Perfume is a mixture of fragrant essential oils or aroma compounds, fixatives, and solvents in liquid form that give the human body, animals, food, objects, and living-spaces a pleasant and agreeable odor. It is used to impart a distinctive scent or to cover up unpleasant odors, such as sweat or fecal matter. The perfume industry employs many skilled craftsmen, including fragrance artists who blend various components to create a signature fragrance for a brand or individual.
Fragrance experts use a musical metaphor when classifying a perfume’s olfactory quality: the first impression of a perfume is likened to the initial notes of an aria, the middle note to the heart of the aria, and the final olfactory effect to the orchestration. The perfumer’s composition is based on a series of accords. The word “accord” is derived from the French for “song.”
The raw materials used in perfumes are either natural products, of plant or animal origin, or synthetic chemicals. Traditionally, perfumes were made with extracts from flowers, grasses, spices, fruit, seeds, woods, barks, roots, balsams, resins, and animal secretions such as ambergris or musk. Extractions are typically obtained by distillation of the plant material or, for delicate materials such as flower oils, through a process called enfleurage in which the petals are laid between layers of purified animal fat that become saturated with the oil and the resulting substance is dissolved in alcohol to obtain an absolute.
In the past, wearing a perfume was ungendered and men and women alike wore perfume. However, the rise of germ theory in the mid-nineteenth century led to a demise for perfume and its associated social standing, with odor-neutralizing soaps and deodorants becoming the new norm. Perfume use also became gender stereotyped, with sweet floral blends deemed feminine and sharper, woody and pine scents deemed masculine.