A bit of history

Once upon a time... there was a perfume industry. The Egyptians started it, the Greeks applied what they learned from the Egyptians, the Romans revolutionized the art of perfume making and the Moorish took it to the Spanish and the French by invading their countries! In the meantime, the Venetian merchants, besides goods purchased in Spain, brought to Florence a lot of information and secrets about perfumery. Due to this information transfer, Florence became the center of perfumery for about a hundred years.

Then the French created an industry, family owned and managed, and which remained that way for a couple of hundreds of years.This industry grew bigger and bigger until it exploded into a myriad of companies. Some of these companies made alliances with each other, some did not. The competition was fierce, casualties among the weaker perfumeries were numerous, and outside the walls of Grasse and Paris, many companies, outsiders to the perfume industry, were awaiting the victims.

The victims fell; companies were sold to petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals or other giants. It was the beginning of the period when the perfumers were drowned by numbers and statistics. The creativity of these perfumers was analyzed by financial auditing companies, market tests started, and organizations with initials became unavoidable : MSDS, CTFA, PETA, MCS, RIFM, IFRA, C of A, GC, ISO 9000 and the ever present, C.H.E.A.P. and F.A.S.T.E.R.

Farewell Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, hero perfumer of Patrick Suskind's book: "Perfume, the story of a murderer"! It is a new world now.

By the end of the second millennium, the perfume industry was no longer French or Italian only; it is now world wide and has lost most of its individuality, through discoveries of all peoples of the world. Trends are now similar in all continents because perfumes, and people, travel at supersonic speed. Each major country has now a different impact on the future of perfume creation. Today's perfumers are as attentive to the wishes of the women of Asia and south America as they are to the ones in Paris or in New York..

Perfumers are ready to enter the third millennium and, who knows, they might have to be attentive, very soon, to the needs of female beings in other galaxies.