Tag Archives: perfumes

Plants and Herbs, Series: Ancient Roman Studies, Series: Perfumes and Aromas

Smelling of Roses in Ancient Rome

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By Laurence Totelin as part of the perfume series

The Roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1888. Source: Wikimedia

The painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) had a knack for depicting the — sometimes imaginary — luxurious excesses of the Romans. In The Roses of Heliogabalus, he represented a banquet hosted by the emperor Elagabalus (218-222 CE). Vast amounts of delicate rose petals are drifting onto the banqueters, some of whom appear to be asleep, perhaps after drinking too much. Look more carefully, however, and you will note that some are inert but have their eyes wide open — they are dead, suffocated under the oppressive roses.

Alma-Tadema’s inspiration for his painting was a story preserved in a collection of emperors’ biographies called the Historia Augusta (21.5). There, the emperor is said to have smothered his guests with violets and other flowers — no roses then — released from a reversible ceiling. The guests were unable to crawl from under the roses and died; it is unclear whether the emperor had intended for this to happen. If the story is true, Elagabalus might have emulated another infamous Roman emperor, Nero (54-68 CE), who also had a reversible ceiling in his palace, which opened up to scatter flowers and spray perfume (Suetonius, Nero 31).

It would be impossible to count the flowers on Alma-Tadema’s canvas, but one would guess that they are in their thousands. Imagine a heap of a thousand fresh roses. Imagine their scent.

One thousand roses is the exact number we find mentionned in a second-century letter from Roman Egypt preserved on papyrus. Apollonios and Serapias write to Dionysia to apologise for having sent only a thousand roses for the wedding ceremony of Dionysia’s son, Serapion:

There are not yet many roses here — rather a shortage — and from all the farms and all the garland makers we had difficulty in putting together the thousand which we sent you via Sarapas, even by picking the ones which should have been picked tomorrow. We had as many narcissi as you wanted so we sent you four thousand instead of the two thousand you ordered (P. Oxy. 3313; translation John Muir)*

Cupids hanging rose garlands. Roman Fresco, end of the first century CE. Getty Centre. Source: wikimedia.

One thousand roses is also the number we find in the first-century pharmacologist Dioscorides’ recipe for rose perfume (Materia Medica 1.43). The recipe is long and complex and involves several stages. What is clear, however, is that the petals of ‘1000 unmoistened roses’ are left to steep overnight in 20 litrai 5 oungiai of olive oil (approximately 6.7 kg — equivalence between ancient and modern weights and measures is difficult to establish). The petals are then squeezed out, and the same amount of fresh petals can be added to the oil. Dioscorides notes that “the oil accepts the addition of rose petals up to the seventh insertion and no more.”

Imagine then that oil into which the petals of no less than 7000 fresh roses have been inserted. The head spins. Imagine too the feeling of that perfume on your skin. The thick oiliness of it. Let me tell you a secret: I feel queasy at the very thought of it. I can’t quite fathom the work involved in picking this extraordinary amount of thorny flowers, in detaching the petals without bruising them too much, in squeezing them out by hand. Yet that work was carried out, and in antiquity, it was probably carried out by enslaved people. Roses can be oppressive in more senses than one!

Muir, John. 2009. Life and Letters in the Ancient Greek World, London and New York: Routledge.

 

 

18th Century, Animals, Series: Perfumes and Aromas, Trade

The civet trade in eighteenth-century London

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By Kirsten James as part of the perfume series

Arthur Rothwell, Arthur Rothwell, per-fumer, at the Civet-cat and Rose […] (London, c.1790).

Civet was an indispensable ingredient for early modern perfumery. This yellow, musky-smelling liquid from the perineal glands of carnivorous civet animals (Viverra civetta) was used in a bewildering range of recipes. Given its perceived potency, it was almost always diluted with other animal or floral ingredients. The importance and widespread use of the ingredient prompted natural philosophers to investigate its source. The French surgeon Sauveur François Morand (1697–1773) studied the “sac and the perfume of the civet” at the start of the eighteenth century, and was surprised to discover that the animal possessed “a particular organ containing all parts of a cassolette” – in other words, a device akin to a man-made vase for burning perfumes. This organ, Morand insisted, included a natural sponge preventing its singular perfume leaking.

