by Mandy Aftel
Queen Elizabeth’s perfumed gloves
René opened the first perfume shop in Paris, probably the first in France. Soon everyone who was anyone flocked there. On the ground floor he sold perfumes, unguents, and cosmetics to the public, but a select few were invited into the chambers above, where René kept alive the alchemical legacy of his profession.
In the shop, which was large and deep, there were two doors, each leading to a staircase. Both led to a room on the first floor, which was divided by a tapestry suspended in the centre, in the back portion of which was a door leading to a secret staircase. Another door opened to a small chamber, lighted from the roof, which contained a large stove, alembics, retorts, and crucibles; it was an alchemist’s laboratory.
In the front portion of the room on the first floor were ibises of Egypt; mummies with gilded bands; the crocodile yawning from the ceiling; death’s heads with eyeless sockets and gumless teeth, and here old musty volumes, torn and rateaten, were presented to the eye of the visitor in pell-mell confusion. Behind the curtain were phials, singularly-shaped boxes and vases of curious construction; all lighted up by two silver lamps which, supplied with perfumed oil, cast their yellow flame around the somber vault, to which each was suspended by three blackened chains.
It was said of Anne of Austria that with fair linen and perfumes one could entice her to Hades. Known for her beautiful hands, Anne was another glove fanatic. She sent to Naples for them, though she is credited with saying that the perfect glove is made of leather prepared in Spain, cut in France, and finished in England. Gloves of mouse skin were fashionable at her court as well. It was Anne’s son Louis XIV who granted a charter to the guild of gantiers-parfumeurs in 1656.
Shop of René the perfumer
In the meantime, perfumers were rapidly acquiring a varied palette of natural ingredients and the sophistication to use them imaginatively. Benzoin, cedarwood, costus root, rose, rosemary, sage, juniperwood, frankincense, and cinnamon had been in use since ancient times. Between 1500 and 1540, angelica, anise, cardamom, fennel, caraway, lovage, mace, nutmeg, celery, sandalwood, juniper berries, and black pepper were added to the aromatic repertoire of distilled oils. The years between 1540 and 1589 saw the addition of basil, melissa, thyme, citrus, coriander, dill, oregano, marjoram, galbanum, guaiacwood, chamomile, spearmint, labdanum, lavender, lemon, mint, carrot seed, feverfew, cumin, myrrh, cloves, opoponax, parsley, orange peel, iris, wormwood, and saffron. Drawing upon this burgeoning assortment, in 1725 Johann Farina of Cologne introduced his famous Eau de Cologne, which was based on a mixture of citrus and herbal odors. By 1730 peppermint, ginger, mustard, cypress, bergamot, mugwort, neroli, and bitter almond had further increased the range of possibilities for the perfumer.
Although distillation could be used on roses, the fragrances of other flowers, such as jasmine, tuberose, and orange flower, eluded that method. They were not coaxed into surrendering their scents until the nineteenth century, when the Frenchman Jacques Passy, inspired by the observation that jasmine, tuberose, and orange flower continue to produce perfume after they have been cut, developed the technique of enfleurage, in which flower petals render their fragrance into a fatty pomade, from which a powerfully scented oil can be derived. Gradually the technique was applied to other florals.
Enfleurage frames
Catherine de Medici had encouraged the development of a perfume industry in France, and in her time Grasse, in southeastern France, had emerged as its center. The climate and soil of the surrounding region proved hospitable to orange trees, acacia, roses, and jasmine. Over time, distillation plants and other facilities for processing perfume materials grew up there; some of them are still operating today.
In tandem with these developments, a retail perfume business was gradually emerging in Europe’s larger cities. In early-eighteenth-century London, a Mr. Perry combined the sale of medicines with that of perfume and cosmetics, along the lines of a modern drugstore; one of the products he advertised was an oil of mustard seed that was guaranteed to cure every disease under the sun. In the 1730s, William Bayley set up a shop selling perfumes under the sign of YE OLDE CIVET CAT—a popular appellation for London perfumeries—where he was patronized by men and women of fashion. But the first true celebrity perfumer was Charles Lillie24, whose shop in London’s Strand was a meeting place for the literary and the fashionable. He counted among his friends Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Alexander Pope. Both Addison and Steele praised him copiously in print, and Steele went so far as to suggest that he “used the force of magical powers to add value to his wares.”
