Scents of self, part two

enfleurage throughout history

I have pieced together a loose retelling of history based on my deep dive into perfumery, specifically enfleurage. This is my point of view, based on historic records and other documents that I consulted to trace the conditions that gave rise to enfleurage as a practice. I must emphasize that my point of view is largely from a Western perspective and there are so many other stories to be told about perfume.

If we want to understand enfleurage there are some key figures, historical events and thought processes that we need to examine.

We must meet in Florence to begin this timeline.

Photos of my grandmother visiting Florence for the first time in the 1980s. These images have nothing to do with perfume, I just think Zoe is an icon and I love seeing Florence as it was.

Arriving in Florence, it is impossible to miss the Basilicata of Santa Maria Novella. The central train station is named, Santa Maria Novella, in homage to the Basilicata— it is one of the first things you see walking out of the station.

If you pay attention, you start to notice the whole neighborhood in front of the station was once the religious grounds for a Dominican order of friars. The convent of Santa Maria Novella was established for the friars in the 1200s. The convent had a large garden like most convents and monasteries during the Middle Ages. The friars were able to use the herbs and flowers growing in the monastic gardens to create their own apothecary.

The Santa Maria Novella apothecary grew in its repertoire and fame until it was eventually opened to the public in the 1500s. Then, Catherine De’Medici enters the conversation.

Catherine de’Medici was a Renaissance woman, literally.

Catherine was born to the Medici’s, a wealthy merchant family that controlled much of Florence at the time. She entered the world right as the Medici’s luck was starting to change. Both of her parents died shortly after her birth and she was orphaned to a city that suddenly hated her family. There were many a plan to kill her out of spite for what her family stood for and she spent much of her childhood in hiding with nuns in convents.

She was soon married to the King of France at the tender age of 14. After her marriage, there are records that she brought a personal perfumer from Florence, Renato Bianco, with her to France in 1547. Renato was trained by the friars in the garden and apothecary at Santa Maria Novella.

I love the idea of apothecaries.

Bees know how important it is to have their own apothecary in the hive. They collect resins from plants and strategically seal their hive with this therapeutic mortar.

In the human world, apothecaries were often the only medical spaces where women were seen formally as healers. Almost every town had an apothecary because they were essential spaces offering medical advice and remedies to their community.

Perfume was certainly not the only elixir being concocted in apothecaries, but it was a product that was emphasized in Florence. Perfume was not originally only for seducing lovers or announcing social status, it was also seen as a curative for certain ailments.

We haven’t strayed too far from this notion, we only now make hard distinctions between perfumes and essential oils. I am sure that you don’t reach for Jo Malone’s Cucumber and Earl Grey when you have a sore throat; however, you might reach for oil of oregano to address your pain.

If you want to step foot into one of the remaining apothecaries in Florence, you must know Bizzarri. Emiko showed me this apothecary and it is frozen in time in the best way. The clients are people actually accessing the apothecary as it once functioned, unlike the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella which is now entirely a destination for tourists.

Florence in the Middle Ages not only had this ecosystem of apothecaries and religious spaces, but there was also a deeply poignant element of leather tanning that defined the city.

Trailing back to Catherine de’Medici, when she went to France there was a bid made for her attention by the tanneries in Grasse, France. They knew that Catherine had access to fine leathers from Florence but France naturally wanted their new queen to patronize their leather craft.

We must now leave Florence behind and move to France in the 16th century.

Allegedly the tanneries in Grasse, France knew the queen had an affinity for the natural world — specifically gardens and citrus — so they made the new Queen fragrant gloves. In order to make these gloves they took the raw hides and charged them with fresh flowers. Hence, the method of enfleurage indelibly seeps into the history of Grasse, France.

Grasse was originally a village known for its leather tanneries, but it later transitioned to being recognized as the perfume capital of the world.

One of the many books I found when visiting the Athenæum library in Providence, Rhode Island.

Moving north to Cologne, Germany — we are now in the late 1600s.

Johann Maria Farina was born in Italy but later left to Germany to start his own perfume factory. He worked less with enfleurage and more with distillation for his fragrances. He is credited with creating Eau de Cologne and founding one of the first large scale factory perfumeries.

I only mention him because I think his contribution to perfumery begins to bifurcate this modern distinction of gendered scents. Cologne is nowadays synonymous with a fragrance crafted with the masculine in mind; whereas, perfume has a feminine connotation.

The recipe for Farina’s Eau de Cologne is still protected by the family and sold worldwide. Eau de Cologne was the first fragrance to register its label as a trademark.

Taking a leap into the future, I want us to visit Sicily in the 1900s.

Sicily has always been a space of extraction. There is a long history of countries’ interest in exporting raw materials from Sicily, one of the darkest but longest stories of this dynamic is the memory of sulphur in Sicily — something I will write more about one day soon. Sulphur, citrus, and jasmine are all Sicilian tokens that were highly sought after by the French and English.

The perfume industry in Grasse, France contracted large jasmine plantations in Milazzo in the 1920s. I wanted to offer this archival footage I found from the jasmine harvests so that you too can appreciate this small window into history.

Le gelsominaie, women who pick jasmine, could not even afford buy a loaf of bread after a full workday, let alone wear the perfume that they were working to craft.

As agricultural protests led to agricultural reform in the 1970s in Italy, the advances in chemical technologies shifted the culture of perfume.

