A Master Perfumer's Reflections on Patchouli and Vetiver
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
I recommend everybody not familiar with perfumery to go to a Sephora or similar store and try these two masterpieces. They are so iconic (and popular) that you ll get memories of people wearing them in your past; the memory of smell is really strong.
This was a revelation to me when I did that before some years and made me really love perfumes after that!
https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=ta&text=vetiver&op=... (You can listen to the pronunciation of the English version and the Tamil version in the Google Translate link above).
I remember my childhood days when the vetiver roots were used to add fragrance to bath water and fragrance & taste to summer drinks.
I distinctly remember a bottle of cologne I was given by a girlfriend back when dinosaurs walked the earth and secretaries still existed in companies. If I wore the cologne on Saturday night and any of the secretaries got a good sniff on Monday, I would get ribbed about having had a really good weekend. It was actively difficult to get rid of all the fragrance. That simply doesn't happen with modern scents.
I presume that some extremely key ingredient has been found to be horribly toxic or terribly inhumane to collect.
Also definitely possible things like shrinkflation are at play.
https://www.scotchnaturals.com/beauty-makeup/the-difference-...
Also after the 80s, where fragrances were much stronger, it's just a "trend" nowadays to have weaker fragrances.
Of course it's also greed, because very often fragrances get reformulated without an obvious external reason and they often end up a shadow of their former selves. If a fragrance has a critical popularity, you can simply cut it's potency in half and people will still buy it.
I also want to add that the performance of a fragrance depends a lot on the moisture of your skin. Fragrances disappear on dry skin much quicker. So if you moisturize your skin before applying a fragrance, you will have longer of it. My skin got much drier with age (and it's getting worse), so maybe this is also part of what you are observing.
I knew that historically perfumers took their job very seriously, but I was unaware that kind of artisanal appreciation was still around; I thought it was mostly a corporate laboratory kind of thing now.
Many perfumers are trained chemists, but it’s definitely not a prerequisite.
It is somewhat rare, as often the people who are truly good at what they do would rather do it than write about it.
"But the remarkable thing about it is that among men who really know something, the looks quickly cease to matter. I remember very clearly the dinner party where I first met L. L. Thurstone, the engineer who became a psychologist and developed the powerful statistical method called factor analysis.
[...] within ten seconds after he began to talk, I could no longer see the face at all, for I was looking at a mind. The excitement of hearing his reasoning and his experience led the whole party out into an area of intellect where such trivia as looks and clothes, the room, the dinner, all faded into the background. I think we rose not knowing what we had eaten and had brandy afterwards up in the flow of the conversation. I suppose it was painful to our hostess that we did not notice much her careful preparations; but if I have forgotten her entrée, I have not forgotten her guest of honor."
Natural smells are very often poisons targeting insects, infections or grazers. The target isn’t often humans or mammals in general which is why things are relatively safe, but many are still active to some degree.
Unfortunately I don't have a reference (read that a few years ago). Would be interested to know if it's true.
Giant hogweed is completely natural. You do not want it on your skin, in any concentration.
On the other hand, it blows my mind reading this and feeling a bit stuffed up - one smell and about 3 seconds would be so much more information than this article. Not that the article is bad, but I can't even imagine what the scent would be without already knowing it. If only we had smell-o-vision.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/ma...