Lillie was a crusader for standards in the perfume business, and in his book The British Perfumer he set out to educate the public on how to evaluate scented goods, in terms that seem oddly prescient:
As numbers of those who keep shops, and style themselves Perfumers, as well as most buyers, are entirely ignorant, the former of the nature of what they sell, and the latter of what they purchase; it may not, perhaps, be thought amiss, at some time, to make them public … Though this account of numbers of the present pretenders to the perfuming trade may seem to bear hard on them; yet, for the sake of rescuing so curious an art from entire oblivion, and from the hand of ignorance; also for the information of the public, and lastly for the sake of truth; some work of this nature is become absolutely necessary: more particularly, as, without it, the present race of pretenders may continue to sell what they please, under whatever names they please, without having the least regard (as is notoriously the case) to its being genuine, if simple; or, properly prepared, if a compound substance … Another design in the construction of this work, was to inform the real Perfumer (for the pretenders are above being taught) how, where, and at what seasons, he may purchase his several commodities; how to judge their goodness; and how to preserve them against accidents or untoward circumstances, which bring on either a partial or total dissolution, and by which the best perfumes are converted into the most nauseous and fetid odors.
Lillie’s was an early entry in what became a burgeoning genre of “how-to” perfume literature, reaching its apex in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Along with formulas for perfumes, these volumes include discourses on flower farming, ancient cultures and their rituals, recipes for hair dyes (often containing lead), remedies for ailments of man and beast (including opiates), and ruminations on society and woman’s place therein. The discourses are charming and odd, and the books are illustrated with lovely woodcuts depicting botanicals and extraction devices. But the perfume information itself is repeated almost verbatim from book to book, with only a small increment of new material, and the formulas themselves are generic; there is no sense in them of a creator’s unique signature.
The recipes these books contain fall into two categories: those for handkerchief perfumes and those for simulating the scents of certain flowers that resisted distillation, enfleurage, or any other means of rendering then available. The latter were considered the essence of how a refined woman should smell. The formulas worked on the premise of like with like, combining a few intense and similarly scented florals to arrive at a single, sweet floral note, with perhaps a bit of vanilla for additional sweetness, and sometimes a drop of civet, ambergris, or musk for staying power. The standard repertoire included lily of the valley, white lilac, magnolia, narcissus, honeysuckle, heliotrope, sweet pea, and violet. For example, the scent of lily of the valley could be approximated with a mixture of orange flower, vanilla, rose, cassie, jasmine, tuberose, and bitter almond. Eugene Rimmel hails the manufacture of such concoctions as “the truly artistic part25 of perfumery, for it is done by studying the resemblances and affinities, and blending the shades of scent as a painter does the colors on his palette.” But in truth they exploited none of the range of contrast and intensity offered by the essential oils then available.
Perfumer’s shop, seventeenth century
The blending of mixtures for scenting handkerchiefs was also conside
red a high art. Again, each of the collections repeats recipes for Alhambra Perfume, Bouquet d’Amour, Esterhazy Bouquet, Ess Bouquet, Eau de Cologne, Jockey Club, Stolen Kisses, Eau de Millefleurs, International Bouquet of All Nations, and Rondeletia. They usually sound more interesting than they smell. Like the floral imitations, most of them are heavy floral mixtures fixed with civet, musk, or ambergris. A few venture a little further afield. Esterhazy includes vetiver and sandalwood; the colognes feature citruses as well as rosemary. True to its name, International Bouquet blends rose from Turkey, jasmine from Africa, lemon from Sardinia, vanilla from South America, lavender from England, and tuberose from France. Millefleurs includes everything but the kitchen sink. Rondeletia—a mixture of lavender and cloves—was considered a daring innovation. But even these rareties were composed of materials that are essentially similar in tone and value, in keeping with the composition principles enforced by the perfume guides:
It may be useful26 … to warn the amateur operator against the promiscuous mingling of different scents in a single preparation, under the idea that, by bringing an increased number of agreeable perfumes together, the odor of the resulting compound will be richer. Some odors, like musical sounds, harmonize when blended, producing a compound odor combining the fragrance of each of its constituents, and fuller and richer, or more chaste and delicate, than either of them separately; whilst others appear mutually antagonistic or incompatible, and produce a contrary effect.
