perfume

perfume is used for a wide variety of purposes: aesthetic, religious, culinary, and medicinal, among others. Traditionally perfumes were made from plant and animal substances and prepared in the form of waters, oils, unguents, powders, and incense. This last method of fragrancing gives us our word ‘perfume’ which means ‘to smoke through’. Most modern perfumes are alcohol-based and contain synthetic scents. While the term ‘perfume’ usually refers to fragrances in general, in the more technical language of the perfumer, a perfume must contain over 15% of fragrance oils in alcohol. Eau de parfum, eau de toilette, and cologne contain lesser amounts of fragrance oils in alcohol diluted with water.

The preferred fragrances for perfumes are by no means universal, but differ according to cultural dictates and fashions. In the sixteenth century, for example, pungent animal scents such as musk and civet were very popular. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, such animal scents were generally considered too crude, and light floral fragrances were favoured.

Perfumes were held in high esteem and widely employed in the ancient world. The wealthy would perfume not only their own bodies, but their furnishings and their favourite horses and dogs. On ancient altars perfumes were offered to the gods, while in the kitchens of antiquity the same scents — saffron, cinnamon, rose, myrrh — might be used to flavour food and wine.

With the rise of Christianity, perfumes became associated with a decadent lifestyle which catered to bodily desires rather than to spiritual necessities. Many of the early Church Fathers condemned the use of perfume as ‘a bait which draws us into sensual lusts’. While disdaining the use of perfumes, however, the Church employed metaphors of fragrance to refer to the spiritual life. Prayer, for example, was presented as a symbolic form of incense, while the Christian soul was a ‘perfumed garden’ of grace. Such metaphors acquired a certain physical reality in the phenomenon of the ‘odour of sanctity’, whereby holy persons were believed to exhale a divine fragrance.

By the end of the Middle Ages, perfumes were once again enormously popular in social life. Those who could afford it perfumed their clothes, as well as their bodies, and wore gloves and shoes made out of perfumed leather. Even jewellery might be perfumed, or else fashioned of beads of hardened perfume. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Puritans and other Protestant reformers, following the ascetic doctrines of the early Christians, denounced this indulgence in scent as contributing to an immoral lifestyle and disguising an underlying stench of sin.

Along with offering pleasing scents, perfumes had many practical uses in premodernity. Perfumes were believed to play a role both in preserving health and curing disease. Thus the ancient poet Alexis decreed that ‘the best recipe for health is to apply sweet scents unto the brain.’ The ancients employed a variety of herbal scents to treat different ailments. The fragrance of mint, for example, was thought to ease a stomach ache. Perfumes might also be applied directly to a wound to relieve inflamation and counter the ill odour of decay.

In the Middle Ages and later perfumes played a particularly important role during periods of plague. According to contemporary theories, plagues were caused by corrupt air, and transmitted from person to person through smell. The best ways to prevent such olfactory contagion were to avoid coming into contact with infectious odours and to counter the odours of disease with other pungent smells, such as perfumes and incense. The pomander — a small perforated container filled with spices and herbs and worn on the body — was meant to provide a continuous fragrant shield against disease.

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, many of the hitherto practical uses of perfume fell out of favour. As bathing became more popular, perfumes were no longer needed to mask stale body odours. The medicinal value of perfume was also questioned. Perfumes, in fact, were sometimes decried by physicians as actually leading to disease by clogging pores, or by enfeebling the mind and body through their vapours. The development of germ theory in the late 1800s largely put to rest the age-old idea of corrupt odours as agents of infection. Perfumes, consequently, were no longer considered by the medical profession to either prevent or cure disease.

The aesthetic use of perfume also declined during the same period. This was due in part to a backlash prompted by the French Revolution against the perfumed, luxurious lifestyle of the aristocracy. Furthermore, the rise of industrial capitalism encouraged the accumulation and display of tangible goods. In this culture of the concrete, the evanescent nature of perfumes made them a ‘bad buy’. Countering this materialist trend were various nineteenth-century artistic and literary movements, notably that of the Symbolists, which lauded perfumes as stimuli to the imagination.

During the nineteenth century, perfumes, which had previously been worn by both sexes, became increasingly restricted to women. The supposedly frivolous nature of perfume was deemed to make fragrance more suitable for ‘frivolous’ women than for ‘serious’ men. Sweet floral scents, in particular, were considered appropriate for women, while men, if they wore any scent at all, were offered woodsy or spicy fragrances.

In the late twentieth century a number of developments have influenced the cultural role of perfumes. The growth of ‘consumer capitalism’, with its emphasis on enjoyment, rather than mere accumulation, of goods, has led to a surge in perfume use. While perfumes are still considered primarily the domain of women, the market for men's perfumes is continually expanding. Research is also being undertaken on how the selective employment of fragrances may influence behaviour, stimulating office workers to work more effectively or shoppers to buy more products. Finally, the medicinal use of perfume has made a comeback in the contemporary practice of aromatherapy, which utilizes fragrant essential oils to treat a range of physical and psychological ailments. These trends towards increased perfume use, however, are currently being combatted by an anti-perfume movement, which argues that many people find perfumes irritating and allergenic, and agitates for an ‘odour-free’ environment.

Constance Classen

Bibliography

Classen, C.,, Howes, D.,, and and Synnott, A. (1994). Aroma: the cultural history of smell. Routledge, London.