jani lane: Fragrance

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Fragrance

Perfume is a mixture of fragrant essential oils and aroma compounds, fixatives, and solvents used to give the human body, animals, objects, and living spaces a "pleasant" smell.
The word perfume used today derives from the Latin "per fumum", meaning through smoke. Perfumery, or the art of making perfumes, began in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt and was further refined by the Romans and Persians.
Although perfume and perfumery also existed in India, much of its fragrances are incense based. The earliest distillation of Attar was mentioned in the Hindu Ayurvedic text Charaka Samhita. The Harshacharita, written in 7th century A.D. in Northern India mentions use of fragrant agarwood oil.
The world's first recorded chemist is considered to be a woman named Tapputi, a perfume maker who was mentioned in a cuneiform tablet from the second millennium BC in Mesopotamia.[1] She distilled flowers, oil, and calamus with other aromatics then filtered and put them back in the still several times