Grasse: perfume capital

Grasse is a small city with a beautiful old city. I don’t know the origin of the city name, but it does mean fat or fatty (greasy) as in Mardi Gras. It used to be known for its tanneries (maybe it was a good place to get animal fat? who knows) and now is the center of the perfume industry. Evidently in the 16^th century, italian glove makers used the scents of local flowers to perfume the soft leather gloves made popular by the queen, Catherine de Medici (to cover up that stinky tannery leather smell we experience so viscerally in Fes!). The ‘Musée International de la Perfumerie’ was, believe it or not, fascinating, as was the free tour on the production of perfume at the Fragonard perfume house. To become a ‘nez’ (The ‘nose’ is the mixer/creator of new perfumes) one must study for 3 years at one of only three schools in France, and then apprentice for 7 years, a ten year process! You hear of the high insurance rates perfume houses have for their head ‘nez’!) There are several ways to extract the scent form the tons of flowers need to make one litre of perfume. One is the steam distillation process developed in Arab regions (steam filters through large quantity of blossoms and is distilled into a vat. The water on the bottom is used for cooking (rose water, etc) and eau de toilette and the essential oils on top are used for perfume). Another is lengthy and expensive and was used for delicate flowers such as jasmine and violets; the blossoms were laid on animal fat which would absorb the scent, then the fat would be washed with a solvent like alcohol which would separate the scent from the fat. 2010 is the year of the Mimosa at Fragonard and they had many delicately scented soaps, perfumes and other products.