Scent and Memory: The Secret History of Perfume - Episode 4

00:00:00: I want you to try something right now.

00:00:03: Think of a smell, not the pretty one necessarily just one that stops You!

00:00:09: The particular cold metal sharpness of rain hitting hot pavement... ...the exact smell ever house you lived in as a child Petro Pine trees and summer heat Your grandmother's coat.

00:00:25: Have you got it?

00:00:27: Now notice what happened when you thought about it.

00:00:29: For most if you It wasn't just a smell.

00:00:32: It was a place, A feeling.

00:00:34: A person maybe Something that arrived whole and sudden The way memories rarely do when you try to force them.

00:00:41: This is not an accident.

00:00:42: Smell's the only one of our senses That bypasses the brain's logical processing centres And travels directly To their amygdala The region governing emotion & memory.

00:00:52: Every other sense gets filtered Interpreted Cross-referenced Before you feel it.

00:00:59: Smell arrives before You have chance.

00:01:01: think.

00:01:03: We are, in other words, wired to be ambushed by scent.

00:01:06: And yet we treat perfume as a finishing touch A luxury?

00:01:10: A small bottle of something nice we spray on before leaving the house.

00:01:14: Here is what I was surprised to find.

00:01:16: For most human history Perfume wasn't about smelling attractive.

00:01:21: It was about reaching the divine Cheating death Preserving memory and occasionally As well discover wearing the scars up at tree.

00:01:32: Today we're talking about perfume.

00:01:34: Where it actually came from, how it works on your brain what it costs to make and why a molecule that in high concentration smells like rotten garbage is responsible for the intoxicating quality of jasmine.

00:01:47: I'm Alexandra Welcome To The Hidden Life Of Things Everyday History.

00:01:50: For Anyone Who's Ever Looked At Something Ordinary And Wondered How Did This Actually Get Here?

00:02:04: That etymology is the whole history in two words.

00:02:08: The first perfumes were not liquids you wore on your skin, they were fires.

00:02:12: Fires built from fragrant resins woods and dried plants.

00:02:17: cedar mure frankincense juniper which released their scent of smoke that rose upward.

00:02:23: Upward toward whatever was up there.

00:02:25: every ancient culture we know have used fragrance smoke in religious practice.

00:02:30: We have evidence of it in ancient Egypt.

00:02:33: Temples burned kipfi, a complex blend of sixteen or more ingredients including juniper berries, raisins, lapdenum resin and ceremonies that were as much about chemistry as devotion!

00:02:54: The specifics differ.

00:02:55: Of course, the underlying idea is remarkably consistent that a good smell rises to meet which growing the dry rocky landscapes of Oman, Somalia and Yemen has been traded and burned for at least five thousand years.

00:03:16: It was valuable enough to be listed alongside gold as a gift.

00:03:20: in multiple ancient traditions We've recently discovered that frankincense contains a compound Which has mild psychoactive and mood elevating effects.

00:03:28: when inhaled The ancient instinct this substance brought you closer to your spiritual state.

00:03:33: wasn't entirely wrong!

00:03:35: The chemistry is doing something real.

00:03:37: The leap from sacred smoke to personal scent happened gradually over millennia.

00:03:42: Egyptian priests were among the first to wear fragrance, pressed into solid cones of animal fat worn on top of their head which melted slowly in heat and released scent throughout day.

00:03:53: Fragrant oils rubbed into skin appear across ancient cultures in ancient India, in the courts of the Persian Empire.

00:03:59: In Ancient Rome where perfume baths and scented oils were part daily life for anyone who could afford them.

00:04:05: but the technology that made perfumers we know it possible I concentrated portable liquid scent required a different invention one that came not from a perfumer's workshop.

00:04:19: In the ninth century CE, a scholar in what is now Iraq wrote to book roughly translated into The Book of the Chemistry Of Perfume and Distillations.

00:04:28: His name was Ishaq al-Kindi And he's known in history as philosophy.

00:04:32: As first philosopher in Arabic tradition He wasn't primarily trying make beautiful scent but was trying to extract What he understood as soul.

00:04:44: Al-Kindi, building on earlier work by scholars including the Persian physician Sina known in the West as Avicenna was developing and refining the technology of distillation.

00:04:55: The process of heating a substance until it vaporizes then capturing and cooling those vapors to produce concentrated liquid.

00:05:03: It wasn't hard –a simple idea–in practice though changed world Distillation allowed something that had never been possible before.

00:05:11: You could take a solid rose petal and turn its volatile aromatic compounds into clear concentrated liquid, rose water then rose oil.

00:05:22: Suddenly you can bottle the smell, transport it store or trade.

00:05:28: this technology spread westward along trade routes and arrived in Europe during medieval period.

00:05:34: For several centuries after its introduction, the line between perfume and medicine was essentially non-existent.

00:05:40: The Great Perfume Centers of Medieval and Renaissance Europe particularly in Italy later France were also apothecaries.

