Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Share Your Expertise: Vintage Perfume and Biochemistry
One of the ironies of fragrance is that organic compounds used by plants as natural pesticides and toxins (to repel predatory insects and herbivores) are some of the key ingredients in perfumes … which are used by human beings to attract, not repel, other human beings (in theory, anyway). 1
These organic compounds (known as secondary metabolites) are present in many of the essential oils used in perfumes, but their key components weren’t manufactured synthetically until the late 19th century. Along with synthetic molecules created in the lab, advances in chemistry at this time meant that traditional extraction processes could be standardized and mass-produced, resulting in a high quality (and quantity) of essential oils and natural isolates. Oils extracted by traditional small-scale methods varied greatly in quality, and could be sludgy and burnt-smelling due to high contaminant levels.
The availability of synthetic compounds and the use of standardized production techniques meant that perfumers could choose from a much larger selection of raw materials, at a much higher quality and lower cost, than ever before.
Coumarin was one of the first aromachemical superstars. Paul Parquet, perfumer for the French house Houbigant, used it to create the fragrance Fougère Royale (Royal Fern) in 1882. Coumarin is present in Tonka beans (Dipteryx odorata), which have a fresh, grassy scent with notes of hay, almond, and vanilla. The synthetic form of coumarin was isolated from coal tar in 1868 by English chemist William Henry Perkin, and was used in the 1880s and 1890s for perfumes and for flavoring cigarette tobacco. 2
Coumarin molecule
The anticoagulant drug warfarin (trade name Coumadin) is synthesized from dicoumarol, which is formed in nature when sweet clover hay goes moldy in a wet environment and the coumarin in the clover interacts with certain species of fungi. A series of wet summers in the US and Canada during the 1920s, and the resulting moldy clover hay, led to an epidemic of cattle and sheep bleeding to death. After the compounds responsible for the hemorrhaging were isolated, warfarin was patented as a rat poison … and as a blood thinner in humans.
In humans, dermal use of synthetic coumarin (as in perfumes and cosmetics) is safe. And essential oils containing natural coumarin have never caused any adverse reactions when used on the skin. 3 So no need to panic when you see coumarin or Tonka listed as a perfume ingredient!
Houbigant’s Fougère Royale was a ground-breaking scent that became wildly popular. It created the fougère family of masculine fragrances, which is still going strong today. 4 Traditional fougères contain notes of citrus, lavender, coumarin, geranium, and oakmoss. They’re fresh and bracing when first applied, and then become richer and deeper with mossy-earthy facets from the oakmoss and hay-almond notes from the coumarin.
Houbigant Fougere Royale
Sharp, spicy aromatic fougères were very popular for men in the 1970s and 1980s – think Fabergé Brut, Azzarro pour Homme, Yves Saint Laurent Kouros, and Guy Laroche Drakkar Noir. Davidoff Cool Water added aquatic and ozone notes to the classic fougère formula. There are scads of Cool Water knock-offs; any men’s fragrance that’s colored blue and has “Sport” in the name is almost certainly a Cool Water wanna-be (my advice is to avoid these like the plague).
I was fortunate enough to run across a bottle of Houbigant Fougère Royale eau de cologne that dates back to the 1950s. It was still sealed when I bought it, though about three-fourths of the fragrance had evaporated. The citrus notes had disappeared almost entirely (citrus oils are very volatile and don’t last long), but the lavender was still cool and minty, and the coumarin-oakmoss base was deep and complex with hay, vanilla, toasted almond, and tobacco facets. The overall effect is rich but never sweet or cloying. It’s a lovely masculine scent, very classic and poised. Unfortunately the modern version of Fougère Royale lacks the deep, rich base notes of the vintage formulation, due to recent limitations on the use of oakmoss in fragrances.
Other aromachemicals that took the perfume world by storm at the turn of the 20th century include vanillin (synthetic vanilla; Guerlain Jicky), eugenol (spicy clove-carnation; Roger & Gallet Blue Carnation), and C-14/gamma undecalactone (ripe peaches; Guerlain Mitsouko).
The most famous perfume of all, Chanel No. 5, gets its shimmering, glittering texture from three aliphatic (fatty) aldehydes – C-10/decanal (waxy orange rind), C-11/undecanal (clean and “perfumey”), and C-12/lauric aldehyde (clean waxy floral). These aldehydes were used at very high levels by Ernest Beaux, who composed No. 5, as a way to lighten and enhance the gorgeous rose-jasmine accord at the heart of this perfume.
Vintage Chanel No. 5 also contains nitromusks – which are byproducts of TNT (trinitrotoluene, the explosive) that were discovered by German chemist Albert Bauer in 1888. These musks have a rich, intense, animalic smell that’s characteristic of many mid-20th-century perfumes. When some nitromusks were found to be phototoxic (causing allergic reactions on skin when exposed to sunlight), their use was discontinued. 5 Modern Chanel No. 5 is nitromusk-free, and doesn’t have the rich animalic base notes of the vintage formula … so if you have a bottle of old-school No. 5 that belonged to your mother or grandmother, treasure it!
What vintage perfumes have you worn, or do you remember your parents or grandparents wearing?
________________________
1 There are always exceptions … it could be argued that Axe is in fact a type of scent-based pesticide designed to repel anyone with a functioning olfactory nerve.
2 Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World (2000), 173.
3 Robert Tisserand and Rodney Young, Essential Oil Safety, 2nd ed. (2014), 544.
4 Derek B. Lowe, The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, 250 Milestones in the History of Chemistry (2016), 176-7.
5 Charles S. Sell, ed., The Chemistry of Fragrances, 2nd ed. (2006), 96-8.
N.B.: Both images were found on Wikimedia Commons, and both are in the public domain. The Fougère Royale image is courtesy of the Osmotheque.
Published in Group Writing
Thanks, Pencilvania – I’m glad you liked it! (Though I’m sorry that perfume makes you and your husband sneeze.)
Vintage (pre-1970) perfumes that are well-preserved usually have a beautiful clear gold color, due to the types of resins that were used at that time. This review is about Deltah perfumes – an American brand that flourished in small-town drugstores during the 1930s and 1940s. Their fragrances used quality ingredients and tend to keep well; the first two photos (of bottles of Deltah No. 7 and Deltah Midnight Hour) show the beautiful gold color that vintages should have. The last photo in the review (Deltah Chypre) is of a bottle with juice that’s dark brown and badly degraded.
Crépe de Chine may have been colored; a few early 20th-ct perfumes are bright artificial green.
Most modern perfumes contain coloring agents (blue is never a natural color in perfume!). Some niche perfumers won’t use artificial colors.
True.
Sweet peas are one of my favorite flower smells.
My mother wore Muguet des Bois her whole life. She had some bottles that I believe were 40s/50s vintage. Now that we’re living in a place where lilies of the valley will grow, we’ll be planting some in her memory.
Glad you liked the post!
Pois de Senteur (Sweet Pea) by Caron is a classic floral that dates back to the 1920s. If you’re ever at Fortnum & Mason in London, they carry the classic Caron perfumes in giant glass urns, and will decant them for you in various sizes.
Sweet pea is difficult to find nowadays, but you might want to try Hermès Jour d’Hermès. It’s a light, radiant, spring-like floral with facets of hyacinth and lily of the valley (which are also present in sweet pea).
I have a little patch of lilies of the valley. Some years they are so fragrant I am just distracted by it. The fragrance blows into my kitchen window. I am the only person in the world who smiles when I’m washing dishes! I can understand why people made perfume out of them.
I will. Oh my goodness. Okay. Thank you so much. :)
Have you ever had a ghost come visit you while you were doing dishes and laugh at you?
True – that’s a good point. [puts Ciara back on the sample list]
I tend to be a bit leery of some of the big 70s perfumes, which is odd because I have no problem with the screaming big-hair frags of the 80s (Giorgio Beverly Hills, Dior Poison, Givenchy Amarige … ).
I promise to work on conquering my 70s perfume prejudices … :-)
Even if it doesn’t smell of bay rum? :-)
Maison Edwards Tobacconist (in the Nickels Arcade in downtown Ann Arbor) used to sell St Johns Bay Rum; I don’t know if they still do.
Any Ricochetti visiting Ann Arbor should stop by Maison Edwards; it’s an old-school, very manly tobacco shop. You can even smoke cigars in the store (amazing these days). It smells like tobacco heaven. I’m a non-smoker, but I love the smell of pipe and cigar tobacco; I like to go into Maison Edwards and just breathe deeply.
Next time I get over there, I just may do that. Haven’t noticed them there. Where are they?
I remember that one! Lovely.
Someone I know grows sage and rosemary. For cologne, he simply takes a couple leaves, rubs them between his hands, then rubs his neck. Cheapest cologne ever.
