Perfumery is one of the oldest trades represented on this marketplace. Egyptian and Mesopotamian records describe resins and oils burned as offerings — the word "perfume" itself descends from the Latin per fumum, "through smoke." What began as incense became, over millennia, a liquid art built on distillation, extraction, and increasingly precise chemistry.
Grasse: the capital of scent
In the 16th century, Grasse — the town our hero supplier Maison Lumière de Mer calls home — was a leather-tanning center. Tanners scented their gloves with local jasmine and rose to mask the smell of the trade, and by the 18th century the flowers had outlasted the leather: Grasse became the fragrance capital it remains today, supplying raw absolutes and concentrates to houses worldwide.
From naturals to modern chemistry
The late 19th century introduced synthetic aroma molecules — coumarin, vanillin, synthetic musks — letting perfumers build entirely new olfactory families rather than only recombining what could be extracted from a petal. The Fougère and Chypre families on today's Auctions board trace directly back to those early synthetic breakthroughs.
The trade today
Modern fine fragrance still runs on the same basic supply chain this marketplace digitizes: raw-material houses compound and sell concentrates by the kilogram, packaging suppliers provide the glass and closures, and brands assemble the finished bottle — the same top-to-base structure you'll see on any Catalogue fragrance listing today.