8 Interesting Perfume Facts

1. Perfume have been with us for as long as humans have walked the earth, first in the form of herbs and flowers, later in more sophisticated forms such as fragrant oils and incense.
    
2. Perfume historians believe that they found evidence of the use of perfume 3,500 years ago when they saw a series of murals in Queen Hatshepsut’s temple in Thebes. These showed an Egyptian fleet sailing off to get myrrh and other exotic aromatics from the Land of Punt.
    
3. The word Perfume comes from Latin and means “through Smoke”. Incense was first and foremost used to waft prayers to the goods, but was also pleasing for the olfactory nerves and in addition it concealed bad smells from drains.
    
4. In the early Middle Ages the Arabs would mix musk with the mortar used to build new mosques and palaces in order to make them scented. 
    
5. Europe did not use perfume much until the sixteenth century when Catherin de Medici came from Italy to marry the future king. She wore gloves of perfumed leather and suddenly everybody wanted this. The best place to get these gloves was from Grasse (France) which soon became the perfume capital of the world.
    
6. The first designer to “marry” clothes with perfume was Paul Poiret. He believed that a well-dressed woman was a fragrant one, perfume adding to her glamour. The couturiers would give their clients little bottles of perfumes as gifts, and then later on they would begin to sell perfume to their clients within their store, some found that they could make more money selling perfume than dresses.
    
7. Today a dress designer will add glamour to his or her reputation by launching a profitable signature perfume. Some of these famous designers include Dior, Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent.
    
8. If you can still buy the perfume your mother used when she was a young woman then you can be confident that is a very good perfume. This is because it will have become a classic meaning it has defied fashion changes and lasted on the market for a least a generation (something very few perfumes do).
    

Perfume-Click.co.uk stock some excellent classic fragrances

For Women

Enigma by Alexandra De Markoff from 1972
Anais Anais by Cacharel from 1978
Diorissimo by Christian Dior from 1956
Chantilly by Dana from 1941
Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden from 1934

For Men

Pour L’Homme by Cacharel from 1981
Eau Sauvage by Christian Dior from 1966
Gentleman by Givenchy from 1974
Pour Homme by Paco Rabanne from 1973
Polo by Ralph Lauren from 1978