History of French Perfume Smruti Thakkar MBA in Luxury Brand Management
France France is known for its majestic views, delicious foods, art, and luxurious lifestyles. And when it comes to the art of making perfumes, France grabs the top spot. In fact, several of the greatest names in the perfume scene came from France such as Christian Dior, Estee Lauder, and Chanel. France holds the highest international perfume sales in the world and French perfumes and cosmetics are the most well-known and respected brands in the world.
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How it came to france ? France’s own fragrant history began during the Renaissance period where perfume was introduced in Europe. Before, the only people who used perfumes were the royal and wealthy people. Catherine de’ Medici’s arrival in France from her native Italy after her marriage to Henri II in 1533 is the one who introduced perfume as a fashion in France. Gifted with scented gloves, Catherine started a fashion that grew with the reign of Louis XV in the 18th century. Louis’ cour parfumée demanded new and innovative fragrances for both home and person, continuing the fashion started in the Renaissance for using scents to mask the odour of habitually unwashed bodies. During the Middle Ages, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur was known for its tanning industry, and leatherworking was usually accompanied by a wide range of unpleasant smells. Glove-making and leather tanning had become big business in France, but the stench created by the tanning process left the end result somewhat fragrant, and not in a good way.The increasing air pollution resulted in attempts to combat the stench with perfume in the 16th century.
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GRASSE , FRANCE The local climate was very conducive to growing plants used in manufacturing scented substances, and, eventually, the perfume industry overtook the local tanners in importance. The special microclimate in Grasse makes it the perfect place to grow aromatic plants that are used by the local perfume industry. The warm weather, sufficient soil and the abundant water are just some of Grasse’s secrets in creating aromatic perfumes. Soon the flower-growing industry of Grasse and the surrounding area which had begun in the 14th century blossomed to supply the demand. Even once clean water and personal hygiene habits changed for the less malodorous, perfume continued to be a part of French life. Napoleon was reputed to be a big user of fragrance, with two quarts of violet cologne delivered to him every week, while Empress Joséphine used such a strong scent that her apartments were said to still smell of it decades after her death. 04
The 19th Century The 19th century was a crucial time in the evolution of the perfume market, as it was the period when perfume products turned from being items of exceptional use into a broadly distributed, more widely consumed commodity. Sensitivity to bad odors increased as better hygienic practices became a more routine part of daily life in the second half of the century, due to the diffusion of water networks and the integration of bath amenities within houses and appartments. Beginning in the 1860s, the innovations generated or adopted by per- fume manufacturers, including new techniques for extracting raw ma- terials and, after 1880, the discovery of new synthetic compounds, also increased productivity, greatly lowering production costs and expanding consumption among new categories of customers.These developments in the perfume industry radically reshaped a differentiated market, not only opening it to democratization, but also permitting a luxury sector to emerge. By the 1880s perfume had become affordable as a result of mechanization and the introduction of synthetic compounds. The success of the perfume business enabled the Parisian perfumers to take advantage of their fame to promote their names as brands, thus enhancing the value of their products. In the competitive environment they experienced at the end of the century as a result of investments by newcomers, perfumers could either try to dominate by achieving cost reductions so they could widen their margins, or they could differentiate their products by conferring a highly symbolic value on them. Capitalizing on their names was among the first, and best, ways to achieve dominance, together with technical innovation and carefully considered management strategies. 05
The 19th Century After it was synthesized in 1869 by the chemists R. Fittig and W. H. Mielk, piperonal began to be produced industrially in 1874 and in quantities in 1886. The scent of heliotrope was first listed in perfumers catalogs in the early 1880s. It appeared in the 1878 Guarlain Catalog in the form of a soap, but then 1882 catalog opened with a bottle of white heliotrope extract. Huge department stores like Au bon marché or Aux trois quartiers never allotted more than one page to perfume products in their catalogs, nor did perfumes account for a significant portion of their sales. Thus, the bazaars became the agents of a massive diffusion of perfume products in 19th century Paris. The first perfume bazaar, Galeries Saint-Martin, was founded at the beginning of the 1890s by businessmen Baudis and Manilève, a dozen years after perfume departments were first opened in the stores. The bazaar was located on boulevard Saint-Martin within a short distance of Place de la République, where the department store Les Magasins réunis had been built in 1866. The perfume bazaars soon flourished, every Parisian arrondissement seemed to have benefited from its own perfumery bazaar. Not only had the bazaars become ubiquitous by the early 1900s; their range of perfumes had also grown more impressive than any found in the department stores. They sold the products of all the perfume producers, as well as their own brands, at much lower prices than those charged in the stores At the beginning of the 20th century, a new practice developed: customers were offered free trial samples of perfumes. 06
The 19th Century The end of the 19th century was an age of transition, combining unique cultural, technological, and economic conditions within the perfume industry and a marketplace favorable both to a dramatic development of the perfume-manufacturing sector and to the emergence of new management strategies. By positioning their product as a luxury, perfumers built the image of a profession whose social success and wealth became proverbial and formed part of their professional group identity. In the case of perfume, utility is mainly social, making it difficult to assign to it a monetary value. From the beginning of the interwar period, however, the utility model was broken by the alliance of perfume production with couture houses that began after 1910 with Paul Poiret’s Parfums de Rosine. Perfume thus found itself attached to names like Gabrielle Chanel, Jean Patou, or Jeanne Lanvin, which rested on strong, extremely visual identities. The new names in the business, by turning perfume into a fashion accessory, capitalizing on the fame of a brand, and accessing more powerful communication means, finally eclipsed the old perfume houses. Apart from Guerlain and Roger & Gallet, little remains today of the 19th-century Parisian perfumers’ original fame.
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CONCLUSION
With today’s technology, the art of making perfumes with natural fragrances that are extracted from flowers is being replaced by chemically produced scents because it is much cheaper and easier to mass produce anywhere in the world. And that’s what sets France apart because, despite the advancements in technology, they still choose to produce high-quality perfumes that are made from the natural extract of plants and flowers with special methods and techniques that have been handed from generations to generations of perfumers. That’s why the French perfume cannot be replicated and replaced. And France continues to hold the reputation of being the source of exquisite perfumes in the world.
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