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Fat City Aromas
| Article
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23186 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 2003 |
357 Words |
| Author
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Craig Lancto, a former high-school English teacher, is
education editor of The World & I. |
One might wonder how the perfume capital of the world came to be named Grasse, which means "fat" or "fatty." No one knows for sure. Of the possibilities that I've heard suggested, my favorite is that it is named after the key feature of enfleurage, the oldest method of capturing and transferring a scent from source to product.
Cold enfleurage is a technique that is particularly suited to delicate flowers such as violets, mimosa, and jasmine. It requires tons of flower petals and seemingly innumerable buckets of animal fat, which, as the ancient Egyptians discovered, absorbs odors. Cold enfleurage was popular until the 1950s, when increasing labor costs and the availability of synthetic scents made it impractical and unnecessary.
In their heyday, Grasse's perfume factories had 70,000 to 80,000 square enfleurage frames. Workers would slather fat on a pane of glass, then cover the fat with a layer of blossoms. A stack, usually of about 35 frames, would be set aside until the fat had absorbed their scent. Then the petals would be removed and a fresh layer laid on. This process would continue until the pomade was supersaturated with the floral scent. The pomade (originally made with apples, as the name implies) would be scraped off, rinsed in alcohol, and filtered to produce an infusion. At the Perfume Museum, wooden scrapers that have not been used for nearly a hundred years still retain a strong floral scent.
Distillation is nearly as old as enfleurage. The process is used to produce essential oils from such plants as lavender, geranium, or patchouli. The plant matter is boiled in an alembic, and the aromatic vapor is piped through a "swan neck" and
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