Smell with Benjamin Young
Overthink
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The History of Perfumery
In the world of perfumery before this shift to completely synthetic perfumes, which happened in the early 20th century with a Chanel number five, that was the first all synthetic perfume. Oh, before that they would have to look in nature for smelly substances. And yeah, you can get some flowers to do that, but the most smelly substances are animal byproducts. So like the throw up of whales, the anal sacks of goats and other mammals. For the Greeks, the function of perfumes really was to mask odors, kind of like it is today. But not necessarily even bad odors, just odors in general. Diane Ackerman talks about this in
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