Eau Factsby Fragnatique
Eau Facts is the perfume-facts video series by Fragnatique: short videos, each under a minute, that answer one question about perfume history, the great perfume houses, raw materials or the science of wearing scent. Every answer below comes from official and academic sources, named on its page.
Old claims, checked against tablets, archives and record books.
VideoNo. Tapputi wrote the oldest known perfume recipe that names its maker, on a clay tablet from Assur dated to 1239 or 1229 BC, but a perfumer called Lipit-Irra already headed a perfume workshop in Larsa at least five centuries earlier.
VideoUnproven: Chanel publishes no lifetime sales figure for N°5, the famous “one bottle every 30 seconds” line has no dated Chanel source, and LVMH called Dior's Sauvage the world's best-selling fragrance in 2024.
VideoYes: the Fondation Napoléon says he was rubbed down with eau de Cologne after his bath and shave, and the Farina house, founded in Cologne in 1709, says Napoleon and the Bonaparte family were loyal customers.
Guinness World Records names Clive Christian No1 the most expensive perfume commercially available: its 2005 Imperial Majesty edition was priced at £115,000, then $205,000, per 500 ml.
VideoBecause its tanners became perfumers: medieval Grasse tanned leather, scented its gloves to mask the smell of the hides, and as orders for perfumed gloves poured in, perfume slowly replaced leather.
VideoAromatics: the beak held spices such as camphor, mint, cloves and myrrh, dried flowers such as roses or carnations, or a vinegar sponge, meant to protect the wearer from the “bad air” then believed to carry disease.
How famous perfume houses began, and what their first bottles were.
Combs, not perfume: in 1820 King George IV appointed Floris his Smooth Pointed Comb Maker, the house's first royal warrant.
Because it counts from two beginnings: 1221, when friars set up a medicinal herb garden in Florence, and 15 October 1612, when the convent voted to open a public pharmacy.
VideoYes: Guerlain still sells the bee bottle born in 1853 for Empress Eugénie's Eau de Cologne Impériale, and you choose the Guerlain fragrance that goes inside.
Heures d'Absence, launched in 1927: its formula has been lost, nobody knows how it smelled, and the 2020 perfume of the same name is a new creation.
VideoCatherine Dior, Christian Dior's younger sister and a member of the French Resistance, inspired Miss Dior, the house's first perfume, in 1947.
VideoEau d'Hermès, created in 1951 by perfumer Edmond Roudnitska, who described it as “the inside of a Hermès bag where the scent of a perfume lingered”.
VideoYes, according to its designer Fabien Baron, who says CK One got a twist cap “just like a bottle of Coke” because opening one was the gesture every kid in America was making.
No: the house says its founder opened his first shop in Mumbai in 1951 with Rs 500, and the name Ajmal Dubai only came in 2026, as the house approached its 75th anniversary.
VideoThrough François Coty: the perfumer asked jeweller René Lalique to design his perfume bottles around 1907 to 1908, and the Musée Lalique calls that collaboration the springboard for Lalique's career as a master glassmaker.
The Estée Lauder Companies: it completed its purchase of the whole Tom Ford brand in April 2023, and licenses the name to Zegna for fashion and to Marcolin for eyewear.
The perfumers, the raw materials and the single molecules behind famous scents.
VideoMolecule 01 is made of a single molecule, Iso E Super, which its maker says some people are highly sensitive to while others find it hard to detect; regular wearers can stop noticing it, usually for a while.
Most still train with the Jean Carles method, which sorts raw materials by similarity and contrast; Givaudan, which runs the perfumery school he founded in 1946, calls it the standard for perfumery training.
Hedione is a jasmine-scented molecule discovered at Firmenich in 1958; faint on its own, it gives a perfume presence and diffusion rather than strength, which is why perfumers have used it since Dior's Eau Sauvage in 1966.
VideoOne perfumer, Alberto Morillas: his employer dsm-firmenich credits him with Acqua di Giò pour Homme (1996), Light Blue pour Homme (2007) and Dylan Blue pour Homme (2016).
Not automatically: of the three fragrance allergens the EU banned for causing the most contact allergy cases, two are natural components of oak moss and tree moss, and one was made in a lab.
Because of the fougère: Houbigant says Paul Parquet's Fougère Royale of 1882 started what is still the most popular family in men's fragrance, and that scent was first developed for soap.
Not yet, but a 2019 study in Nature Sustainability found the main source tree of frankincense collapsing across its range, and projected that production would halve in 20 years.
What lab studies say about sprays, skin, weather, layering and storage.
Not in the lab test we checked: two hours after Victoria's Secret Bombshell, a floral perfume, was applied to a hand, 18 percent of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes flew to it, against 58 percent for a bare hand.
VideoBecause a perfume is a mix of fast and slow molecules: citrus top notes are mostly gone within 15 to 30 minutes, while base notes such as amber, musk and vanillin can last more than four hours on the skin.
Cold slows perfume rather than ruining it: cooler skin releases fewer scent molecules, and the perfume that has not evaporated is still there and smells stronger again once it warms.
VideoNo: felt smell strength grows more slowly than the amount, so doubling a rose molecule in the air makes it only about 15 percent stronger, and even fast-rising clove feels about one and a half times as strong.
VideoYour brain often fuses them into a third smell: in lab tests a strawberry-like and a caramel-like odour mixed together smelled like pineapple, and even trained perfumers could pick out only three or four parts of a mixture.
VideoOpening is not the main danger: a 2014 study found no breakdown of limonene in repeatedly opened, half-empty bottles kept for nine months, while strong light changed lavender oil within three days.
What the series is, where to watch it, and how every fact is checked before it is filmed.
Eau Facts is a series of short videos about perfume made by the Fragnatique team. Each episode asks one question, such as who wrote the oldest perfume recipe or whether a second spray doubles the smell, and answers it with a fact you can check.
On Instagram and TikTok, both at @eaufacts. Every episode page here links to its video when it is live, or to the channel when it is not yet.
Each claim comes from an official or academic source: a perfume house's own history, a museum, a peer-reviewed journal, a government register or a record body. The sources are listed at the foot of every episode page. When the evidence does not settle a claim, the episode says so, as with Chanel N°5's best-seller legend.
The team behind Fragnatique, an AI perfume advisor for iPhone made by Appthos Studio OÜ in Tallinn, Estonia. The videos teach perfume; they do not sell a bottle. About Fragnatique.
Yes. Most episodes have a longer article in the Fragnatique Journal, linked from the episode page, with the full story and every source. Open the Journal.
The name is a nod to eau de Cologne, the citrus water first made in Cologne in 1709. New episodes land on Instagram and TikTok first; follow @eaufacts to get the next question as soon as it is answered.
Prefer to read? The Fragnatique Journal tells each story in full.
