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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?
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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
One set of my grandparents lived in Upper Michigan; my grandfather was a carpenter (he worked in one of the Ford plants near Iron Mountain that produced wooden transport gliders during World War II), and he had a small workshop built onto his garage.
It had a wood floor that was always sprinkled with sawdust and wood shavings; you could smell the oil he used to keep the machinery running smoothly, and catch a whiff of gasoline through the door to the main garage (he kept spare gas cans in there).
There was a big wooden rain barrel, with bright green moss on the slats and a few oak leaves floating in the water, at one outside corner of the workshop. He usually kept the window next to the rain barrel open, and you could smell the damp moss and leaves, and the firs and balsams in the forest right behind the garage.
If anyone ever made a wood shavings-gasoline-moss-and-fir balsam perfume, I’d wear it in a heartbeat … it was a magical smell!
That sounds excellent. Both you and @elephasamericanus sound well-qualified (as does @vicrylcontessa).
It might be better for me to focus more on the raw materials going into the perfumes, continuing in the vein some of your remarks in your OP above. I could write on the olfactive families – fragrance wheel, etc – and structure-odor relationships (including why these relationships are working hypotheses rather than well-established theories), that sort of thing. If I could have been a Sephora perfume-counter girl, I would have been, but somehow, sneezing all over the customers is not considered good salesmanship :-)
Thanks, Nanda – I’m glad you liked it! My sympathies about your parents, and I agree that having your loved ones’ signature fragrances to remember them by is a wonderful thing. I still have my mother’s bottle of Lenthéric Tweed from the late 1960s. It’s a beautiful woodsy fragrance with a touch of lavender.
I have a bottle of late 1960s Aqua Velva Ice Blue, and it smells heavenly. The main notes are eucalyptus, lavender, pine, and rosemary on an amber-oakmoss base. The current version is very synthetic, alas.
Iris is my favorite floral scent (it’s actually the root that’s used in perfumery), and I bet Fragonard does a gorgeous iris. That was a lovely present!
Lessee – cedarwood (really juniper wood) oil smells like pencil shavings; in my opinion, conifer leaf oils can smell pretty gasoline-y at higher concentration; styrax smells smokey and mildewy (damp); oakmoss, peat-y… And that’s not even getting into synthetic ingredients… though… occupational levels of exposure, breathing and skin, to gasoline is apparently considered OK…
As a Hermes man my signature fragrance is Eau d’orange verte, with eau de pamplemousse rose a close second.
And yes, they come in the carriage lantern design bottles.
Indeed! the bi-fold card that held the vial reads: “In 2016, Fragonard celebrates the iris flower. Distilled with head notes of fresh bergamot and Moroccan lemon; the eau de toilette IRIS develops a floral heart of violet and heliotrope, magnified by a base note of iris absolute and Tonka beans.”
Wish I could upload the scent…
You don’t have Smell-o-Vision?
Is it in development in the alternate-history of R> Silent Radio, perhaps?
If they can develop Silent Radio, why not?
Victoria’s Secret Bombshell perfume has been shown in one small study to be as effective a mosquito repellant as DEET.
One of my colleagues has a son who in addition to reeking of Axe suddenly developed severe acne and became pretty aggressive. He’s an athlete; she became suspicious. His DHEA-S levels were off the charts, and of course his testosterone was elevated as well. He denied deliberate use of DHEA or anything else and pretty intensive investigation seemed to confirm this. My colleague ran him through several cycles of a usually pretty effective steroid hormone clearance protocol to no effect.
The only change he had made in his life was starting to use Axe. He stopped. The next round of the protocol brought his DHEA levels down substantially. (Still off the charts, her son’s levels were well above the highest level the lab will report; their method is not calibrated to that high a supraphysiological level but but she has a good relationship with the tech support people at the lab. They told her off the record how much the values had dropped.) The next round after that brought the levels into the high but reportable range, and his behavior and skin began to improve.
When I first visited SMN years ago, I was struck by
1) how many of these old ingredients and formulas had medicinal purposes; and
2) how vital and evocative the sense of smell is to memory. I was able to get a stronger sense of what day-to-day life might have felt like in renaissance Italy; more vivid than just looking at paintings and architecture.