Club circle
Antique bottles, historic houses, lost perfumes: the history of scent, with sources.
The History, Bottles & Houses circle gathers people curious about the past of perfume. Post an antique bottle found at a flea market, a question about a historic house, or a landmark about eau de Cologne or the glove-makers and perfumers of Grasse, always with a source. Members also talk about lost perfumes and the Osmothèque, the perfume conservatory in Versailles. The Class on the history of perfume sets out the main landmarks.
16 posts · 15 active members
aunty_valin History, Bottles & Houses · Liverpool ·
QuestionI always thought the old scents my mother wore were all flowers, nothing made in a lab. Is that right?
carys.cardiff Not quite. The encyclopedia entry on Jicky says Guerlain released it in 1889, created by Aimé Guerlain, and that it was an early user of synthetic…
maeve.mossin History, Bottles & Houses · Galway ·
Memory
Here's a thing. My granny kept one bottle on her dressing table in Connemara, ribbed glass with a stopper and a label worn down to nothing by her thumb, and she only wore it to Mass and funerals and the odd wedding, and the smell of it was powder and…
cormac.bog Turf smoke in everything, that's my nan's house too. Even the good coat.
cormac.bogin History, Bottles & Houses · Dublin ·
Question
The wife and I have one long weekend in France next spring. Grasse for the perfume museum, or Versailles for the Osmothèque?
carys.cardiff For the museum, its own history page says it was inaugurated in 1989 and presents itself as the first public collection in the world devoted to the…
ambrose_leatherin History, Bottles & Houses · Northampton ·
Discovery
Right then. Reading the encyclopedia page on enfleurage : you spread fat on glass, lay flowers on it and keep replacing them until the fat is saturated, then wash that pomade in alcohol to get an absolute. Jasmine and tuberose were the key flowers, and the…
maeve.moss Fat that holds on to a flower and alcohol that coaxes it back out again. Grand find, Ambrose.
kit.clovein History, Bottles & Houses · Oxford ·
Tip
Flea-market tip from a bookbinder: smell the glass stopper before the bottle. In my experience the ground glass keeps the last trace of what was inside long after the bottle smells of dust.
carys.cardiffin History, Bottles & Houses · Cardiff ·
Reading
Reading the museum's page on its conservatory of fragrant plants : from the 1960s international groups bought up Grasse factories, and between 1970 and 1980 jasmine growing moved to the Nile Delta and then South India, which now produce 90% of the world's…
rafa_azahar Jasmine is everywhere in Seville, but I did not know the fields went to Egypt and India.
theodora.figin History, Bottles & Houses · Bath ·
Snapshot
Rain on Walcot Street all afternoon. Beeswax polish, damp umbrellas by the door, and a row of empty scent bottles with their glass stoppers, no labels, waiting for someone who loves old glass.
maeve.mossin History, Bottles & Houses · Galway ·
Reading
Here's a thing. UNESCO's entry on the perfume skills of Pays de Grasse was inscribed in 2018 and covers three things, growing the plants, knowing and processing the raw materials, and composing the perfume, and it says the knowledge is passed on mostly…
bev.bostonin History, Bottles & Houses · Boston ·
Memory
My late husband wore the same aftershave for forty years, a green bottle with lavender on top and something sweet like hay underneath. I'm trying to work out what that sweet part was.
dougie_newcastle Lavender and hay sounds like a fougère to me. Half the shipyard smelled like that on a Saturday night.
trudy.lilacin History, Bottles & Houses · Ottawa ·
QuestionMy mother wore a lilac scent all through my childhood. I smelled it again recently and it's thinner, greener, not her at all. Is it me, or do perfumes really change?
frankie.incense IFRA's explainer on its standards says a material can be prohibited, restricted to a maximum quantity or given a purity specification, and that the…
dougie_newcastlein History, Bottles & Houses · Newcastle upon Tyne ·
QuestionMy granddaughter keeps calling perfume houses 'niche'. Is it about how old they are, or how small?
carys.cardiff Neither, really. The Class on what niche perfumery means says it's mostly about selling through selective channels to a narrower audience, and that…
ambrose_leatherin History, Bottles & Houses · Northampton ·
Discovery
Right then. I always knew Grasse for its flowers, but the encyclopedia article on Grasse says its perfume trade grew out of leather tanning in the 12th century, that scented gloves were made there for Catherine de' Medici, and that a corporation of…
kit.clove Old bindings in the workshop smell of hide, paste and something faintly sweet. I always wondered where the sweet came from.
dario.bergamotin History, Bottles & Houses · London ·
Discovery
My grandfather grew bergamot near Reggio and always said cologne was an Italian idea. I checked: the encyclopedia entry on eau de Cologne says it was created in 1709 in Cologne by an Italian perfumer, Giovanni Maria Farina, as a light citrus scent in diluted…
frankie.incense That same entry says 'cologne' is now a generic term, most often for men's fragrances in American English, which definately explains every aftershave…
theodora.figin History, Bottles & Houses · Bath ·
Scent diary
Found at the Sunday market, in a drizzle: a cut-glass atomiser with a gilt collar and a rubber bulb gone hard as a walnut shell, tassel half gone, no label, no name anywhere. Inside, a brown ring and a faint smell of powder and violet, nothing like whatever…
kit.clove Old rubber smells of its own age too. Hard to tell what's bottle and what's bulb.
carys.cardiffin History, Bottles & Houses · Cardiff ·
Reading
Rain on the library windows, so I read the Osmothèque's page on its collection on my lunch break: 4,000 perfumes, 800 of them no longer found, kept in a dark cellar at 12°C under a layer of argon. And if a raw material can't be had, they don't remake the…
trudy.lilac Argon for perfume. I like that they'd rather not remake one than fake it.
frankie.incensein History, Bottles & Houses · Chicago ·
Exercise
Fun fact, with a source: the encyclopedia's history of perfume names Tapputi, recorded on a Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet dated 1200 BCE, as an early perfume maker, and credits Avicenna with distilling oils from flowers, starting with rose. So here's a little…
carys.cardiff Frankincense: church, candle wax, lemon peel. Rose water: Turkish delight, my nan's soap. Tonka: hay, almond, warm biscuits.