I have compiled various works on smell, fragrance, and perfumery for anyone seeking more in-depth information on the matter. The following are links to titles themselves or podcast episodes from the New Books Network wherein a host interviews the author of a new book whose topic relates to fragrance or scent.
Books
Internet Archive
This search pulls up works freely available on the Internet Archive with the subject “Perfume”. To read many of the listed books, you need to have an account on the Internet Archive to check them out from the digital library. It is free to register! I would highly recommend making an account since it’ll allow you access to so much free multimedia.
- Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin: A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present by Richard Howard Stamelman
- The Artifice of Beauty: A History and Practical Guide to Perfumes and Cosmetics by Sally Pointer
- The Scent Trail: How One Woman’s Quest for the Perfect Perfume Took Her Around the World by Celia Lyttelton
Other Sources
- The Perfume Lover: A Personal History of Scent by Denyse Beaulieu
- Fragrance and Wellbeing: Plant Aromatics and Their Influence on the Psyche by Jennifer Peace Rhind
- The Case Against Fragrance by Kate Grenville
- Scent: A Natural History of Fragrance by Elise Vernon Pearlstine
- Sacred Luxuries: Fragrance, Aromatherapy, and Cosmetics in Ancient Egypt by Lise Manniche
- Perfumery: The Psychology and Biology of Fragrance by D. M. Stoddart, Steve Van Toller, George H. Dodd
- An Ethnography of Fragrance: The Perfumery Arts of ʿAdan/Laḥj by Dinah Jung
Academic Works
- Fundamentals of Fragrance Chemistry by Charles S. Sell
- Great overview of fragrance as an industry
- Perspectives in Flavor and Fragrance Research by Philip Kraft and Karl A. D. Swift
- Some neat-sounding chapters include
- “New Woody and Ambery Notes from Cedarwood and Turpentine Oil”
- “Pyrazines and Pyridines from Black Pepper Oil (Piper nigrum L.) and Haitian Vetiver Oil”
- “New Alicyclic Musks: The Fourth Generation of Musk Odorants”
- Some neat-sounding chapters include
- Common Fragrance And Flavor Materials: Preparation, Properties And Uses by Johannes Panten and Horst Surburg
- This work speaks on sourcing and processing of various compounds used in fragrance
- Science and Technology of Aroma, Flavor, and Fragrance in Rice by Srivastav, Prem Prakash, and Deepak Kumar Verma
- For anyone who enjoys a good rice note. Here’s a quote from the preface:
Aroma is one of the diagnostic aspects of rice quality that can determine acceptance or rejection of rice before it is tested. It is also considered as an important property of rice that indicates its preferable high quality and price in the market. An assessment of all known data reveals that more than 450 chemical compounds have been documented in various aromatic and non-aromatic rice cultivars. The primary goals were to identify the compounds responsible for the characteristics and rice aroma. Many attempts were made to search for key compounds for rice aroma, but no single compound or group of compounds could be reported that are fully responsible for rice aroma.
Multimedia Materials
Here are some results from the George Mason University Open Educational Resource Metafinder on perfume and fragrance, which will bring up multimedia on the searched topic, including photos of antique bottles, vintage ads, articles, and more. The metafinder searches from various archives, including the Digital Public Library of America, the Library of Congress (of the U.S.), and JSTOR, for materials mentioning the search term(s) in their metadata (e.g., titles, content, or tags).
Podcast (on Books)
I have found that the New Books Network podcast has a great range of episodes related to sense of smell, fragrance, spices, and other scented items, going beyond the human species’ experiences of this sense. As far as the format, the episode host simply interviews the author of a new book on its subject matter.
Below are the episodes I found just by searching the network’s site for “fragrance” and “perfume”. The types of books below range from monographs to biographies to literature. The pages linked below include a description of the book’s subject, information on the author and host, and an embedded audio player with the episode so you can listen from the web page.
Science
- The Secret Perfume of Birds: Uncovering the Science of Avian Scent by Danielle J. Whittaker, hosted by Galina Limorenko
- Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind by Ann-Sophie Barwich, hosted by Joseph Fridman
- Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling by Erica Fretwell, hosted by Chad Valasek
Biographies (of celebrities who had fragrance lines)
- Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography by Meryle Secrest, hosted by Oline Eaton
- On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide by Matthew Kennedy, hosted by Daniel Moran
History
- The Scent of Empire: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow by Karl Schlögel, hosted by Jana Byars
- Vanilla: A Global History by Rosa Abreu-Runkel, hosted by Amir Sayadabdi
- Scent: A Natural History of Fragrance by Elise Vernon Pearlstine, hosted by Miranda Melcher
- Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell by Xuelei Huang, hosted by Miranda Melcher
- The Scent of Ancient Magic by Britta K. Ager, hosted by Miranda Melcher
- Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain by Helen Louise Cowie, hosted by Miranda Melcher
- Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World: Medicine, Material Culture and Trade, 1600-2000 by Anne Gerritsen and Burton Cleetus, hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
- Fragrant Frontier: Global Spice Entanglements from the Sino-Vietnamese Uplands by Annuska Derks, Jean-François Rousseau, and Sarah Turner, hosted by Julia Heinle
Literature