On the Origins of Perfume

Around 3000 B.C., in the temples of ancient Egypt, priests set fire to resin. Myrrh, cedarwood, frankincense. The smoke rose, and the gods, it was believed, leaned down to meet it. The English word "perfume" comes from the Latin per fumum. Through smoke. The origin of perfume is fire.

Around the same time, in Mesopotamia, someone was already keeping notes. A cuneiform tablet from roughly 1200 B.C. bears the name Tapputi, a woman who oversaw the royal perfumery of Babylon. She distilled flowers and oils with calamus and myrrh, filtered them, refined them. She is, as far as we know, the first perfumer on record. She is also, as far as we know, the first chemist.

In those centuries, scent belonged to ritual. It was rubbed onto the bodies of the dead to guide the soul toward whatever came next. It was a signal from the living to the departed, a letter from human beings to their gods. The meaning came first. The pleasure came later. The shift happened gradually, somewhere between Greece and Rome. The bath. The banquet. Scent stayed inside the ritual, but the ritual now belonged to the living.

The real break came when alcohol distillation took hold. Perfume slipped out of its oil and into the liquid we recognize today. In 1882, in Paris, a perfumer named Paul Parquet released Fougère Royale under the name of Houbigant. It contained coumarin, a molecule drawn from the tonka bean. The first synthetic note in a commercial perfume. In 1921, Chanel No. 5 lifted aldehydes to the very top of the composition.

Perfume no longer needed to imitate a flower, a tree, or anything found in nature. A scent from nowhere had become possible. And with that, perfume became capable of holding every abstraction the world has to offer.