From a Woman in Mesopotamia to a World Worth Billions
In a museum in Berlin lies a broken clay tablet, known to scholars as KAR 220. The writing was pressed into wet clay with a reed stylus, in cuneiform, in a language we call Akkadian. Its edges are worn smooth; part of what it once said is lost for ever. On that tablet is a name — and behind that name, a story I only learned after I already had more than two hundred perfumes standing in my cupboard.
The name is Tapputi-Belatekallim. She lived around 1200 BC, in the city of Assur in Mesopotamia. She is one of the earliest people whose name we know in connection with chemistry. You will often read online that she was ‘the very first chemist’; historians are more cautious about that — she was almost certainly one of many, and the fact that it is her name that reached us owes something to chance, for her clay tablet happened to survive the centuries. But this much is certain: her craft was making perfume, and she set it down methodically.
The Woman with the Flowers, the Oil and the Water
What Tapputi did sounds simple. She took flowers, oil and plants we still know today — myrrh, balsam, calamus — and mixed them with water and other solvents. Then she heated the mixture and caught the vapour. What was left behind was a liquid that smelled of the flowers she had begun with. This process is called distillation, and it is the foundation of almost all perfumery ever made. When, today, a laboratory in Grasse draws rose oil from thousands of rose petals, it is in essence using the very method Tapputi described on clay 3,200 years ago.
The most touching detail: she did not do it alone. On the tablet there is a second name, partly lost in the damaged clay — Ninu, a woman whose full name we will never know. Two women working side by side in the hot kitchens of a palace, surrounded by flowers and jars, patiently working out how to capture scent and keep it. When I open a bottle in my own kitchen, I sometimes think of them. The same curiosity that stirs in me when I smell something new was already alive in them.
Per Fumum — Through Smoke
The word perfume comes from the Latin per fumum — “through smoke”. For long before perfume was a liquid in a bottle, it was smoke rising. In ancient Egypt, priests burned fragrant substances in their temples so that their prayers would rise to the gods. One mixture they often used was called kyphi — a blend of myrrh, honey, raisins, wine and many other ingredients, depending on the recipe.
When archaeologists opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, after more than three thousand years sealed shut, they reported still catching a faint scent from the jars that stood inside. Egyptian embalmers used resins and oils that preserved so well that not even time could entirely undo them. For the ancient Egyptians, scent was not a luxury — it was how you spoke with the invisible.
The Golden Age of Arabic Distillation
Between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries, the Arab world lived through a scientific flowering that Western history books often undervalue. It was in this period that scholars such as Avicenna — Ibn Sina in Arabic — refined the art of distillation. Avicenna perfected the steam distillation of roses into something we would still recognise today. A great deal of our modern perfume chemistry has Arabic roots.
A small but telling detail: the word alcohol comes from Arabic — al-kuhl. When a perfumer today dissolves perfume oils in alcohol to make an eau de parfum, he is using both a procedure and a word that came to life in the Arab world.
How a French Tanners’ Town Became the Capital of Perfume
Grasse, in the south of France, is known today as the capital of perfumery. But until the sixteenth century it was a tanning town — a dirty, foul-smelling trade. The story goes that a Grasse tanner made a scented glove for Catherine de’ Medici, the Italian woman who married the French king. The court fell in love with perfumed leather gloves, and so an entire region changed: from tanning, to flower-growing, to perfumery.
Today, on the hills around Grasse, the flowers that end up in the most expensive perfumes in the world still grow: rose centifolia (which blooms only in May and is picked by hand before sunrise), jasmine (gathered in the early morning, at first light), tuberose, mimosa, narcissus. Flowers for perfume cannot be produced industrially — they bloom when they bloom, and must be picked at exactly the right moment. What we buy in a bottle is, in large part, time: seasons, patience, hands.
1868 — The Year Everything Changed
In 1868, the English chemist William Henry Perkin managed, for the first time, to synthesise a scent molecule — to recreate it in a laboratory without a single flower involved. The molecule is called coumarin, and it smells of fresh hay and dried grass. This was a revolution: perfumers could suddenly work with raw materials that no longer depended on season, weather or harvest — and that were, on top of it all, far cheaper. A kilo of natural rose oil costs tens of thousands of euros; a kilo of synthetic rose scent a fraction of that.
In 1882, the French house Houbigant launched a perfume called Fougère Royale — the first to lean heavily on synthetic ingredients. It ushered in modern perfumery. Since then, almost every commercial perfume has been a blend of natural and synthetic materials. When you spray on a Dior, a Chanel or a Gucci today, your nose is often, for the most part, smelling molecules made in a laboratory. That is not a bad thing — it is simply how it works.
Who Rules the Perfume World Today?
Here the story turns less romantic and more businesslike — but you have a right to know this, especially if you spend money on perfume. The global perfume market is worth roughly 50 to 70 billion euros, depending on what you count, and it grows every year. It is dominated by a handful of large companies:
- LVMH (France) — the biggest player. Owns Dior, Givenchy, Guerlain, Acqua di Parma and Maison Francis Kurkdjian. Dior Sauvage is one of the best-selling perfumes in the world.
- Kering (France) — in 2023, through its new Kering Beauté division, bought the niche house Creed.
- Estée Lauder (US) — owns Jo Malone, Tom Ford, Le Labo, Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, Kilian. Many “small niche brands” in fact belong to this one company.
