The Perfumes: The A-Z Guide

Next come lactones in 1906, discovered by the Russian chemists Zhukov and Shestakov

Some of the most successful aromachemicals of all time were musks developed for laundry in the late 1950s that did not get chewed up by microorganisms.

Russian alcoholics drinking odekolon (eau de cologne) and sometimes writing novels afterward, such as Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki, bear witness to the relatively low toxicity of perfume materials. Most of them have a lethal dose around 300 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, which means a medium-sized human would have to swallow a liter of perfume before feeling seriously ill.

Michelangelo’s David can topple over and kill you or your chaud-froid de grives au Gevrey-Chambertin can result in a kitchen fire, all art forms provide beauty at the expense of some risk, and the ratio of risk to pleasure afforded by perfume is as low as any.

These have given us a slew of sandalwood-like materials ranging from Sandela (1960) to the fabulously powerful Javanol (2000) via Sandalore, Ebanol, Polysantol, and Osyrol.

Dune, Angel, Chiffon Sorbet)

known as the Big Five—Takasago, Firmenich, Givaudan, IFF, and Symrise—produce raw fragrance materials as well as compounding perfume oils.

You can no more predict the next great beautiful perfumery idea than you can predict the next catchy melody before you hear it

The fragrances known as soliflores, meant to represent a single material or flower, nice as they may be, have a hard time competing with the best perfumes unless they cheat in more interesting directions, because, unlike perfumers, flowers aren’t interested in us. Having heard innumerable passionate panegyrics on the smell of this or that blossom—honeysuckle, mimosa, gardenia, rose, linden, lily of the valley, get out your garden catalog and fill in the rest—I have taken the time to poke my face into many flowers, after checking for biting or stinging inhabitants. They have smelled mostly pleasant, occasionally harsh or disappointingly simple, ethereal or syrup

Flowers are things I like to smell in passing, not on me.