Top 5 Facts About Perfumes
Perfume symbolizes beauty, evokes memories, and smells great, but it actually has a pretty strange history. Welcome to MsMojo's Top 5 Facts. In this installment, we'll be looking at the five most interesting and surprising facts about perfume and cologne.
#5: We Don’t Know Exactly How Old Perfuming Is
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The first alcohol-based perfume was Hungary water, which was developed in the 14th century, but people have been using scents for cosmetic purposes for much, much longer. The oldest known perfume factory was built around 2000 BC, located near the believed birthplace of Aphrodite. Excavation of the factory has helped us find some of the oldest samples of fragrances, but perfuming goes back even beyond then. Ancient Egyptians using oil-based perfumes in their medical, religious and beauty rituals as early as 3500 BC. They believed that perfume was the sweat of the sun god Ra, and they even had a god of perfume named Nefertum. Even earlier, there’s evidence of tribal societies in Africa that used scented oils for everything from cleansing, to medicine, to bug repellent.
#4: Some Perfumes Are Made from Whale Excretion
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Ambergris is one of the most expensive perfume ingredients in the world. It's used to make scents last longer on human skin, and if the ambergris has the right fragrance, it can be worth thousands of dollars per ounce. Unfortunately, ambergris is kind of gross… because it’s made in the intestines of sperm whales. Scientists used to think it was ejected through whale vomit, but now they believe that it probably comes out the other end– which, again: gross. But, if you ever happen to find a lump of it on the shore, like an 8-year-old boy in the U.K. did in 2012– it can be worth as much as $63,000 US. Other weird perfume ingredients include castoreum and civet, which are respectively made from beaver testicles and cat anal glands.
#3: People Used to Drink Perfume
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Believe it or not, perfume was once thought to have positive effects if consumed. Different recipes were expected to have health benefits, and honestly some of the early oil based perfumes might have been kind of tasty, but most probably weren’t. Hungary water wasn’t oil-based, but it was used as a tonic and made from alcohol and rosemary. Not only was it believed to increase longevity, beauty and to ward off diseases; it was also said to be most effective when drunk, rubbed into the skin, and inhaled. Also, alcohol-based perfumes were commonly consumed during periods of prohibition in the Soviet Union, and perfume poisoning caused a surprising number of deaths in Russian and Soviet history.
#2: Perfume Was Believed to Keep Away the Plague
Before modern medicine, there was the miasma theory, which proposed that foul-smelling air was toxic and caused disease. In medieval Europe during the plague, a ball filled with fragrant floral and herbal scents called a pomander became popular. It was carried around by both women and men who had money and were afraid of the Black Death, because they thought the fragrance would keep the disease away. Plague doctors wore bird-like masks with a long beak, which contained scented substances like lavender to protect them from disease carrying smells. It probably didn’t do much to fight the plague, but at least the medieval world musta smelled less rotten.
#1: Perfume Was Once a Tool for Murder and Assassination
That’s right: the Sumerians, and later the ancient Romans and Greeks would use poisoned perfume to carry out political assassinations and intimate crimes. It was so popular in ancient culture, that the Sanskrit word for perfume is the same as the word for red arsenic. Perfume makers would often double as poison makers until at least the 18th century, often using arsenic and cyanide in their formulas. One famous Italian Perfumist named Giulia Tofana was said to have killed 600 men with her perfumes, allegedly selling them to the unhappy wives of abusive husbands. So what do you think? What do you think is the most surprising fact about perfume and cologne? For more freshly-scented top 5’s and lethal top 10’s subscribe to MsMojo.
