Few would dispute the importance of petroleum to the world economy. In fact, some argue that in 1991 the United States and its allies fought a war in the Persian Gulf over this liquid that, at current prices, cost less than half a cent per fluid ounce and doesn't even smell all that good.
Imagine the lengths one might go to protect access to a liquid that, in some cases, cost over $100 per ounce-20,000 times the cost of crude petroleum. Wars may be fought again-advertising wars- this time to claim a portion of the international perfume market, which, according to Smithsonian magazine, has sales of $10 billion each year.
Ever since the ancient Mesopotamians first used perfume in burial rites over 4,000 years ago, humanking has developed an obsession with the scent and its willing to pay amazingly high prices for something as intangible as a smell.
Puzzles by my own inexplicable fondness for aftershave, I've spent sometime researching our culture's partiality to perfume. Evern if you're someone who doesn't especially like to dabble Chanel or Pole behind your ears, you probably smell someone else's fragrance everyday. Or maybe yor use a product made with perfumes- such as soap, facial tissue, insecticides, or even cattle feed.
With that in mind, we'll first discuss the ingredients of perfume and then we'll examine some of the new commercial applications of perfume
Let's start with the ingrediets.
Quite likely, you think of perfume only as a smelly liquid. But many connoisseurs of the stuff would disagree. In fact, perfume is complex mixture of many ingredients.
The most important ingredients of any perfume are a variety of aromatic oils, usually called essential oils. According to Edwin Morris in his book Fragrance, essential oils have two important properties- they easily evaporate and become gas at room temperature, ann they detectable to us as fragrance, in umimaginalbly minute quantites. The essential oil of the vanilla bean, ...