Big Efforts in Small Bottles: What Your Perfume Does
Perfume creates a whiff of fragrance in the surroundings. It fills and mesmerizes the senses with a wonderful sensation and feeling. Perfumes have always attracted mankind and how a bottle of perfume is created is a mystery even in this era and age! The art of perfume making is a secret and the selected perfumes are created by specialists who never divulge the ingredients of it. This makes each bottle of perfume unique.
The perfume making art was introduced in Egypt and Mesopotamia somewhere in the 2nd millennium BC. Originally perfume was made from spices like almonds, coriander, and bergamot along with various other herbs. Flowers were not used in those days.
A Persian doctor and chemist discovered that perfume could be made from flowers too. He started making perfume with roses and rose water was a big favorite immediately. Once introduced, rose water was being used extensively and is still used.
With the advancement in the perfume-making industry and mass production and consumption, there has been a sea change in the entire procedure of perfume making. It has now become a mechanical job no doubt but still needs expertise.
Commercial manufacturers keep their secrets of making perfume close to their hearts and don’t like to divulge it. However, it is an open secret that perfume is derived from plants, animals, and other natural ways. Among the plants resins, seeds, leaves, fruits, and flowers are used. In the animals` category civet, musk, and honeycomb may be used. In the modern era, genetically induced plants are also being used to make perfumes by the perfume manufacturers.
The manufacturers now days use many synthetic sources like chemicals prepared in labs to make perfume and these perfumes are quite a hit among the users.
Although the basic method of producing perfume is the same for all perfumes various manufacturers adopt a slightly different style of manufacturing it according to their individual style and choice.
Before you start making perfume you need to understand the composition of the perfume oil. They have been classified into four categories according to the role played by them. These scents are found in the different notes like the top, base, or the middle according to the supporting ingredients. They are the following: fixatives, modifiers, blenders, and primary scents.
The fragrance oil has to be mixed with ethyl alcohol and water in special containers for a minimum of two weeks and all sediments are to be filtered off carefully. Nowadays the usual style is to use the base for it because of the obvious reasons instead of extracting perfumes from the “ground ups”.
There are quite a few types of oils mixed in a perfume. Once the final product is ready, it is very difficult to know about its separate compositions. It is very difficult to break up the perfume and find its ingredients. However, the nature of the perfume can be understood by the experts by using reverse technology. But this is also useful only if the perfume contains less complex information. A lot depends on the equipment that is put into use. Competitors and discerning consumers use it to reveal the formula used in the making of the perfume.
Continuous research is always being carried on in the perfume industry and experts keep experimenting and devising new ways of making perfume. Efforts are made to make each bottle unique, each perfume unique and the secrecy that is maintained by all concerned is amazing.
The perfume bottle that you have is unique and a lot of hard work has gone into it. Don’t waste it, but use it with love and care in honor of the care that has gone into it!