00:05:48: Fragrant waters where prescribed as treatment drunk as tonics used to purify air that is believed carry disease.

00:05:54: people drank there or their cologne.

00:05:56: This sounds strange until you understand that Cologne water was originally formulated a tonic in medicinal preparation.

00:06:03: The fragrant drinking version came before the wearing version.

00:06:07: The same products that scented skin were also swallowed, rubbed onto wounds and burned to disinfect rooms.

00:06:13: Perfume and pharmacy where one discipline!

00:06:16: The separation of perfume into its own distinct category something worn purely for pleasure in attraction rather than medicine or devotion is a relatively recent development And it happened in large part In once more town...in Southern France.

00:06:30: The town of Grasse sits in the hills above French Riviera surrounded by fields of roses, jasmine, lavender and orange blossom.

00:06:39: Today it is considered the perfume capital of this world And for several centuries it dominated the industry In a way that shaped how all us think about fragrance.

00:06:48: But they didn't start in flowers.

00:06:50: It all started with leather!

00:07:00: pungent business.

00:07:01: When Catherine de' Medici, who had bought Italian perfumes to the French court popularized a fashion for perfume gloves The leather workers of the town saw an opportunity.

00:07:12: They began growing fragrant flowers To send their products developed expertise to extract those fragrances and gradually transformed Their entire local economy from leather to perfume.

00:07:23: by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were supplying the course of Europe.

00:07:28: The dominance of France more broadly meant that French terms became the global language of perfumery.

00:07:35: Top notes, heart notes, bass notes or de parfume all the toilette were garless aware in a world where fragrance was created or worn.

00:07:43: but the actual ingredients for perfume were never European!

00:07:47: The raw materials of scent have always come from around the world and history is largely part of global trade And in its darker tap deserve extraction and exploitation.

00:07:59: Sandalwood, the warm creamy base note found in perfumes across every tradition comes primarily from India where it has been used in religious & personal fragrance for thousands of years... ...and from Australia which now produces significant quantities.

00:08:14: It is slow growing heavily protected.. ..and was historically subject to severe over harvesting.

00:08:20: Patuli That distinctive earthy, slightly sweet scent strongly associated with the nineteen-sixties counterculture in the West comes from a plant native to Southeast Asia particularly Indonesia and the Philippines where it had been used traditional textile making for centuries before European traders began shipping.

00:08:39: Vetiver, a complex smoky grassy root used as the base note in hundreds of perfumes is harvested from a grass grown primarily in Haiti India and Indonesia.

00:08:50: Haiti's the world's largest producer And vetiver farming has been an important part of the island economy for over a century.

00:08:57: The story of perfume Is not a French Story.

00:09:00: France refined their technology and created commercial language ingredients raw materials foundational knowledge of aromatic plants.

00:09:08: That knowledge is global, ancient and stretches across every continent.

00:09:13: And some of the most sophisticated fragrance traditions in the world developed entirely outside Europe.

00:09:18: In Japan there's a practice called Kodo Translated as The Way Of Incense or sometimes the way of fragrance.

00:09:25: It developed in the Heian period roughly one thousand years ago and reached its most refined form among Japanese aristocracy in the fourteen then fifteen centuries.

00:09:35: Kuro is not about smelling perfume.

00:09:38: It's about listening to it.

00:09:40: The Japanese verb used for experiencing incense, is kiku To listen rather than kagu to smell.

00:09:47: the distinction Is deliberate and meaningful?

00:09:49: To Listen to a fragrance implies different quality of attention slower more receptive less acquisitive.

00:09:57: You're not consuming this smell you are receiving.

00:10:00: A coddle session involves small pieces of fragrant wood being gently heated over charcoal, releasing their scent in thin cool streams.

00:10:09: Participants cup the hands around the sensor and breathe in very slowly.

00:10:14: There are formal games.

00:10:15: In one, participants must identify which of several fragrant woods is which or recognize a scent associated with passage of classical

00:10:23: literature.".

00:10:23: The world's oldest wood used in Kodo – A piece of agarwood called Ranjatai held the Imperial Treasury at Nara has been there since the eighth century.

00:10:33: It is considered national treasure.

00:10:39: And it brings us to one of the most extraordinary facts in this entire episode.

00:10:44: Oud does not occur on a healthy tree!

00:10:47: The Aquilaria Tree, native to the rainforests of Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia produces no scent at all when is alive or thriving.

00:10:56: But When certain trees become infected by specific species of mold something remarkable happens.

00:11:03: The tree mounts an immune response producing dark dense, intensely aromatic resin that permeates the hardwood.

00:11:11: The infected wood is called agarwood or oud – the uninfected wood which looks identical from outside has no value!

00:11:19: In other words we're wearing the scar tissue of a tree.

00:11:23: The smell of oud, that dark complex smokey animalic almost medicinal quality is the smell of a living thing fighting back against something they were trying to destroy it.

