The history of scent marketing: from ancient civilisations to modern technology

Mesopotamia: Tapputi and the birth of scent chemistry

Her name is of monumental historical significance: historians regard her as the world’s first chemist documented by name. The addition Belatekallim refers to her high rank – she was a “female overseer of the palace”. This suggests that perfume-making at the time was not a casual pastime but a matter of state with bureaucratic and ritual weight. Scent was an instrument of power.

Tapputi’s work marks a technological turning point. Where earlier cultures had limited themselves to macerating plants in fats or oils, Tapputi developed advanced extraction methods. She used the first documented still in history. Her process, recorded in cuneiform, was complex and precise: she worked with flowers, oil, calamus, cyperus, myrrh and balsam.

Her decisive innovation was to add solvents and to distil and filter the mixture several times. This technique allowed her to separate the volatile essences from the heavy plant matter, resulting in scents that were lighter, purer and longer-lasting than anything before.

More recently, Turkish scientists, working with the Turkish Academy of Scent Culture, have tried to reconstruct Tapputi’s 3,200-year-old formulas. This archaeological experiment confirmed the complexity of her work. An interesting detail: Tapputi did not work alone – the tablets name another researcher whose name is partly lost but ends in “-(—)ninu”. Together they laid the foundation for the chemical processing of nature, a legacy that millennia later would form the basis of modern pharmacy.

Ancient Egypt: the alchemy of kyphi

The absolute high point of Egyptian scent culture was kyphi (or kapet), a complex temple incense intended not only to please the gods but also to serve as a pharmacological and chronological instrument. The Egyptian temple service followed a strict olfactory rhythm in which scent indicated the time of day:

• —Morning: frankincense, to greet the sun god Ra and purify the night air.
• —Midday: myrrh, for the spiritual centre of the day.
• —Evening: kyphi, to close the day and lull the gods to sleep.

Kyphi was not a simple resin but a compound “bouquet” whose preparation took days, sometimes weeks. Recipes varied by temple (for example in Edfu and Philae), but the basic structure remained consistent and complex. The process involved grinding mastic, juniper berries, mint and cinnamon, followed by maceration in wine – with the alcohol acting as a solvent – and binding with honey and raisins. When burned, kyphi produced a heavy, sweet smoke with a slightly intoxicating effect, which contributed to the mystical experience in the temple and probably calmed the priests.

In Egypt, scent was also a hard indicator of social class. The poor population had little access to fragrances, while the elite wore precious oils and cones of fat on their heads that slowly melted in the heat. The trade in these raw materials was a driving force of Egyptian foreign policy – in particular the expeditions to the Land of Punt, probably present-day Somalia, to import myrrh and frankincense trees.

Ten thousand years of scent in ten milestones

Roman decadence and Eastern refinement

An archaeological breakthrough in Spain

The Roman use of scent was often architectural and decadent:

• —Ganosis:Roman statues and villa walls were treated with a mixture of oil and wax, often perfumed, so that they shone and gave off a subtle scent. The “white marble” antiquity was in fact glossy and fragrant.
• —Theatres: Pliny the Elder describes how saffron was misted in theatres to mask the smell of the sweating crowd during the games.
• —Baths: in the bathhouses, the unctorium was a separate room for anointing. Emperor Nero went to extremes, having silver pipes installed in his dining hall to spray guests with rose water between courses.

In parallel: India and the art of attar

Unlike Western perfumes, which use alcohol as a carrier, traditional attar uses sandalwood oil as its base. Flowers are boiled in copper vessels (degs), and the steam is led via bamboo pipes into a collecting vessel that stands in cold water and contains sandalwood oil. Sandalwood is a brilliant fixative that gives the scent depth and enormous longevity. This reached its peak under the Mughal Empire; rulers had attar fountains installed in their bedchambers – a kind of “scent air conditioning”.