So while each perfume vendor peddled his own Rondeletia or Eau de Cologne from his shop or cart, they all stayed within an extremely limited range. It was like being a painter and using only a quarter of the color wheel.
The striking exception was Peau d’Espagne (Spanish skin), a highly complex and luxurious perfume originally used to scent leather in the sixteenth century. Chamois was steeped in neroli, rose, sandalwood, lavender, verbena, bergamot, cloves, and cinnamon, and subsequently smeared with civet and musk. Bits of the leather were used to perfume stationery and clothing. It was a favorite of the sensuous because of the musk and civet, and also because of the leather itself, which may have stirred ancestral memories of the sexual stimulus of skin odor. (Perhaps this explains the passions of old book collectors and shoe freaks as well as leather fetishists.)
By 1910 Peau d’Espagne was being made as a perfume, by adding vanilla, tonka, styrax, geranium, and cedarwood to the original formula used to scent leather. Peter Altenberg, one of the Vienna Coffeehouse Wits and the embodiment of the turn-of-the-century bohemian, recalls:
As a child27 I found in a drawer in my beloved, wonderfully beautiful mother’s writing table, which was made of mahogany and cut glass, an empty little bottle that still retained the strong fragrance of a certain perfume that was unknown to me.
I often used to sneak in and sniff it.
I associated this perfume with every love, tenderness, friendship, longing, and sadness there is.
But everything related to my mother. Later on, fate overtook us like an unexpected horde of Huns and rained heavy blows down on us.
And one day I dragged from perfumery to perfumery, hoping by means of tiny sample vials of the perfume from the writing table of my beloved deceased mother to discover its name. And at long last I did: Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, Paris.
I then recalled the times when my mother was the only womanly being who could bring me joy and sorrow, longing and despair, but who time and again forgave me everything, and who always looked after me, and perhaps even secretly in the evening before going to bed prayed for my future happiness …
Later on, many young women on childish-sweet whims used to send me their favorite perfumes and thanked me warmly for the prescription I discovered of rubbing every perfume directly onto the naked skin of the entire body right after a bath so that it would work like a true personal skin cleansing! But all these perfumes were like the fragrances of lovely but poisonous exotic flowers. Only Essence Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, Paris, brought me melancholic joys although my mother was no longer alive and could no longer pardon my sins!
Peau d’Espagne (sans leather) continued to be made as a perfume and lost none of its sensuous appeal over the decades, but it was an exception to a generally tame and uninspired approach to perfume. I gave up on using the formulas spelled out in the literature of the period after I turned to them in the process of designing a fragrance for a shop that had asked me to come up with something light, floral, and sweet. Each of the imitation floral blends I tried had the same problems. The overpowering odor of bitter almond made them smell cloying and dated. More important, the perfumes had no real construction; they were just a mishmash of florals that cost a fortune, with some animal scents thrown in as fixatives. They were unimaginative and clichéd and unusable.
It is not in the recipes per se that the spirit of the alchemist lived on, but in the information these old books offer on the history of perfume, their commentaries on the nature of the ingredients, and the occasional imaginative suggestion for combining them. But it was not until the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth that perfume composition began to take on the attitudes, creativity, and license of a true art form. “Modern perfume28 came into being in Paris between 1889 and 1921,” writes the perfume researcher and writer Stephan Jellinek. “In these thirty-two years, perfumery changed more than it had during the four thousand years before.”
