
Perfume (Latin "per fume" meaning "through smoke") was highly favored by the Egyptians, Romans, and Arabs. In East Asia, perfumes were incense based. People used to make perfumes from spices and herbs like bergamot, myrtle, coriander, conifer resin, and almond. The use of flowers came only after Avicenna, an Iranian doctor and chemist showed the process of distillation, whereby oils could be extracted from flowers. In 1370, at the behest of Queen...