Japan: kōdō and listening to scent

In a ceremony, a tiny piece of precious wood – usually oud or agarwood – is heated on a mica plate above charcoal. The wood does not burn but releases its resins. Participants are meant to recognise the nuances and connect them with poetry. It is a meditative exercise in concentration, deeply rooted in the Zen tradition.

Avicenna and the chemistry of the rose

Scent as shield and medicine

The iconic plague doctors did not wear their beaked masks for decoration. The beak was filled with herbs to filter the deadly miasma before it reached the nose. This is essentially the earliest, most primitive form of odour neutralisation: fighting stench with scent as protection.

To protect the home, households used strewing herbs. Floors of rammed earth or stone were covered with rushes and herbs:

• —Meadowsweet: for a sweet, almond-like scent – the favourite of Elizabeth I.
• —Pennyroyal: to keep fleas and insects away.
• —Lavender: for calm and purity.

Walking across the floor released the fragrances through friction – a kinetic air freshener before its time.

The military history of scent

From da Vinci to the Second World War. Leonardo da Vinci already designed prototypes of “stink bombs” that could be fired with arrows to disorientate the enemy. Modern militarisation, however, only began in the Second World War. The American intelligence service OSS developed a substance called S-liquid (stench liquid). This chemical weapon was intended to be sprayed on Japanese officers to humiliate and socially isolate them, but the project failed because the smell was so volatile and uncontrollable that it also affected the user.

The Vietnam War: the “people sniffer”. In the Vietnam War, the US deployed the XM-2 and XM-3 people sniffers. These devices were designed to detect the chemical signature of human urine and sweat (ammonia) in the jungle in order to locate Viet Cong fighters. The Viet Cong, however, quickly learned to hang buckets of urine and mud in trees to mislead the sensors.

Modern crowd control: “Skunk”. In the 21st century, a non-lethal weapon called Skunk was developed: a liquid that smells like a mixture of rotting meat and sewage and is sprayed on demonstrators with water cannons. The smell is so overwhelming that people flee immediately. This marks the ultimate instrumentalisation of smell as a means of spatial displacement.

Grasse: the unexpected birth of scent marketing

In the 17th century, a revolution took place in France. The town of Grasse was originally a centre of leather production, but the tanning process – which used urine and dung – smelled considerably. To make the leather gloves sellable to the nobility nevertheless, the tanners perfumed the leather with flowers from the region: jasmine, rose, lavender.

It worked immediately. The gants parfumés became fashionable at court. This is the very first evidence of commercial scent marketing: an unpleasant product becomes desirable through the addition of scent. As a result, Grasse grew from a foul-smelling tanning town into the world’s perfume capital – where our ambient scents are still composed today.

The synthetic breakthrough

Harry Gordon Selfridge and the “perfume gauntlet”

The logic was simple: London’s streets smelled of horse manure and exhaust fumes. By placing perfume at the entrance, he created a “scent airlock” that separated customers physically and mentally from the dirty outside world and introduced them to the fantasy world of consumption. This model was so successful that almost every department store in the world still retains this layout today – and it is still the basis of retail scent marketing.

The failure of Smell-O-Vision

From scent airlock to molecular precision

The lessons from Grasse and Selfridge still apply, but the technology is different. Where resins were once burned and oils evaporated, today’s cold-air diffusion works entirely without water: a compressor forces air over pure scent oil and creates a dry mist of particles smaller than 1 micron – without heat, without residue.

The second difference is control. What Nero improvised with silver pipes is today a weekly schedule per zone with 99 intensity levels. And the third difference is responsibility: all compositions are IFRA-compliant and documented with an MSDS safety data sheet – a standard that did not exist in antiquity.

What has not changed in 3,200 years is the mechanism. Scent reaches the limbic system without a detour via reason – just as in the temple of Edfu. Anyone who knows this path understands why a scent at a shop’s entrance achieves more than a shop window.

From history to application

3,200 years of experience, one scent for your spaces