Perfumers began to roam far beyond their timid beginnings in Rondeletia and Eau de Cologne to create scents that were conceived not as copies of scents found in nature but as beautiful in themselves. No longer shackled to the traditional recipes, perfumers were free to use their materials as liberally as an artist works with color, or a musician with tone. “It was, for the first time29 in history, an aesthetic based on contrast rather than harmony,” Jellinek writes. “Pungent herbal and dry woody notes were used alongside the soft and narcotic scents of subtropical flowers, the cool freshness of citrus fruits offset the languorous warmth of balsams and vanilla, the innocence of spring flowers was paired with the seduction of musk and civet. A sense of harmony was, of course, maintained in all this, but it was a harmony of a higher, more complex order. The sophisticated harmony of artistic creation had replaced the simple harmony of Nature.”
This period of creative ferment coincided with—and was, to a degree, spurred on by—the introduction of synthetically formulated perfume ingredients. Coumarin, which was designed to replicate the smell of freshly mowed hay, appeared around 1870. It was derived from tonka beans, but it was a quarter the price of essence of tonka itself, inexhaustible, and therefore independent of market fluctuations. Vanillin, to imitate vanilla, followed next, and had what was seen as the great virtue of colorlessness. These cheaper chemicals were offered by the same suppliers who sold natural ingredients, but they were only too happy to avail themselves of consistent quality and steady supply.
Jicky by Guerlain was the first modern perfume. Created in 1889, it was a fougère, or fern fragrance, based on coumarin. It also included linalool (naturally occurring in bois de rose) and vanillin (naturally occurring in vanilla). To this synthetic cocktail were added lemon, bergamot, lavender, mint, verbena, and sweet marjoram, plus civet as a fixative. It was a significant departure from the perfumes that preceded it: Jicky had nothing to do with replicating the smells found in nature. It was also a great success, its popularity building over the next twenty years as women became more venturesome in their perfume choices.
Bundle of vanilla
The perfume community was initially cautious about employing the cheap new synthetics. Perfumers were well aware of the depth and beauty of the naturals, and at first used the synthetics only to amplify or modulate them. As late as 1923, a guide cautioned, “Artificial perfumes obviously present30 great resources to the manufacturers of cheap extracts, but in the manufacture of fine perfumes they can only serve as adjuncts to natural perfumes, either to vary the ‘shade’ or ‘note’ of the odors, or to
increase … intensity.” But by then the perfume industry, lured by the cheapness, stability, and colorlessness, had largely abandoned its reservations and embraced the synthetics wholeheartedly.
The shift can be traced31 in the twice yearly reports, from 1887 to 1915, of Schimmel and Co. (later renamed Fritzsche Brothers), which was one of the major suppliers of essential oils at the turn of the century. At first they chart the fluctuations in the supply of natural ingredients, as territories are colonized and recolonized, and their resources and labor exploited to provide materials of better quality at competitive prices. But gradually, more and more of the catalog pages are devoted to the wonders of synthetic ingredients, described in copy that increasingly hypes the virtues of the new. An 1895 report introduces Schimmel’s first synthetic jasmine; by 1898 the catalog notes, “The demand for this specialty has gradually increased as to induce us to extend our arrangements for its manufacture on a larger scale. At the same time we are able to offer it at a considerably reduced price, in place of the extracts made from jassamine pomatum.” Three years later, the catalog vaunts the superiority of the synthetic version: “The natural extracts from flowers excel in delicacy of aroma, the artificial products being stronger, more lasting, and cheaper.” And a year later, “The use of this perfume, which we were the first to introduce into commerce, has become more and more general. It may now already be counted among the most important auxiliaries of the perfume trade, and it has recently also been improved to such an extent, that in quality it so nearly approaches the natural product, that, in dilution, the one can scarcely be distinguished from the other.”
