Perfume & Women's Fragrances

Perfumery, the art of making perfume, began in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, before being later refined by the Romans. In fact, the earliest record of a practitioner in the art of scent-making is a woman named Tapputi, operating in the second millennium BC in Mesopotamia, who was known to combine flowers, oils, and aromatics, then filter them several times. Perfume was originally mostly used to bring fresh fragrance to rooms, and even to improve the smell of pets.

Later, a Persian chemist named Avicenna (980-1037 AD) revolutionised perfume by pioneering the use of distillation in extracting oils from flowers, a method that is still used to this day. Until this time, perfumes were mostly concocted from a mixture of crushed herbs and plants with added oil, a method that created a particularly strong scent. However, Avicenna’s experiments with the rose created a softer, more subtle fragrance, and his products quickly became very popular. Avicenna’s distillation methods influenced not only perfumery, but had far-reaching impact on Western scientific development, particularly in the field of chemistry.

The art of perfumery prospered in Renaissance Italy, a period lasting between the 13th and 16th Centuries, and a perfumer to the nobility by the name of Renato il Fiorentino exported the Italian techniques to 16th Century France, which soon took over as the heart of European perfume development. By now, perfumes had become more popular in their modern-day incarnation as a fragrance for the human body, and around this time were widely used among the wealthy to mask unpleasant body odour caused by infrequent washing. With this backing of the rich and powerful, the industry quickly thrived, and today France and Italy remain the centre points for perfume development and production in the Western world.

Today, most perfumes are the brain-children of major players in the fashion world. Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Christian Dior, and Hugo Boss, among others, have all seen their scents exploding into huge popularity around the world, often becoming better sellers than the clothes for which they were originally known. The modern celebrity-obsessed world has recently brought the glamorous influence of big names such as Britney Spears and Kylie Minogue into the fragrance market. Nowadays, even those enjoying a brief fifteen minutes of fame, for example Chanelle from Big Brother, have had their names put to their very own range of fragrances.