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The Ancient Perfumes

I got to know that in the ancient world oils were used as the carrier medium for perfumes.  In modern perfume making, an alcohol is usually the carrier medium, with essential oils added for lasting fragrance combined with fixatives, coloring agents and preservatives. Alcohols evaporate much more
quickly than oils do, thus dispersing scent into the air more rapidly, whereas oil retains and keeps the fragrance allowing it to stay over time. An ancient perfume would therefore be more subtle, and you’d have to be closer to the skin of the wearer to feel its strong power.
In the ancient time, the abundance of olive oil made it the most popular oil for the perfume industry, though other oils such as almond were popular as well. Cheaper oil was better because it has less of its own scent to compete with the fragrant materials.
To increase fragrance, plant-based ingredients were used, including flowers, leaves, seeds, woods, resins and gums. Animal-derived ingredients were also common, such as musk and civet, which are the glandular oils produced by the musk deer and the civet cat. These aromas tend to be pungent and even unpleasant in their natural states, but act as fixatives in combination with other scents, accentuating them and making them last longer without imparting their own scents to the mixture.
As in ancient times, today more expensive perfumes still use mostly natural products—essential oils gathered from flowers, spices, and fruits, while cheaper ones are made from synthesized oils that approximate these natural scents.

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