For London perfumers, the ingredient was so central to their trade that they familiarized the capital’s inhabitants and visitors with the creature that produced it. The scarce surviving evidence of how perfumers advertised suggests that the image of the civet animal became among the most widely used for trade cards and shops signs – at least seven eighteenth-century examples can be identified, and there were undoubtedly many more. Even while the actual use of the ingredient declined in importance over the century, such advertising ensured that the civet’s image became and long remained synonymous with the perfumer. In the semiotic context of the city, the diminutive animal both signified the availability of perfume and evoked the exotic and erotic.

Just as the image of the civet became commonplace, the actual animal became a curious feature of the eighteenth-century city because the global trade in civet was accompanied by a trade in civets. Civet farmers in western European cities imported the animals and attempted to recreate their warm native climes, hopeful that breeding them and establishing a secure source of civet would prove lucrative. Nativizing this exotic creature also provided a means to eliminate reliance on unscrupulous foreign merchants.

Among those who hoped to profit was Daniel Defoe. Later famous for his political and literary writings, in the late seventeenth century Defoe was above all known in his neighbourhood of Newington as a general merchant. The son of a tallow chandler and member of the butchers’ guild, Defoe had an eye for novel lines of business. In 1692, he purchased a local civet farm, including a civet-house and seventy civets, for £852 15s. He kept his civets in cages in rooms heated by fires to prevent their “degeneration” through emulating their natural habitats. To increase and improve their production of civet, they were beaten and teased, fed sheep’s heads, rice, milk and egg whites. Unfortunately for the already indebted Defoe, the farm seems to have worsened rather than improved his finances. Six months later, it was seized and appraised at just £439 7s, barely half what he had paid for it. The sale of his civets – their number already depleted – and a “considerable amount of civet” was advertised two years later.

The subsequent fate of Defoe’s farm remains unknown, but such ventures seem to have yielded poor results because civets failed to acclimatize to cages and artificially heated rooms, and their number therefore probably declined over the eighteenth century. If farms became scarcer, more individuals owned a small number of civets. Records show that, until the early nineteenth century, individual perfumers continued to import, breed and farm civets in England. For instance, various examples document perfumers importing single animals from the East Indies, sometimes directly and at other times from farms in Europe. Most revealingly of all, some perfumers kept the animals in their shops: for instance, in the early decades of the century, one Mr Lloyd kept civets in his shop in Gracechurch Street; toward the end of the century, a newspaper notice informed readers that Mr Davidson’s civet had died in his Fleet Street perfume shop.

Owning civets served several purposes. It eliminated the need to buy the ingredient from merchants, thereby simplifying supple chains, improving profits and enabling perfumers to determine the quality of their product through regulating their animal’s diet. Customers could henceforth be offered guarantees of quality, legitimized by the animal’s presence. In this last respect, owning civets also provided a marketing tool that smacked of authenticity and increased footfall. Civets were, as the perfumer Charles Lillie observed, a source of “genuine civet” but also of “pleasure and amusement.” Paradoxically, by the end of the eighteenth century civet was therefore simultaneously exotic and homegrown. Although its exoticness was previously celebrated, now, in an age of sharpened national sentiment, London perfumers preferred “true English civet” whose purity and freshness could be guaranteed.

British Studies, Modern, Series: Newspapers and Advertisements, Series: Perfumes and Aromas, Series: Politics and Propaganda, Series: Wartime Recipes, Trade

Winning the War with Eau de Cologne

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By Jess Clark as part of the Perfumes Series

In August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. As many historians compellingly argue, the Great War was a point of major military, political, and socio-cultural disruption. This extended to commercial relationships between Britain and Germany, as firms suddenly found themselves at odds with time-honored partners. In Britain, for example, German products—and nationals—were subject to boycotts or outright violence as British consumers conveyed their national loyalties via their shopping preferences.

Fig. 1: Bottle of Johann Maria Farina’s Eau de Cologne. Public domain image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.
Fig. 1: Bottle of Johann Maria Farina’s Eau de Cologne. Public domain image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.

The expression of patriotism through shopping extended to the purchase of eau de Cologne, one of Britain’s most popular commercial scents leading into the First World War. While its origins are contested, the scent is often attributed to Johann Maria Farina (1685-1766), a Cologne-based perfumer of Italian descent who (allegedly) first developed eau de Cologne in 1709.[i] The exact recipe remained a secret, but the perfume typically included a blend of bergamot, neroli, citrus, and other essential oils. For two hundred years, the Farina family firm dominated its production, with customers flocking from around Europe to purchase the authentic German good. This extended to Britain, where shoppers could purchase original Farina eau de Cologne from local firms like Floris [Fig. 2].

