History of perfume

What is Perfume?

People have been using perfumes for pretty much all of recorded history. While hygiene standards have varied over the centuries (Queen Isabella of Spain, the 1400s, boasts that shed only had 2 baths in her entire life), people have always wanted to smell good. And theyve turned to perfume.

So what exactly is perfume? Have people always understood it to be scented liquids in little glass bottles, as we know it today? Well, oddly enough, some of the earliest perfumes were kept in little glass bottles. As the French say, the more things change, the more things stay the same. So lets look at perfume through the ages, and see what we find.

We see perfume now as liquids, which we can dab or mist on ourselves to give a pleasant scent. The word modern word perfume, however, comes from the Latin phrase per fumus, meaning through smoke, and that gives a hint to the origin of perfume. The earliest perfumes were the smokes given off by burning incense.

Incense and Ancient History

Incense is one of humanities oldest inventions; records of it go back to ancient Egypt, more than 3500 years ago. It was used to scent the air, and was...