- Coty (US) — holds licences for fashion brands without a perfume arm of their own: Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs, Burberry, Hugo Boss.
- Chanel (France, privately held) — the only large perfume company still in family hands (the Wertheimer family). Chanel No.5 (1921) remains, after more than a hundred years, one of the best-selling perfumes in the world.
- L’Oréal (France) — holds the perfume lines of Yves Saint Laurent, Giorgio Armani and Lancôme.
- Puig (Spain) — owns Paco Rabanne, Carolina Herrera, Jean Paul Gaultier, Penhaligon’s, L’Artisan Parfumeur, and, since 2022, Byredo too — which presents itself as “Swedish niche” but is Spanish-owned.
What looks like a hundred different houses is, in truth, a dozen families with a great many brands between them.
The Invisible Giants — Who Really Makes Your Perfume?
Here comes the part that surprised me personally. When you buy a Dior perfume, you probably imagine it was dreamed up and made at Dior. It is sold under the Dior name — but the actual scent, the blend itself, is usually not developed by Dior at all. There are a few very large companies worldwide that work for almost all the famous brands; they employ the real perfumers. Their names never appear on a bottle:
- Givaudan (Switzerland) — the largest. Creates scents for Dior, Estée Lauder and Tom Ford, among others.
- dsm-firmenich (Swiss-Dutch, since a 2023 merger) — supplies many of the big luxury brands.
- IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances, US) — makes both food flavours and perfume scents.
- Symrise (Germany) — strong in both luxury perfumery and personal-care products.
This does not mean the brands are lying. It means the real art of making perfume happens, for the most part, at a handful of companies most people have never heard of. When I read this, I felt something double: a small disappointment — for years I thought I was wearing “a Dior”, when often I was wearing a Givaudan creation with a Dior bottle around it — but also a deep respect. The perfumers there train for years before they are allowed to work on their own. They are the true artists behind the work the brands send out into the world.
Why Is Perfume So Expensive, Really?
For anyone who has ever wondered why a 50 ml bottle costs 150 or 250 euros — here is an honest answer, with numbers:
- Oud (an Asian resin): 30,000 to 80,000 euros per kilo — more expensive than gold. Only a small share of the trees develop the fragrant resin naturally.
- Orris butter (from iris root): up to 100,000 euros per kilo. The root must first dry for three to five years before it can be used.
- Rose absolute from Grasse: between 8,000 and 15,000 euros per kilo — a single kilo needs hundreds of thousands of hand-picked flowers.
- Jasmine absolute from Grasse: similar prices, and likewise hundreds of thousands of flowers per kilo, picked in the early morning.
On top of this come the cost of the master perfumer, the development time (two to four years on average), the packaging, and — often the largest part of all — the marketing and the margin. The raw materials are usually not the most expensive element. But for the truly rare ingredients, the story holds: what sits in your bottle is sometimes worth more than gold.
In Closing
We began with Tapputi: a woman in Mesopotamia, 3,200 years ago, who heated flowers in water and caught the vapour — with her hands, with patience, with a colleague named Ninu. We end with conglomerates worth billions, factories in Switzerland, private rose fields in France, and marketing campaigns that cost more than the raw materials themselves.
Between those two extremes lie 3,200 years of the human longing to hold on to what we cannot hold. Scent is fleeting: a molecule rises, touches our nose, and is gone. And all that time, people — priests, queens, chemists, artists — have been trying to capture that fleeting moment and carry it with them.
When I reach for a perfume from my collection, I am not only wearing a scent. I am wearing 3,200 years of human work: the distillation Tapputi described, the steam method Avicenna refined, the rose fields of Grasse, the molecules first made in 1868, the perfumer who studied for years, the hands that picked flowers before dawn. A perfume is not a product — it is a chain of hands and minds reaching back thousands of years.
And at the very beginning of that chain stand two women we had all but forgotten. They did their work long before anyone began to make money from it, long before there were bottles with logos on them. They did it because scent was worth the trouble. That may be the only reason that has ever truly counted.
Did you know this about the perfumes in your cupboard? And does it change anything about the way you will wear them?
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Sources & Accountability
This is a historical story, drawn together from archaeological, history-of-science and business sources — not medical advice. Where the history is uncertain, as with Tapputi’s precise role, I have said so honestly rather than make it prettier than it is.
- Tapputi-Belatekallim and the clay tablet KAR 220 — held in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin; first translated by the Assyriologist Erich Ebeling (1919). For a critical, nuanced discussion of the mythmaking around Tapputi, see the work of scent historian Nuri McBride.
- William Henry Perkin, first synthesis of coumarin (1868) — W. H. Perkin, “On the artificial production of coumarin and formation of its homologues”, Journal of the Chemical Society 21 (1868), 53–63.
- Fougère Royale (Houbigant, 1882) — widely recognised as the first fine fragrance to lean heavily on a synthetic raw material (coumarin).
- Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and the refinement of the steam distillation of roses — history-of-science literature on the alembic and the Islamic Golden Age.
- Market size and ownership structure (LVMH, Kering/Creed, Estée Lauder, Coty, Chanel, L’Oréal, Puig; and the fragrance houses Givaudan, dsm-firmenich, IFF, Symrise) — corporate filings and industry analyses, 2023–2025.
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