Fig. 2: Order from London perfumer Floris to Johann Maria Farina, Cologne, 1887. Image courtesy of Farina Archive and WikiMedia Commons.
Fig. 2: Order from London perfumer Floris to Johann Maria Farina, Cologne, 1887. Image courtesy of Farina Archive and WikiMedia Commons.

However, the scent came under scrutiny with the onset of war, given its associations with luxury, not to mention its “enemy” origins. Britain’s perfumery firms suddenly found themselves in the difficult position of offering a “luxury” to a market that was increasingly rejecting such items. The British industry endured, however, and for the most part did not suffer during the war, despite the halt in trade with Germany and its allies. In fact, reflecting on the trade’s performance in 1915, the Perfumery and Essential Oil Record estimated that, as long as the government’s “campaign against ‘luxuries’” did not go too far, the essential oil and perfumery business could continue to be “fair” in spite of global conflict.[ii] 

Fig. 3: Wartime advertisement for Gosnell’s Society Eau de Cologne. Courtesy of John Gosnell & Co. Ltd., Lewes.
Fig. 3: Advertisement for Gosnell’s Society Eau de Cologne. Courtesy of John Gosnell & Co. Ltd., Lewes.

This success also depended on ongoing promotional efforts to maintain consumer interest in British-made perfumes, including eau de Cologne. Domestic perfumery firms manufactured “British” alternatives to the German scent, with national connections becoming a key selling point in wartime marketing. For example, London-based firm John Gosnell & Co. advertised their eau de Cologne and “Real Old English Lavender Water,” two “very delightful British perfumes,” as “refreshing and welcome gifts to the wounded and other invalids.”[iii] Boots Chemists proclaimed that British-made eau de Cologne “entirely supersed[ed] any German Eau-de-Cologne.” Meanwhile, famed firm Yardley proclaimed that their eau de Cologne was not, in fact, German but French, a seemingly acceptable alternative.[iv] In this way, perfumed purchases were yet another means to demonstrate alignment with a national wartime effort—by smelling of “pure” British smells that derived from “pure” British and allied sources.

Not only did British advertisements emphasize the domestic origins of their eau de Cologne, but they also suggested a broad range of uses that made the good a necessity rather than a luxury. Promotions for Luce’s “Original Jersey Eau-de-Cologne” suggested using it as “a mouth wash after using tooth powder,” a hair rinse, a carpet deodorizer, and a means of scenting the sick room.[v] Other firms extended eau de Cologne’s usefulness beyond the British home to the Front. Leicestershire-based Zenobia Ltd. argued that “[n]o other perfume” offered “an ever welcome ‘Comfort’ for wounded Soldiers & Sailors.” In the context of war, perfumes purportedly had value, serving all-purpose functions in “reviving, cooling, and refreshing.”[vi]

Throughout the trade disruptions and nationalist marketing campaigns, one thing seems to have remained constant: the recipe for individual firms’ eau de Cologne. While firms advertised their use of English or French ingredients, there was no mention of changing the formulation of the scent. This suggests that, despite the disruptions of war and attempts to signal British loyalties, consumers still smelled of the original recipes for eau de Cologne. In this way, longstanding olfactory trends prevailed, as British consumers sought out new ways to smell of time-honored scents.

 

[i] Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (London: Oxford, 2017), 97.     

[ii] “Commercial and Legislative Features of 1915,” The Perfumery & Essential Oil Record Year Book and Diary 1916 (London: G. Street & Co., Ltd., 1916),v.

[iii] 20 December 1914, John Gosnell & Co. Ltd., Lewes, East Sussex. 

[iv] See “Gifts for the PeaceTide,” The Graphic 98, no. 2559 (14 December 1918): 38.

[v] “The Uses of Luce’s,” The Illustrated London News 149, no. 4051 (9 December 1916): 713.

[vi] Advertisement, The Illustrated London News 145, no. 3939 (17 October 1914): 560.               

19th Century History, Plants and Herbs, Series: Chemicals, Series: Perfumes and Aromas

A rose is a rose is a rose… but how does it smell?

