For thousands of years perfumes have existed in many shapes and forms. in childhood many children make their own versions of perfume by using various petals and water, and as they become older, particular women become part of the fragrance culture.
As children make pefume with petals this is in essence how real perfume can be made. the water is added to the petals to extract the fragrance from the petals into the water thus giving the perfume its aroma.
Today perfumers use (amongst other things) materials that have been extracted from various natural materials such as plants flowers and even foods such as fruits.
So things like juniperberry extract or rose oil could be ingredients that maybe used by the perfumer or even grapefruit oil to give a fruity dry topnote.
A perfumer creates his fragrances in stages and will generally have a base complex which contains the heavy lasting aroma and then the middle notes go on top to give the general fragrance of which the fragrance will be based on and finally a topnote of the more lighter specific notes that give the perfume its identity and disdigush it from other fragrances.
These materials used are very powerful and some are so strong that they are used at parts per million/billion or even lower in some cases , so the perfumer is able to use materials that are extremely costly but are viable to use due to the low use rate
So as we understand some of the materials used we can start to understand the complexity of perfumes and also why they are luxury items in the sense of cost.
Perfume can be expensive but when you relise that some ingredients used in fragrances cost more per kilo than Gold then you will start to understand the effort and cost that goes into these fragrances, perfume can be expensive for a very good reason.
So next time you dab on your favourite perfume remember you could be wearing liquid Gold.
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