A Nose for History

by Joanna McLaughlin, exclusive to thePerfume-Reporter

Actually, perfume didn't change the world. Money and perfume changed the world. And it all started with two families, one of which had the unfortunate surname of Fugger. The other family is a little better known: the Medicis. What they did was change the way the world worked in terms of money. Up until the Fuggers (from Bavaria, now Germany) and the Medicis (from Tuscany, now Italy), you could only get money two ways: you were born to it or you married into it. That pretty much left money to the aristocracy.

The Medicis and the Fuggers figured out ways to make money but what they did was more revolutionary than ordinary people today with rags-to-riches stories. They got rich although they were not aristocrats. They weren't high-born. They had no connections and definitely did not have the right genes. They weren't titled (until later on) and they weren't typical.

The kings and popes and noblemen of the era would have probably ignored these common upstarts, if they could have, except for one thing. The Medicis and the Fuggers (who worked independently, but the way, but both practically invented the banking principles the world uses today) had all of the money.

No kidding, kings would come to the Lorenzo di Medici and ask him if they could borrow money. Nobody says this much in the history books, but the Medicis and the Fuggers changed the world.

When having money started to become more influential than having the right parents, the doors opened to what would become the middle class. It was now possible to get money a third way: you could earn it.

With wealth came a desire for the luxuries of the aristocrats. Perfume, once a treasure so rare that only kings and their courts could afford it (remember, in the Bible, Judas is mad when a woman puts perfume on Jesus, because it was "so expensive" and the money might have been better used elsewhere). Other luxury items were included in the middle class list of "must haves": fancy clothes, shoes, gloves, decent food, even servants.

The Medicis patronized the arts. They maintained a library. Knowledge, artistic endeavor, politics, war, governments, and architecture all became part of what commoners, albeit with money, might indulge themselves in.

One of those luxury items included perfume. From the Crusades, European soldiers had returned with exotic scents from the world-famous perfumers of Arabia. Marco Polo reportedly brought back perfume from China and the Far East to his native Venice. The Medicis and the Fuggers taught us that this wasn't stuff for only queens.

The perfume trade has always relied on the exotic. Local plants and flowers that make local scents soon seem ordinary to jaded nostrils. As demand for perfume increased in the 15th century (because a growing middle class of people wanted the stuff and could pay for it) so did demand for exotic ingredients.

Enter Christopher Columbus. An explorer by trade, his mission was always a business trip. He was trying to figure out a way for Europe to make a beeline for the Malabar Coast of India, which is famous for its spices. To Europeans, these spices were very rare, as precious as rubies. A group of merchants could make its way to the south of India and back (indeed, they often had, that's how Columbus knew where he was going) but the route was just too long and time consuming and the journey too perilous for a consistent flow of trade.

Spices were not unheard of in Europe at the time, but they were very rare. Salt was common enough, but not pepper. Black pepper, ounce for ounce, was more precious than gold in Columbus's day. It could be used to season food or for fragrance. Likewise with other spices like cinammon or cardamon. All of this was plentiful on the Malabar Coast, and the Indians appeared quite eager to trade with the Europeans. The problem was getting there and back.

Columbus and others embarked on voyages of discovery. I'm no historian, but I think Columbus died thinking he had found India, but just never located the part he was looking for. He called the people there Indians. When they showed him some native plants, he assumed they were showing him the "pepper" that Europeans wanted.

A New World was discovered, which did not really help the perfume trade at first, but soon it was possible to travel from Europe to India in relatively economy and safety.

Perfume was not a big subject again in world history until the 1920s, when once again, an emerging middle class demanded the fine scents that were usually reserved for the wealthy. Aristocrats were pretty much off the scene, at least in the United States, but they had been replaced by old money, which was now getting replaced with another emerging middle class that wanted perfume.

Perfume seems to go well with the economic depressions, probably because it's an affordable luxury at a time when the world is collapsing. Perfume arrived on the scene before the Great Depression and the second World War and although it might have lost a bit of momentum to the war effort, it never disappeared. In the boom years following the war, perfume was right there. In fact, it was hard to find a middle class home without it.

In the olden days, you had to be a queen to commission the services of a perfumer to make a particular fragrance. Today, you pretty much have to be a celebrity. Not much has changed, our celebrities are our royalty. And Brittney Spears knows as much about perfume as Marie Antoinette, that is, as a consumer mainly and as a person with enough money to hire a quality perfume-maker.

Today, perfume is still a luxury that the middle class demands. Even young girls or college kids without much money often make sacrifices to be sure they have some scent.

Perfumes today rely on artificial ingredients, despite a trend in many consumer fields to go toward the natural. Natural ingredients aren't necessarily better when it comes to fragrance. Synthetic ingredients can be made to more specific quality standards than natural scents. In addition, synthetic ingredients do not put a strain on certain natural resources. For instance, India is losing a lot of sandalwood forests when we can make a wonderful synthetic version of the odorant molecule in a lab.

That's how perfume is changing the world today. We're realizing that just because we can make something in a laboratory does not make us bad people and it certainly doesn't make the product bad. There is a time and place for science, and most perfumistas are pretty comfortable with the idea of synthetic fragrances. After all, one of the world's great scents, Chanel No. 5, was based heavily on aldehyde, a synthetic molecule that was once described as smelling "like sparkles."

The other day, it occurred to me that I do not know much about the fragrances of the Far East or the Middle East. Both of those regions have ancient perfume-making traditions and no doubt a lot of unusual exotic ingredients. In a society that grows more global every day, why have we not really shared the secret perfumes of these distant lands? I think it's a metaphor. We in the West don't really know the world of the East, although I suspect the converse is less true.

Perfume could change the world again when we start to seek out the fragrances of China, the perfumes of India, and the fine scents of Lebanon or Syria or Saudi Arabia. I know they're there, but I can't even really imagine them. Maybe we won't much care for them, but maybe we can learn from them. A hint of this, a wisp of that.

Just think if there are scents left undiscovered, plants we never knew, flowers we never smelled, moss or bark we can't even really imagine.

Perfume has changed the world before, maybe it will do it again.

<take me back to BASICS>