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By Galina Shyndriayeva as part of the Perfume Series

Questions of words and the meanings they convey are critical for poetry and literature, but they are just as important in the poetry of the senses. While chemical knowledge seems to have little to do with poetic concerns, European chemistry at the turn of the twentieth century, around the time of Gertrude Stein’s famous pronunciation that “a rose is a rose is a rose”, called into question what a rose really was.

The preoccupation of many organic chemists at the time was to analyze and identify discrete compounds which were responsible for a specific function in the organic matter, such as providing the sensation of a grassy scent. For example, lavender essential oil was analyzed into components which were responsible for the lavender scent. Some of these compounds could sometimes be isolated from materials cheaper than lavender oil and used as an ingredient in perfumes to impart some smidgen of lavender scent.

Evaluating otto of rose at Kazanlik, Bulgaria, major exporter of roses, ca. 1906. From William Le Queux, An observer in the Near East (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Roses proved to have a particularly thorny (of course) scent to analyze. Chemists, mainly in France and Germany, published many articles claiming to have thoroughly identified the key components of rose oil (known as rose otto, the product of two sequential distillation steps), such as the alcohols citronellol, geraniol, rhodinol and others. But what was rhodinol to one group of chemists was not recognized as rhodinol to another; the second group claimed rhodinol was just an unrefined mixture of other components and judged the first group of chemists for sloppy technique. This situation was due to the delicate and laborious procedures of chemical analysis of the time. Adding to the complexity was the fact that oil from even the same cultivar of rose but grown in different conditions (altitude, rainfall, temperature, etc.) could contain different quantities of compounds. Setting a standard to demarcate a pure rose oil according to its constituents was therefore a matter of contention; what could be a rose in Germany was not a rose in France.

Yet the problem of identifying a rose oil as rose oil was not limited to satisfactorily labelling its components in a way agreed to by all the chemists. Profits from manufacturing rose oil could of course be stretched by adulterating the oil and a chemical understanding of the oil helped to choose more sophisticated adulterants. Verifying by chemical analysis whether the oil one just bought was genuine was as laborious a process. For example, a common adulterant was palmarosa oil, the major component of which was the alcohol geraniol, which was not only also present in rose oil, but varied in quantity depending on cultivation conditions. All these sophistication efforts ensured that the skilled ‘nose’, rather than chemical tests, would often remain the most trusted arbiter of a real rose.1

Rosa x damascena, principal Bulgarian hybrid for use in perfumes. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Photo by Lucia Condac / CC BY 3.0.

What about the perfumers? One option was just to identify a favorite, trusted supplier of roses and buy otto of rose, with all its complex mixtures of compounds still somewhat mysterious, only from them. A cheaper option was to replicate the rose scent without using roses at all, possible by the 1920s with a greater range of compounds being manufactured commercially. One recipe gives 80% geraniol and small proportions of other compounds, such as citronellol and phenyl ethyl alcohol. Perfumers could use this product, manufactured by a German fragrance and essential oil supplier called Schimmel, or use something similar but add a little ‘real rose’ to ground the imitation.2 This imitation option called into question what skills were more important for a talented perfumer – to replicate a rose scent skillfully using lesser ingredients, or to properly identify a high quality ‘real’ rose oil? A British perfumer for Yardley, William Poucher, for example, was evidently proud of his skills in both these activities, but what he boasted of most in his book was his ability to identify correctly the origins of different rose oils only by scent: “To the trained specialists, however, the merest graduation of odour is appreciable, and an expert florist will name the variety of rose even in the dark” (italics original).3 And these deliberations do not even take into question which perfume the consumer would identify as a rose scent!

The scent of a rose then was highly malleable, due to both intentional as well as fraudulent artistry, as well as to the difficulty of identifying its components, and defining it was a contentious process.

1. Michael Palairet, “Primary production in a market for luxury: the rose-oil trade of Bulgaria, 1771-1941,” Journal of European Economic History 28, 3 (1999): 564-566.

2. Michael Palairet, “Primary production in a market for luxury: the rose-oil trade of Bulgaria, 1771-1941,” Journal of European Economic History 28, 3 (1999), 569.

3. William A. Poucher, Perfumes, cosmetics and soaps: With especial reference to synthetics, vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1932), 206.