Perfume is a blend of essential oils, fixatives, and aromatics. Share your love for smell with the world. This information is taken from Wikipedia’s definition of smell, but we wanted to take the definition a little further. Most people think they know what smell is, but they don’t realize how much it takes to create a great scented perfume. Learn more about fragrance below. Stay tuned.
It is generally a blend of essential oils, absolutes, and/or aroma compounds, fixatives, and solvents. The word Fragrance comes from the Latin perfume, which means through the smoke. Fragrances were often made with a base of animal fat or plant oils.
The most common raw materials for perfumes include:
- More than 300 ingredients are used in perfumes.
- Popular materials include flowers, wood, spices, resin, and ambergris.
- Modern Fragrances usually consist of a mixture of synthetics and naturals.
To say that a Fragrance contains essential oils means that the fragrance has aromatic compounds obtained from raw materials through distillation or expression which have not undergone chemical modification or synthesis during the extraction process.
The most common natural ingredients in perfumes are:
Perfume is a mixture of fragrant essential oils and aroma compounds, fixatives, and solvents (carrier materials) used to give the human body, animals, food, objects, and living space a pleasant scent.
- Essential oils are distilled from plants like roses, jasmine, and lavender.
- Absolutes, which are highly concentrated essential oils (they smell like the plant they come from but are more intense).
- Aroma compounds such as vanilla or sandalwood.
- Fixatives (or bases) such as oakmoss and vetivert.
- Solvents such as alcohol.
Perfume has been used since ancient times. The earliest attested references to smell have been found in Mesopotamian texts from the second millennium BC such as the Sumerian poem “The Royal Bath” in which the great goddess Ninhursag is described sprinkling incense and aromatic plants on the goddess Ishtar, who then appears “as a sweet smell” (“a goodly fragrance like the gods”).
History of perfume used by women in ancient Greece
In ancient Greece, women wore a myrrh-based smell in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. Fragrances have been known in China since ancient times; These were made with flowers boiled with starch grains. The Chinese word for is 香 (“xiāng”), which can be translated as “perfume” in English.
Fragrances have been used by many civilizations throughout history, including ancient Egyptian culture, the Persian Empire (Persia), the Indian subcontinent, and the Arabian Peninsula.
The earliest smell was made from incense, fragrant tree and flower, musk, or animal smell and was intended to be used as incense or as a persona smell.
Do not use perfume in religious ceremonies
Priests and priestesses used it during religious ceremonies in ancient Egypt and Greece. They were also used by the Romans and Greeks to ward off bad odors and body odors. The Romans also used Fragranceto cover the smell of animals in stables.
In medieval Europe, perfumes were mainly made at home by mixing fat-based substances like oils or waxes with herbs, flowers, spices, and other natural ingredients. In the 17th century, French chemist René-Maurice Gattefossé developed a formula for a smell called Eau Thermale de Villedomaine, which was later renamed EO de Colon due to its popularity among German soldiers stationed in Cologne during World War II.
The oldest known of the essential oils
Aromatic oils were used in ancient Sumer, where the gods were known to wear perfume. The Egyptians used it for hygiene and religious ceremonies as well as for pleasure. Its production was expensive and ingredients were rare and expensive.
Aromatic compounds were mixed into base ingredients such as animal fats, vegetable oils, and resins. They were were kept in special containers called alabastron which was shaped like cornucopia (lots of horns) or eggs.
In 1827 the chemist Augustine-Jean Fresnel created the first modern smell. He mixes lemon oil with alcohol and water to create a smell that could be sprayed on clothing or hair.
Conclusion
In the 19th century, chemists learned how to make it. These scents are cheaper than natural ones and could be made in any color or shape. They had the ability to stay longer than natural oils because they would not evaporate so quickly. More