Fast forward and we are in the age of chemical industry.

By the 1960s chemists were able to synthetically reproduce the volatile molecules in the essential oils of plants. This meant that synthetic flavors and perfumes started to inundate the market because it suddenly became cheap to market fragrances to consumers.

It became normal to add fragrance to all elements of daily life — soap, deodorants, makeup, detergents, cleaning products, air fresheners, stationary…the list goes on and on.

Marnie (Grease, 1978) is a terrific pen-pal — she sprays her stationary with perfume before sending a letter. I remember having scented pencils, markers and scratch and sniff stickers as a little girl.

Thanks to the chemical industry, artificial flavors and synthetic fragrances are a normal part of modern life. There are perfumes at all price ranges and it has become increasingly difficult to discern which fragrances are synthetic and which fragrances are crafted with raw plant material.

I think we have become so numbed to the constant bombardment of scent synthetic scents that we actually are dulling our senses.

I remember landing in Oman for a quick layover and listening to the person sitting next to me explain the important cultivation of roses to make exquisite perfumes. It is a dream of mine to actually visit Oman and explore their world of flowers and perfume.

The Muscat International Airport is incredibly luxurious. Men were barefoot, dressed in beautiful white dishdashas and elegantly sprawled out on chaise lounges under palm trees. In the airport, I had a conversation with a friend about body odor. He commented that culturally there are clearly different ideas of acceptable body odor. I found his comment a bit harsh and replied that actually I found the contrast and presence of body odor to be refreshing. It was a reminder that we are just human at the end of the day.

Maybe we don’t need to always mask our scent, but then again maybe we do?

Synthetic scents are undoubtedly interfering with our hormones. Most synthetic fragrances contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals. It is no coincidence that people trying to conceive with IVF are asked to avoid all fragrances, synthetic fragrances are altering our fertility.

Remember when the damaging effects of sunscreen on coral reefs was a topic of everyone’s interest? The idea really is not any different in the discussion of synthetic fragrances. Everything that we put on our body eventually ends up back in the watershed. Those forever chemicals don’t just wash away, they also start to influence everything connected to that water source.

We have arrived to the moment of proletariat perfume.

Before the widespread availability of synthetic perfume, it was a luxury to smell good. It meant you were not doing a physical or dirty job. You had enough affluence to live a convenient life free from sweat, dirt and shit.

I can understand why the people now reach for totally intrusive perfumes. They are consciously or unconsciously trying to convey that they too can perfume their homes, clothes and car with luxurious scents that mask any remnant of what they might be doing to earn money in this capitalist hellscape.

I think there is also a reverse psychology to this — some probably associate overpowering scents with an insecurity or a lower social class — this is making me think of Axe cologne.

I realize that by playing into these class commentaries I risk sounding like an elitist, but I am just simply trying to write what I have been observing as people talk about scent. The perfume industry cannot be ignored, it has a massive market share that is expected to grow exponentially.

There is a psychology of scent and some pretty incredible research as well as documented evidence that brands will unique craft scents to influence the spending habits of their customers.

It is worth questioning the ethics of perfumery.

Perfume would still be reserved for a select few if it was all made with raw materials sourced in nature or grown intentionally for the purpose of crafting fragrances.

If we only used enfleurage or distillation for perfumery, the story of silphium would most likely be applicable to many more sought after plants in perfumery, like sandalwood or tuberose. Considering the sheer volume of raw material needed to inundate the market with all of the perfume that we have now, these plants would be endangered.

I find it hilarious that on Ryanair flights the ‘in-flight service’ is a host of flight attendants trying to sell you some of the most synthetic perfumes on Earth. A cheap airline peddling cheap perfume, fitting…and both with damaging consequences to ecosystems.

We now expect everything to be scented— I mean come on, scented trash bags?

When did we start to shy away from the visceral scents that are signs of life?

Fermentation is a sign of life.

Can you recognize the smell of fermentation?

All of the sexiest foods rely on fermentation but I would go as far to say that the average human would smell fermentation and an alarm would go off in their mind saying — that is risky, don’t eat it.

Being alive is and was risky for humans. We crave security.

Taste and smell are the two senses that help us avoid death on a daily basis.

Smell is our first line of defense.

If something smells “off” we most likely will not put it in our mouth. Super helpful if we are trying to not die today, but not great if we intend to be sovereign. There is a happy medium somewhere to be negotiated.

Defaulting our sense of security to large corporations like Procter and Gamble, Kellogg's, Nestle and Unilever eliminates all need for humans to develop body and food literacy. A food suddenly becomes ‘safe’ because it is endorsed by a brand, they are responsible but I must pay for this protection.

I see overlap here in the “Camembert crisis” with the same synthetic selection of yeasts and bacteria for cheesemaking. These dynamics leaves no room for nuance and magic.

If we rely on labs to artificially select our yeasts and bacterias and create our “medicines” and perfumes, we are all agreeing to live in a super predictable, controlled world.

We no longer have a need to understand the natural world. All of our answers are patented and secured somewhere in a lab.

We lose our power.

After a year of wading in this world of perfumery I believe it is a really profound subject. I am only scraping the surface and yet here we are. Trends in perfumery allow us to take a look at humanity and infer.

Scent is once again a reflection of ourselves.