 Perfumes consists of alcohol, water and perfume oil. The word “perfume” comes from Latin per fumum and its meaning is "through smoke".
Perfumers name 3 categories of perfumes: oriental, floral and chypre. Also there are under-categories, such as woody, musk, oceanic, spicy and fruity fragrances.
A perfume may contain from 5 to 260 natural or synthetic ingredients. The most common among them are musk, ginger, grapefruit, mandarin peel, clementine, peppercorns, fig leaves, rose, watercress, bamboo, vanilia, honeysuckle, green tea etc.
A few interesting facts about perfumes:
1. Such things as diet, style of life and medication have influence on your sense of smell.
2. People with certain type of hair (blondes, brunettes and red hair) are recommended to use different kinds of perfumes.
3. Women have better sense of smell than men.
4. Your smell memory is better than your visual memory. This means that we remember things more by its smell than its image.
5. Our smell sense is stronger than our sense of taste.
6. Our sense of smell is stronger in the afternoon.
7. Older people have not that sharp smell as they had in their youth.
8. Smell of perfumes rise up in the air. So you should apply perfumes to the pulse points of different parts of your body (wrists, base of the throat, behind the ear lobes, the bend in the elbows, and between the breasts, under knees).
9. A fragrance remains longer on oily skin than on dry skin.
10. You can’t store perfumes for a long period of time (more than three months in average) after you open the bottle.
11. Perfumers classify perfumes by seasons of the year.
12. The alcohol is the main component of the fragrance; it makes a scent to evaporate.
13. One of perfume classification is based on concentration of the perfume oils in it: Perfume, Eau De Parfum, Eau De Toilette and Eau De Cologne, Aftershave.
14. The same scent applied on skin of different people can generate various smells. This happens because of different chemistry of skin. That’s why always try the perfume on your skin before buying it.
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