spirit—something to be slapped on at the last moment like a diamond clip or a bunch of violets. With them their perfume is their personality In France too. are the factories ot most of the big perfumers where are gathered together all those strange raw materials that form the basic ingredients of a hundred different perfumes—civet and ambergris, sandalwood and orris root and fine oils and spices and tuberoses and jasmine flowers and millions and millions ->f roses! They grow the roses down in the south, in the country round Grasse—fields and fields of them, making the air heavy and breathless with all this concentrated perfume—little low-grow-ing magenta-coloured Provencal roses, not queens of the rose garden but whflt 3 scent, You cannot buy them for nothing, these good French perfumes, but a little goes a very long way, and it's worth making some effort to achieve that faint, elusive hint of scent that follows like a fragrant ghost wherever you go—your accent, your personality!