The history of perfume is centuries old and has long gone hand-in-hand with sultry charm. The original definition of the word comes from the Latin word, smoke. To wear a fragrance is to mask the senses in fumes, to beguile and intoxicate. Even in the after-life, perfume played a big part for Egyptians. Ancient tombs have been discovered with jewel-encrusted bottles filled with scents and powders – when the soul was released to heaven, relatives saw to it that it was presented as a perfumed gift.
The earliest traces of perfume start with the elaborate Egyptians, who painted and preened with the very best. No figure in Egyptian history represents the power of perfume better than Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. This vixen demanded that wherever she went, her servants doused and clouded the air with perfume, hailing her arrival as Queen and seductress. She even set out to seduce the great Mark Anthony on a ship of perfumed sails. The label Tocca were so enamoured of Cleopatra’s reputation that they named a perfume after the Grande-Dame, acknowledging her as a key player in perfume’s history.
Nowadays, things haven’t changed too much. Women sprinkle on scent to glam it up on a night out, making it the icing-on-the-cake of their pampering routine. Women realise the power of perfume and those that can afford to – the rich and famous - create scents under their name. Wayne Rooney’s loveable fiancée Coleen Mclouglin, has her own perfume as does Jennifer Lopez, Kylie Minogue and Kate Moss - it’s certainly the trendy thing to do.
Men’s fragrances show flashes of this trend too and campaigns are often fronted by a fashionable celebrity male, like Dunhill’s Jude Law. Some male stars like footballer David Beckham go down the route of creating their own signature scent and being their own model and spokesperson, showing how the power of perfume has placed itself firmly into a male market. For that reason, men are represented well by perfume companies, with a whole range of men’s perfume stocked up on shelves and glamorised in fashionable campaigns. Dunhill and Hugo Boss perfume both boast a designer fragrance for the modern or traditional male.
New perfume is always being launched – this season sees the return of Escada, with a new fragrance for hazy summer nights called Escada Moonsparkle that comes – Egyptian Style – in a rather lavish looking purple bottle and the previosuly mentioned
Boss, unleashing an icy glass bottle. Perfumes get more varied and the bottles more decorative as time goes on. Today there are a host of fragrances in sparkling bottles helping you to announce your arrival in a cloud of perfumed smoke.