The Journey Of Love And Fragrance

The precious most jewelry a woman ever wears is invisible to the naked eye!

The everlasting journey of love comes alive with the season of love – the Valentine’s Day. Lovers around the world flock to malls, designer boutiques and exclusive showrooms in search of one of the most precious gifts to impress their lovers, wives, daughters and someone very-very special.

One of the most precious jewelries a woman can ever wear is always invisible. It is mysterious how a woman can fascinate the whole gathering in a seductive way, in which, she is the cynosure of the evening. It is never about the dress or the jewelry one is wearing that catches the eye of the beholder. It is always, the fragrance she flaunts leaving the sighs, turning of heads and the gasp of WOW! The WOW factor is all about one’s love for the right perfume to leave the style statement, individuality and love of life even after the evening is over. A perfume always leaves the effect of lingering longing just like in love. Both, perfume and love inspire to enhance desire of possession.

Perfume has been synonymous with love since ages. Perfume makers have created brands because of their love to create the best of the bests. The art of perfume making indulges in love towards creation involving the lovely flowers with intoxicating fragrance, invigorating herbs and spices, aromatic oils and of course, essential additives. An ounce of perfume bottled in tailor-made well-crafted bottles is the prize catch of the lovers and for the lovers.

This Valentine’s Day, some of the desirable perfumes from renowned perfumeries are making lovers gunning for them for respective reasons and choices. These desirable perfumes will certainly make lovers happy to seduce their partners with a dab in the right spots to go on a long journey of love. Wives will certainly be pleased by their husbands’ pick of the right perfume from the dozen of choices in various notes and sweet fragrance. Daughters will be too happy to receive perfumes this Valentine’s Season. What can one say of the very-very special someone… Your guess is as desirable and mystifying as is mine!

In our modern civilization, some of the all time favourite perfumes are hand-picked among the plethora around the world for its classical notes and popularity. The popularity of the ‘selected’ few has rose to the great heights among perfume lovers, who test and select the best among the best perfumes of the world to suit their individuality, class, taste and their style statement.

Even Romance Is Scented!

Jacques Guerlain’s Shalimar is considered to be the world’s first oriented-scented perfume, dating back to 1921. With iris, bergamot and vanilla notes, the perfume evokes unique sensuality to have become the most popular perfume in the world.

Opium by Yves Saint Laurent became popular because of its unusual branding, an intelligent ploy to create controversy with the brand name and campaign. It became a huge hit. Needless to say, the perfume stood to its name containing top notes of mandarin origin, coriander and pepper with the solid base of cedarwood and sandalwood.

Joy, Jean Patou

Jean Pataou created one of the most unique high-end fragrances by using 336 roses and 10,600 jasmine flowers in just a single ounce of perfume. It was during the Great Depression Jean Patou sold JOY to only his selected 200 valuable customers. The joy spread like wildfire around the world.

Dior’s Diorissimo!

Christian Dior’s main fragrance Diorissimo is lily of the valley with a sandalwood base and high notes of calyx. Diorissimo’s process making and ingredients had to be reformulated to meet the specified standards of the International Fragrance Association. Even after the reformulation, the perfume is still very popular among the perfume lovers.

Chanel No. 5!

Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel commissioned her master perfumer Ernest Beaux to create a unique composition to match her artistic personality. Thus Chanel No.5 was born out of love! It was the first perfume by the French couturier and launched way back in 1921. Chanel No. 5 is iconic in its stature and popularity. Jasmine, sandalwood, amber, ylang-ylang and aldehydes notes are prominent in Chanel No. 5. Among the perfumeries of the world, Chanel became one of the firsts to blend several scents into a single fragrance.

The journey of love commenced ever since the Universe came into its existence!

The world of perfume is perhaps one of the most ancient first among products created by nature. The abundance of fragrance spreads the length and the breadth of the celestial world. Flowers, tree barks, leaves, seeds, oils and animals’ aromatic flavours captured the essence of earth. How the journey to bottle up these aromatic fragrances came into existence is the brainchild of few experts. Experts, who envisioned enchanted by the fragrance all around, created their own methods to create the so-called modern term ‘Perfume or Parfum’ to bottle them to lure the elite group of the selected group.

Perfumes And History, go hand-in-hand!

No one has an exact date when perfume was first introduced in the high society. However, Tapputi was considered to be the world’s first recorded chemist, who was mentioned as the first woman to have been a perfume maker from the 2nd Millennium BC in Mesopotamia. Ancient 2nd Millennium BC cuneiform tablet has Tapputi’s name engraved as the perfume maker. She is believed to have distilled flowers, oil, calamus and other aromatics into fragrant liquid, filtered and then put them in stillness to create her perfume.

During the early 3300 BC to 1300 BC Indus Civilization, perfume and perfumery were believed to have existed in the Indian sub-continent. Hindu Ayurvedic text mentioned ‘Charaka Samhita’ and ‘Sushruta Samhita’ as the earliest distillations of ‘Ittar’. As civilisations developed to become more civilised and educated, discoveries led various ingredients assimilation to give birth to modern perfumes. However, modern perfumery only began commercially in the late 19th Century. Vanillin or cumarin were used to create fragrant perfume with unattainable aroma and pleasant scent.

As the journey of love progressed, more and more people came to unearth the secret ingredients consisted of essential oils, fixatives, solvents, flowers and other aromatic compounds. However, the secret of how various fragrant pleasant scent differs from each other and is still ‘the’ most sought after trade secret in the world of perfume in the modern world.

History reveals that the art of making perfumes first began in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. It was the Romans and Persians, who refined its branding further. During an archaeological excavation in Pyrgros, Cyprus in 2004 – 2005, archaeologists found one of the world’s oldest surviving perfumes dated back to more than 4,000 years ancient. Ever since ancient ages, perfume makers used various herbs and spices like almond, coriander, myrtle, conifer resin, flowers and bergamot to make scented perfumes.

The European Influence

During the Renaissance in Italy the art of perfumery prospered. In the 16th Century, Renato il Fiorentino, popularly known as ‘Rene – The Florentine’, the personal perfumer to Catherine de’Medici took Italian refinements to France. The period is believed to be in between 1519 to 1589. To safeguard his formulae, his laboratory was constructed with a secret passageway connecting his residence. France soon became one of the most sought after centres of perfumes and cosmetics manufacturing, courtesy Rene. At the beginning of the 14th Century, cultivation of flowers for perfume making further grew into a major industry in the South of France.

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