HombreOilsRare perfumery, preserved

The HombreOils field guide

The chemistry, craft and history of fragrance.

Discover the materials behind scent, explore the science, and build your own olfactory vocabulary.

HombreOils · Rare perfumery, preserved

Explore the records Shop the collection

Enter the world of scent

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Wherever you enter, the records lead somewhere else: a material to its molecules, a molecule to the words for its smell and the accords that use it, an accord to the fragrances and the history behind it.

from the records

Each count and each first record below is read from the records when the site is built; every record page shows the source of each of its fields. The evidence register lists the claims the pages make, with their status.

  1. Material

    15 materials

    What goes into the bottle, and how each is obtained.

    Start with Bergamot essential oil

  2. Molecule

    32 molecules

    The aroma molecules, where they occur and how they smell.

    Start with Methyl dihydrojasmonate (Hedione)

  3. Place

    13 places

    Where the materials grow, and when they are harvested.

    Start with Grasse

  4. Perfumer

    13 perfumers

    Perfumers of the past, with their dates and their works.

    Start with Ernest Beaux

  5. Fragrance

    20 fragrances

    Fragrances of other houses, as documented references.

    Start with Chanel No. 5

  6. History

    39 dated events

    Houses, syntheses, launches, laws and prizes.

    Start with Perkin reports a synthesis of coumarin, 1868

  7. Science

    44 words of smell

    The words for a smell, and the molecules that carry them.

    Start with Powdery

  8. Accord

    8 teaching accords

    How a family is built, in modeled parts; never a formula.

    Start with A rose, from four molecules

  9. Regulation

    16 rules

    What IFRA and EU law restrict, prohibit or label.

    Start with IFRA Standard: Oakmoss extracts

  10. Plant

    13 plants

    The botanicals behind the materials, with where they grow.

    Start with Rosa damascena

  11. Bottle

    15 historical bottles

    Bottles in museum collections, from their museums’ open records; not HombreOils products.

    Start with the bottles by date

  12. The HombreOils collection

    Rare natural essences, historical materials and unusual olfactive treasures.

    Browse our materials

All the records 228 pages in eleven kinds

It takes an enormous weight of hand-picked petals to make a little rose oil β-Damascenone is present in rose oil in traces, yet it shapes the scent Hedione is reported to activate a receptor of the VN1R family; what that means for perception is still open One study estimated the human nose can tell apart over a trillion odor mixtures (a debated figure) Orris roots are dried for several years while their irones develop The word perfume derives from Latin per fumum , “through smoke” Grasse, in Provence, has grown flowers for perfumers for centuries Tapputi of Babylon , a perfume-maker named on a cuneiform tablet, often cited in histories of chemistry , worked around 1200 BCE
Rosa × damascena, the damask rose , botanical illustration
Fundamentals

Where chemistry
becomes poetry

Millennia
of recorded perfumery
Thousands
of aroma materials
Hundreds
of olfactory receptor types
the family behind the 2004 Nobel Prize (Axel and Buck)
1853
Guerlain Bee Bottle
1921
Chanel No. 5
1925
Guerlain Shalimar
c. 1920
Lalique Flacon
2015
Baccarat Rouge 540
1992
Mugler Angel
The house’s proof flacon, a cut-glass bottle, engraved and turned on its stand.
Proof flaconDrawn and rendered for this educational archive , a proof, not a product. Engraved at rest; “See it as glass” shows the realtime glass, and “Hold the flacon” lets it slosh with your phone.

Historic bottles shown for educational reference. Trademarks belong to their respective owners; no affiliation is implied.

Perfumery exists at the intersection of organic chemistry, botany, neuroscience, and artistry. Smell takes an unusually short route to the brain's emotional and memory regions, one reason a scent can move us before we have named it.

It is one reason a scent can bring back a place or a person so vividly: a single breath can return something years old, not as a vague impression but as something close to being there again.

A perfumer , or nose , spends years training olfactory memory: learning to identify hundreds of raw materials blind, understanding how molecules interact, evolve, and transform on human skin. Every molecule on these pages was selected for scientific significance, not commercial importance.

Have a smell in mind but no perfumer’s words for it? The Scent Translator reads a phrase such as “an old library after rain” and shows the scent concepts it may point to, as three possible readings, with the materials and molecules on record behind each. Nothing you type is stored or sent.

The HombreOils collection

Rare perfumery, preserved

Explore the materials, methods and histories behind scent. HombreOils brings its collection of historical perfumery materials together with a practical reference library for curious noses, collectors and perfumers.

Follow a plant to its origin, a material to its molecules, and an accord to the fragrances that helped define a family.

Explore our materials About HombreOils