The creation of pleasant scents is an activity that is as old as the preparation of food and remedies. Probably, most of us have experienced during childhood the desire to extract and to reproduce the scents around us, even before we knew the meaning of the word "perfume" and "perfumer". This desire to capture the odor of living things, bottling their essence (scent and taste are usually the first thing a child thinks when he says the name of a flower or a fruit) precedes all forms of art. The desire to capture a scent has a profound power and it can be detected in all historical ages, outside the perfume workshop and this process equals the definition of art in the most literal sense. You "trap" the invisible essence of things, both their objective and emotional nature, but being able to perform this act means understanding its inner nature and the balance of odors. You deconstruct a scent and then you reconstruct it from your available materials. The work is finally validated (or not) by others, because the "essence of things", both the scent and the emotion, have universal values, recognized by all individuals from the same group.
Before the personal preference, a perfume is subject to objective aesthetic criteria and these have a universal value.
It is interesting to see how frequent this "temptation" is experienced by kids who will later become artists / writers. However, I wish to make a clear distinction between perfume, as an act of discovery or sensorial exploration, and perfume as an act of creation.
There are a great number of fragrance amateurs (from amatorem, lover of), attached to the study of perfumes and without formal training in a world where the true training is extremely rare, but amateurism has rather a negative light in this art. "Do it yourself perfume" is more a game than a true possibility because this art is neither accessible, nor obvious or easy to understand.
The secret of the perfume is not the formula, but how to combine ingredients, how to separate the essential from the non essential with the purpose to recreate particular scents and later to invent other. When this love of perfumes is combined with entrepreneurial spirit you have a new market, for ingredients and for "information".
I have the privilege to own and read everything that has been published about perfumes since the early days of writing, but also the unique chance given by the direct experience with many historical scents and raw materials. Many years ago, a short and obscure text written by Guy Robert in the early 80's or late 70's had a profound impact on my thinking. The elegant, but also very subtle text (because it did not fully reveal the thoughts of the great perfumer) was certainly inspired by those who were writing about formulation or history of perfumes in those days without being perfumers or, at least, having a formal training in the lab.
In the era when all perfumes are subject to reviews it might seem unconceivable that you could write about history without smelling the "old bottles". But many wrote about perfumes in the past (before the 90's) without "bottles" under their nose.
When an amateur tries to learn or to understand, he will often search for books, but this is often a trap, because correct formulae of individual notes (not even perfumes) have rarely been published and those which were "unveiled" where never published with the intention to give the information or the "secret".
During the second half of the XIXth century, several books were published and some editions are still in print. No copyright to pay! It is true that Piesse, Rimmel and Atkinson, all perfumers and business men, were presenting correct information about plants and their extraction, but the formulae of their perfumes were neither correct, nor complete formula of a true fragrance. Before WWII, there were hundreds of small brands which sold their perfumes in all possible places. Entrepreneurship has never more appealing all around the world. In fact, these three famous perfumers were selling the dream of creating a fragrance at home or the dream to open a small shop with perfumes. For a small clientele the quality was satisfactory, but you couldn't even dream to compete with Guerlain, Piver, Lubin or even with the perfumes sold by the authors, Rimmel and Piesse. Too many things were actually missing from their formulae.
Later, at the end of the XIXth century, other formulae books appeared. They were actually a soup of these previous 3 works, they were not written by perfumers, but revealed something else: books about perfume industry sold very well. Just imagine the number of chemists and drugstores in USA and Europe. Some of them were selling their own cologne or floral extracts before the invention of "mass market perfumes" and these "books" were perfect for them.
As Germany became very powerful in the perfume industry (the study of essential oils and the production of first synthetic molecules) they invented the most clever way to sell their products in countries where they had a strong influence and presence before WWI. These were the perfume formulae books written in a very encyclopedic style.
You have certainly met the books of Mann, Wagner and Winter (at least 5 editions) and dreamt about all the formulae inside. In fact, these books are less innocent they would appear under their academic style, and they do not reveal many of the things their authors knew.
H.Mann was a "nickname" for Haarmann and Reimer. The first edition was in fact a "marketing tool" for the German industry. When later a new edition came, authored by Winter, it was in fact a new book proposed by the giant producer of essential oils called Schimmel (and signed by its chief perfumer).
Schimmel (reports), Gildemeister (the books) and Guenther (the books) had the same source of knowledge, a German company that became American after WWII. But you do not sell your essential oils with a huge, well written book detailing their chemical composition. You sell them "proposing" formulae easy to use.