00:11:34: Ood now one of most expensive raw materials on earth sometimes worth more than gold by weight.

00:11:40: The wild trees that produce it have been so intensively harvested, That most species are now endangered or protected.

00:11:47: Perfume industry and the cultures of their Arabian Gulf South Asia & East Asia where oud has been beloved for centuries Are now largely supplied by cultivated trees that have been deliberately infected with mold.

00:12:00: And then there is a scent from India.

00:12:01: I think its the most quietly extraordinary in all perfumery.

00:12:05: It is called Miti Ata and it's the smell of rain.

00:12:09: More precisely, its the first rain falling on dry earth after a long dry season.

00:12:14: that particular ancient deeply comforting smell scientists call Petricor.

00:12:19: Its produced when rainwater disturbs chemicals in parched soil and releases them into air Perfumers in the city of Kannauj, in Uttar Pradesh India.

00:12:30: A City that has been a centre fragrance for over a thousand years discovered a way to capture it.

00:12:36: They take sun-dried clay from the ground and distill its volatile compounds very gently into sandalwood oil.

00:12:43: The resort smells unmistakably exactly like rain on dust.

00:12:48: Let me tell you about Indole.

00:12:51: Indole is a chemical compound at high concentrations and I want to be precise here.

00:12:55: It smells powerfully of decay, rotting organic matter things you would cross the street to avoid in tiny trace concentrations.

00:13:04: indole Is what gives jasmine and gardenia there intoxicating almost hypnotic quality that depth That suggestion of something slightly warm an animal underneath The floral sweetness that is indole And every major Jasmine fragrance In the world contains it.

00:13:20: Perfumers have long understood what neurochemists are now beginning to explain that the most compelling smells are never purely pleasant.

00:13:29: They contain something complex, something slightly challenging... Something the brain has to work with!

00:13:35: Perfume is not pretty smell it's tension.

00:13:38: It is management of contrast.

00:13:41: This why perfume is described in notes top heart and base which unfold over time.

00:13:48: The top notes are what you smell first, the small light volatile molecules that evaporate within the first fifteen to thirty minutes.

00:13:55: Citrus, bergamot, green herbs, ginger.

00:13:58: they're bright and immediate and designed make want keep smelling!

00:14:03: They are opening line of sentence.

00:14:06: The heart notes emerge as the top note fades.

00:14:09: Florals, spices woods their lighter end rose jasmine cardamom oris root.

00:14:17: These are the personality of their fragrance.

00:14:19: The part that lasts three or four hours and constitutes most of what you experience wearing it.

00:14:24: through a day, the base notes arrive last in state longest ,the heavy slow-moving molecules sandalwood vetiver wood vanilla ambiguity musks.

00:14:35: they can last for hours or even days on fabric.

00:14:39: Their chemical function is as fixatives.

00:14:42: They slow the evaporation of the lighter notes above them, anchoring their whole structure.

00:14:47: A well-constructed perfume is a piece of time based architecture.

00:14:51: It's designed to change...to surprise To reveal itself gradually.

00:14:57: The thing you spray on in the morning Is not that same thing You smell your wrist at night.

00:15:02: The perfumer is writing his story with beginning middle and end Measured Not in pages but hours.

00:15:08: And here is the thing that makes all of this both wonderful and slightly humbling.

00:15:13: We do not all smell the same story!

00:15:16: Some people carry genetic variations, but make them unable to detect certain musk molecules entirely.

00:15:22: They can wear perfume built around musks and smell almost nothing what others find overwhelming.

00:15:28: Other people have heightened sensitivity to specific compounds.

00:15:31: Smell is the most personal of the senses and, The most variable.

00:15:35: two-people smelling the same bottle can Have genuinely different experiences which means that the perfume you love might not smell To you anything like it smells.

00:15:43: so no person who made It?

00:15:45: The smell You've been wearing for years as your signature Is a collaboration between chemistry And biology Between the perfumers intention in the particular Unrepeatable nature Of Your own nose.

00:15:57: So The next time you spray on your favorite scent or catch a smell that stops you in your tracks, take a moment with what's actually happening.

00:16:05: You might be inhaling a compound that a tree produced to survive a mold infection Or the distilled volatile memory of rain and dry clay from a city in northern India... ...or a molecule that another concentration would be entirely different Reminding you beauty & complexity are not opposites.

00:16:23: You're wearing something that connects you without your needing to think about it, To the smoke rising in ancient temples... ...to the apothecaries of the Renaissance.. ..to the agarwood forests of Borneo and the clay earth of Kanaush.

00:16:38: Perfume is NOT just a decoration.

00:16:40: It's memories stored in molecular form!

00:16:42: IT IS THE ARCHETICTURE OF A FEELING built-in layers designed.

00:16:46: change meant be worn by specific an irreplaceable body Your body.

00:16:51: History isn't only in museums, sometimes it's invisible and travels directly to the part of your brain that knows how.