Per Fume Smoke
Cleopatra, Soaps and Candles for Christmas
It’s time to wake up and smell the soap. And the candles. This year I’ve done a lot more with beeswax and goat’s milk. It is a dizzying way to spend time, away from my desk and all those endless words… to the world of smell and texture.
I’ve been intoxicating myself with ‘new’ fragrances- frankincense, myrrh, cranberry and cinammon… I love this time of year, crawling towards the Solstice, everyone is wrecked and pretending not to be and nobody wonders why we do this anymore…
I’m interested in smells. The only thing we can’t record or measure in our range of senses. When I was a child I heard a man saying on the radio that he was emitting a particular smell over the radiowaves, but holding my nose up to the radio for a long time, nothing came through the speaker. Only his voice, trying to convince us that a smell was being broadcast through the waves.
Smell is intensly evocative. My brother had a gang of friends and one of them, called Georgina, always wore patchouli oil. I could smell her in the house before I ever heard or saw her. My Grandmother Mary Catherine smelled of Yves Saint Larent and cigarettes, my other Grandmother Monty smelled of cigarettes and perhaps bread, I don’t remember as she was lying prostrate for many years, riddled with strokes. Now, the smell of nursing homes… I cannot describe what I smelled there, only that this particular one was run by the nuns which smelled acutely of disinfectant and wax. I will always remember my sister Kristin in the smell of baking sourdough bread, garlic and Nagchampa incense. She never wore perfume, she hated it. My mother wore sharp citrusy fragrances, sometimes roses. My father, probably Old Spice, lashings of it. There are a range of other smells that are very distinct in my memory but they evoke terrible memories and I’m trying to be cheerful…
The word perfume comes from the Latin perfumare, meaning "to smoke through". In the world, the first recorded chemist is a woman called Tapputi, a perfume maker found in the Cuneiform Table in Babylonian Mesopotamia around 1200 BCE. She was in the Mesopotamian government as the overseer of the Mesopotamian Royal Palace. She developed methods for scent extraction that would lay the basis for perfume making, using solvents. She recorded her techniques and methods and those were passed on, with her most groundbreaking technique in using solvents.
Perfume and perfumery also existed in the Indus Civilisation, 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE. The earliest distillation of Ittar is mentioned in the Hindu Ayurvedic text Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita. The perfume references are part of a larger text called Brihat-Samhita written by Varāhamihira, an Indian astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer living in the city of Ujjain. He was one of the ‘nine jewels’ in the court of Vikramaditya. The perfume portion mainly deals with the manufacture of perfumes to benefit ‘royal personages’.
As civilizations advanced, so did the methods for using perfumes. Ancient Egyptians used fragrance for personal adornment and they moisturized their skin with essential oils. Scent was a daily ritual and ritual and Cleopatra was one of the earliest known wearers of perfume. She mixed her own fragrances made from flowers, oils and spices to attract powerful admirers such as Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony, so it is said.
In Cleopatra’s day, the concoction she used was known as Mendesian perfume, after the city in which it originated, Mendes. The written recipe survived in ancient Greek and Roman. Archaeologists have tried to reconstruct the scent of Cleopatra using classical sources and the technique of paleobotany to both identify and recreate the scent. They came up with a perfume that had a spicy base note of freshly ground myrrh and cinnamon and accompanied by sweetness. It is a recipe that has remained potent since they produced it a number of years ago (2021 I believe), a quality associated with Egyptian perfumes already in Theophrastus’s time.
Maybe they did get close to Cleopatra’s scent but it isn’t known whether the surviving Roman and Greek descriptions of the Mendesian perfume are the same as the Egyptian recipe. When a recipe calls for pine resin, should that come from pine or cedar trees? That is just one of many problems.
Charred resins found in incense burners in the city, which was located on an ancient trade route that transported frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean, did reveal traces of burnt frankincense and myrrh. A team from the University of Pisa studied 46 vessels, jars, cups, and bits of organic material from the tomb of an ancient Egyptian architect and his wife. Publishing their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the team found residues of oil, fat and beeswax—all of which would have been scentless bases for perfumes with fragrant ingredients like juniper berries and nut grass.
Research on Cleopatra’s perfume continues. Smell’s importance lingers on. Of the five senses, smell is the one most closely linked to emotions and memory. Smell is the only sense to fully develop in fetuses while in the womb. Smell gives food its flavour and evokes long buried memories unexpectedly…
Arabia was the first region to develop perfumery exquisite mixes of animal and plant extracts. As the Ancient Roman Empire spread its influence, its secret perfume recipes spread, too. Arabia sent skilled perfumers at the request of Roman emperors to help create some of their finest blends. Pliny the Elder describes perfume making and its ingredients in Naturalis Historia.
The oldest perfumery was discovered in Cyprus in 2005- an enormous factory that existed 4,000 years ago, and over 99 acres, this was an industrial pursuit.
Iranians perfected the extraction of fragrances through steam distillation, and used musk, roses and amber. They had access to a wider range of spices, resins, herbs, precious woods, and animal fragrance materials such as ambergris and musk. Many of the flowers and herbs used in perfumery were cultivated by the Iranians — rose and jasmine were native to Iran along with bitter orange and other citrus tree.
The Arabic philosopher Al-Kindi (c. 801–873) wrote a book on perfumes called ‘Book of the Chemistry of Perfume and Distillations’ in which there’s over a hundred recipes for fragrant oils, salves, aromatic waters and substitutes for medicines.
The art of creating perfumes travelled to Europe with the influence of the scholars of the Middle East and soon the task of creating perfumes was put into the hands of the alchemists who worked away in mysterious laboratories, unlocking the secrets of perfumery. Recipes of perfumes from the monks of Santa Maria Delle Vigne or Santa Maria Novella in Florence were known from 1221.
The art of perfumery flourised in Renaissance Italy. Catherine de Medici had a personal perfumer, Rene le Florentin, whose laboratory was an extension of her own aparments, connected by a secret passageway, to ensure that nobody would rob the recipes.
The Hungarians developed the first modern perfume made from scented oils in an alcohol solution in 1370, as commanded by Queen Elizabeth of Hungary. In the 17th century, the first synthetic chemical was used to capture the scent of flowers and create a more complex combination of fragrances, marking the dawn of modern perfumery.
So, if you’d like to try some of the scented soaps and candles that I’ve made from Goats’ milk, Donkey’s Milk, Aloe Vera (soap bases) and natural bees wax candles, scented with Frankincense, Myrrh, Cranberry, Cinammon, May Chang, Ylang Ylang… all depending on your sense of smell and inclination.. please do PM me letters@siofraodonovan.com for your orders before the shop closes!
If you don’t feel like beautiful natural soaps and candles, you could just buy me a coffee as all the blogging I do here is for free… thank you and Happy Solstice, Christmas and all of that!
PRICES: BEESWAX SOAPS 12 EURO, OTHER NATURAL SOAPS 10 EURO
SMALL BEESWAX CANDLES 12 EURO, LARGE 16 EURO
CANDLES IN GLASSES: 18 EURO
ORDER HERE: LETTERS@SIOFRAODONOVAN.COM
Facinating research into perfume origins and love that you have put it into practise, your range of soaps and candles look very enticing!!!
Gosh Síofra, I didn't think I would enjoy a post about perfume so much! I only read it because you wrote it to be honest. I intensely dislike (mass produced) perfume, which turns my stomach and makes me feel nauseous. Even if I hug someone who is wearing perfume, I can smell it on my clothes and generally have to change out of them as soon as possible. This post has given me a whole new insight into 'real' perfume. Thank you!