Perfume

What a fabulously smelly evening we had at our April meeting, with lots of beautiful

scents wafting about under our noses and lots of fascinating information about Perfume from our visiting speaker Yvonne and her wonderful array of bottles and boxes from her personal scent collection.

Yvonne a self-proclaimed perfume addict gave us a potted history (or should that be bottled history) of the rise and rise of the use of perfume. From the Ancient Egyptians to the present day she explained how perfume became popular, the science behind it and a trip down memory lane, reminding of us some of those famous scents from decades past.

Yvonne started with an interesting fact: perfume actually translates from French as 'from smoke' and this ties in with the first kinds of perfumes which were burned to cover up undesirable pongs from outside, and indeed inside as bathing was an infrequent activity back then!

The simple combination of WATER + ALCOHOL + ALDEHYDE + NATURAL FRAGRANCE makes up every single perfume ever produced, but of course the trick is in the blend. These are mixed by a perfume expert called a nose. When Coco Channel decided to develop a new scent, she was presented with a selection of different blends and she chose the fifth one, hence the famous name Channel No.5. Incidentally the blend and packaging has never changed in since 1921. We also found out how important packaging and marketing is to a perfume brand, we were asked to remember how many perfumes from decades past that we remembered, used or our mother's or grandmother's used. This was a wonderfully evocative trip down memory lane. And as Victor Hugo said "nothing awakes memory like a smell".

I have to say I am only scratching (and sniffing) the surface of Yvonne's talk, it really was choc full of information and she finished by letting us have a sniff of her very own perfume collection.

But that wasn't quite the end of our wonderfully fragrant evening! Kim from John Lewis who had come to listen to the talk had bought some lovely cosmetic and perfume samples which she distributed to the Bombshells to great delight!

Thanks go to both Yvonne and Kim for a wonderful multi sensual evening.

As usual the Bombshells brought in their donations to our local food bank run by Horsham Matters. We try to bring in items that are in short supply to fill in the gaps on their larder shelves. Usually in short supply are thinks like tinned vegetables including potatoes and long life fruit juices and milk. It is easy to find out what is needed by downloading the following app: