As we explore perfumes over the years, we tend to collect not just bottles but also fascinating details about them. Whether it’s something about ingredients, chemistry or history, those little bits of trivia add even more charm to our hobby.
Saturday Question #283:
What’s the Most Interesting Perfume Fact You’ve Learned?
It doesn’t have to be an obscure or groundbreaking fact – just something that surprised or intrigued you when you first learned it. Maybe it’s something many perfumistas learn sooner or later, but most people outside our hobby wouldn’t know.
My Answer
I recently came across something called “olfactory training” or “smell training,” which involves regularly smelling some distinct scents (e.g., rose, lemon, clove and eucalyptus) and consciously trying to identify them. Research shows that these simple exercises act like a workout for the brain, helping to keep memory and thinking skills sharper over time. Clinical trials with older participants and patients with early Alzheimer’s suggest that this kind of mental engagement can have measurable benefits.
For example, in one recent study, participants aged 60–85 in an “enriched” group were exposed to seven different pleasant scents each week, one per night, for two hours using diffusers, while a control group received only tiny amounts of the scents. After six months, the enriched group showed significantly greater improvement on a word‑list recall test, and brain scans revealed changes in a neural pathway known to decline with age.
It’s not a treatment for dementia, of course, but at least our perfume habit has an excuse for being indulgent: it’s brain exercise! Time for round two: let’s see if I can finally pick out a few notes in the latest batch of samples.
Undina's Looking Glass 
When I learnt I wasn’t alone in my perfumery obsession. Even more surprising & interesting was that others wrote about their obsession.
I was very late to the online perfume party, it was 2009 when I discovered perfume blogs & even later when I found Basenotes & Make Up Alley forums. I read without posting for years & had Alitykescents registered for a decade before I dared actually post about perfume. I felt such shame at wasting money on perfumes
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The thing I learned that surprised me was that some underhanded company owners lied about being the perfumers of their perfumes. It seemed, and seems, really icky and definitely besmirched those houses for me. I’ve had to suck it up with a few because their perfumes transcend the owners lack of integrity but I don’t forget.
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Learning that ambergris existed, what it smelled like, hearing that it was banned, then reading that it wasn’t banned, all in a short amount of time early on when I developed my interest in perfume. I suppose that was an introduction to the misinformation that is common around perfumery topics.
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As part of my personal journey with my blog, PER FUMUS, I made it a priority to explore and learn about various aspects of the perfume world, both past and present. While I’ve discovered many things in that time, I particularly enjoy historical references. I would have to answer your question, Undina, with a post I did a few years ago about scented gloves. Another unrelated part of my journey was discovering that both women featured in the post were cousins within my English and Italian lineage. One of the two appears to have been an integral part of French perfumery itself.
https://perfumuschicago.wordpress.com/2024/02/27/sweet-sweet-gloves/
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Learning about ambergris was the most fascinating perfume fact for me.
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Much the same as Alityke said, it was such a revelation to find people online who shared what for me was becoming perfume mania. The world of perfume was blown wide open to me and I loved it. I also learned that I shouldn’t possess a credit card😬.
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