The intention of these books was never to reveal the true creation or formulation of perfumes but to sell ingredients. The formulae were rich in natural (expensive) ingredients in a time when synthetic molecules and "artificial oils" were already used. Many are prototypes from the XIXth century and there are very few "modern" formulae (modern at the time when the book was written) and very few "famous" perfumes, as if they did not knew them. On the contrary, looking inside the old catalogues of Schimmel and Haarmann and Reimer, it is clear they were very aware about all the known perfumes of the era. A small entrepreneur in Budapest would buy the Mann-Winter book and he will order the many expensive naturals from the Schimmel representative, as they had a huge network before WWII, unlike their competitors from Grasse. But this small entrepreneur will never be able to produce a fashionable perfume, nor to make profits with such an expensive formula. It is extremely important to remember that the cost of a formula is not an invention of the modern marketing.
But what exactly these old and famous books did not reveal? The German industry was obsessed with innovation, price, efficiency and of course the protection of secrets. Already in 1899 they had patents on synthetic oils. Having a German book with formulae is like having a propaganda book. A "secret" in 1912 was a correct and complete formula of a lilac, a violet or a lily of the valley. You need 10 ingredients to make them, but their true identity and the correct proportion is not something obvious. When you are a perfumer with several years of experience, it is out of the question that you cannot "recreate" the scent of a simple composition / base if none of its ingredients is unknown to you.
One should remember that all German companies before WWII were selling also accurate artificial oils of flowers with a very good price compared to their friends in Grasse. So, why would a company reveal to the world the formula of their "flowers"? For this reason, you can find a lot of "incorrect" formulae. If I give you an unbalanced lily of the valley formula with an overdosed synthetic, if you have little experience, you will be tempted to use a natural to "cover" or "correct" the harshness. This was a very clever way to sell naturals. If I'm a producer of ionones I will show you a lilac with ionone a (which is an incorrect formula). Comparing the German perfumes I have, created before 1925 with the published "formulae", the differences are huge in style and intention.
The same method started to be used in France around the same period and it is useful to compare the "knowledge" inside these books with the true scents available in Paris, sold by famous houses or by known manufacturers.
René Cerbelaud, a pharmacist and owner of a perfume shop near Ecole Militaire, wrote his huge book in 1908 and it was reprinted until the 50's. But though he is right with many observations, he is wrong with many "formulae". Many were just an attempt because he was not a perfumer, but a formulator. Something even more bizarre happens in the 20's and 30's. A huge number of articles with formulae were published in a trade magazine in Grasse. Hundreds of formulae were "revealed", but all were using only natural, very expensive ingredients, without any reference to synthetics. Even the lily of the valley and the lilac were "revealed" in the late 20's with floral infusions of the XIXth century. In fact, they were not real formulae, their intention was to promote and sell the expensive floral absolutes produced only in Grasse. The author used a pen name, but he was very famous in the industry. Explaining what's inside a perfume, how it works and how you can build beautiful scents with few but precise ingredients meant loosing your job.
Another case is the famous writer Poucher who became the perfumer of Yardley, several years after he wrote his first book, but I do not believe he is the real author (or not 100% the author of the 1923 edition).
In fact, the only book where important things were revealed, but hard to decipher because of other reasons, is a huge work published in 1931. The author, Félix Cola, worked for several known manufacturers of specialties and died mysteriously (!) in an accident in 1932.
When perfumer Paul Jellinek wrote his small book about perfumes, he presented long and strange formulae (quoted from other sources) for somebody who knew precisely what's inside a type of scent. He composed bases with modern ingredients but what he "unveiled" are useless formulae, built at least 30 years before, so different from the style of the 50's. I had the privilege to look inside several production formulae from the early days of Dragoco and Haarmann & Reimer. They had nothing to do with the "formulae" published by the same companies or those who worked with them.
All these books have been quoted without the proper criticism by other writers and the information was rarely taken with the necessary precaution. Many are "dangerous" books, unless you master the creation of perfumes and you are able of critical reading. Of course, it depends on your expectations from the book. In fact, despite their scholar or scientifically approach, these works published before the 60's, belong to the same tradition of "Segreti", a type of book extremely popular in Italy during the Renaissance.
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Fragrance is the 8th Art - Octavian Coifan - Le Parfum est le 8ème Art
