Whether it’s for a special occasion or everyday wear, perfume is a personal accessory with the power to make you feel confident and evoke beautiful memories. Like quality jeans or designer sneakers, it’s one of the small pleasures in life worth spending a little extra on.
A perfume is a mixture of fragrant essential oils or aroma compounds, fixatives and solvents in liquid form used to give the human body, animals, food, objects, living-spaces and other materials a pleasant and agreeable scent. Perfumes are available in a wide range of bottle sizes, fragrance concentrations and prices. Some are derived from natural ingredients, while others are synthetically produced in labs.
There are five main perfume families: Floral, Oriental, Woody, Fresh and Aromatic Fougere. In each family, there are subgroups based on specific odours. For example, the classic Chanel No. 5 falls under the Floral group, while Hermes Rouge, an Oriental chypre, is in the Oriental family.
The scent of a perfume is released when it’s rubbed on the skin. The scent may linger for eight to twelve hours.
Perfumes are formulated using extracts and essences from various raw materials, including spices, flowers and woods, which can be extracted by maceration (a process of steeping or boiling plant material in oil) or distillation. These extracts and essences are then diluted in alcohol. The resulting perfume may be referred to as an eau de parfum, eau de toilette or eau de cologne.
Various additives such as colorants, preservatives and stabilisers are sometimes included in perfumes to enhance their appearance, improve their longevity and provide them with more stability. Animal substances such as castor bean from beavers; musk from male oxen or ambergris from the bladder of sperm whales are also often used to add intensity and character to perfumes.