Of course, it probably makes women hungry in a different way than he’s aiming for.
They’re in the Nickels Arcade (intersection at the NW corner of the Diag), about halfway through on the south side. I think he’s next to that big antique store, and across from (kitty-corner to) Comet Coffee. It’s a small storefront, kind of hole-in-the-wall. Just follow the smell of tobacco. Definitely worth a visit!
I’ve read that the scent of vanilla is an aphrodisiac to men.
As often as women say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, you’d think they’d spend less on fancy perfumes and more on body wash with food scents like citrus, vanilla, or coconut.
If a woman smells like alcohol, she should at least carry a flask to share.
Anna, have you been to Florence? Santa Maria Novella is an incredible time capsule:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/27/travel/florence-apothecary/
They still make the perfume they originally created for Catherine de Medici.
A relative of mine buys the same soap George Washington supposedly used.
Most people wash their hands of history, not with it.
This whole conversation has reminded me of whisky blogs in that respect. My brother was taken aback when he asked about a bottle he’d given me and I used the words “good” and “iodine” in the same sentence.
Thanks for the great conversation, Anna M.!
I haven’t been to Italy (yet!), and Santa Maria Novella is high on my list to visit when I get there.
They have some lovely perfumes, including one of the best patchouli fragrances around. It isn’t a headshop/hippie patchouli (ugh), instead it has a rich woodsy-aromatic scent that’s strong but clear and translucent.
If I ever get to Florence, I’ll bring back SMN samples for everyone at Ricochet. :-)
Lily-of-the-valley scent is so hard to extract from the flower that perfumers reconstruct it from other scents. My mother is a big fan, and some of her old lily-of-the-valley scents that perhaps she keeps mainly for sentimental value have turned (they smell like singed hair and bad hairspray). One is Diorissimo, another is Muguet de Bois. (I think her Diorissimo has turned.) Gardenia, narcissus, lily, and daylily scents are typically similarly reconstructed from other scents.
The temperate greenhouse in our public gardens (not the tropical one with the flowers that smell like latrine sanitizer) houses gardenias. Whenever I visit the greenhouses, I check to see if the gardenias are in bloom, just to smell them. Someone gave me an inexpensive bottle of a gardenia perfume. It resembles gardenias more than it does other things.
Small amounts of narcissus, gardenia, and lily absolutes or pomades from enfleurage extraction are sometimes available for purchase. They are very expensive, and not, I think, produced in the quantities that would allow a perfume which became very popular to rely on them except perhaps as trace ingredients. Enfleurage is reportedly especially disappointing on lily-of-the-valley.
@annam, @elephasamericanus, @grosseteste:
I have had a few outside distractions (our first child, some other stuff) making it much easier to leave comments than to write long-form lately, but it occurs to me that between the three of us, more articles could be written about, well, smells. What do you guys think?
Some of the trees I planted last fall and spring survived the drought, thanks to frequent and deep watering (which also attracted ground animals that dug tunnels through the soft, watered soil). And they seemed to perk up when we got our first big rain. But it’s as if after all that, the monsoons were too much for them. I now have only one tulip popular and one beech tree that survived. The elderberries are doing OK, especially after I put up electric fence wire to keep the deer from munching them.
I don’t remember any of my parents or grandparents ever wearing perfumes. I found your article to be interesting, though.
I should add that I can get very nostalgic over the smells of my grandparents’ places, especially my grandfather’s country store with living quarters in the back.
Sounds good; I’m overextended on Ricochet promises at the moment, but it’s something to keep in mind.
@Annam: Thanks so much for this! Fascinating! I’ve lost both of my parents fairly-recently; so, I keep a bottle of Aqua Velva [Dad] and Coty’s Emeraude [Mom] around for olfactory hugs, as needed…I initially hesitated to comment here, but…
My niece brought me a vial of Fragonard’s “Iris” home from a school trip to Europe last month: I am in Heaven…being very sparing with the vial, ’til I can drop enough hints to home folks that might bring a gift-bottle my way…(The niece says she selected it just for me; its hint of bergamot reminded her of my love for Earl Grey tea.)…It’s gonna become my signature, I hope. Thanks again!
Sounds good to me! I could natter on about fragrance-related topics for days. :-)
I’ve thought that one nice option would be a holiday gift guide to fragrance (perhaps in late November), with basic information on quality fragrances (masculines and feminines) in various prices ranges, how to choose a nice gift fragrance, how to store fragrances properly, and so on.