In 1853, the year of the premiere of Verdi's "La Traviata", the famous perfumer Stefano Frecceri created "Acqua di Genova" for the royal house of Savoy. The fresh and noble fragrance lent its scent to an entire era. It was soon delivered to all the royal houses of Europe, became part of the morning toilette of many famous personalities and still enjoys a legendary reputation today. The men's fragrance with woody-aromatic chypre is initially dominated by a top note of tart, fresh citrus fruits such as lemon, bergamot and mandarin, before a sensual heart note of neroli, sandalwood, pepper, rose and lavender slowly opens up over rosewood. In the base note, patchouli, sandalwood and musk give the fragrance composition a spicy foundation.

What the term "perfume" encompasses today goes back to the origins of human culture and identification: the invocation of the divine per fumum ("through smoke") was already practiced by the earliest advanced civilizations, for example the Egyptians 5,000 years ago. The transition from sacrifice to lustration rites and on to disease prevention, atmospheric purification and finally self-exaltation was fluid from the very beginning, and so the various purposes of perfumery existed and still exist side by side today. The perception of scent is one of the most interesting and still far from fully deciphered border areas between physiology and psychology: a scent can evoke memories from long ago and fundamentally change the mood of the moment.

Around 100 new fragrances are launched on the market every year. Old perfumers, who know what a feat of compositional violence it is to invent a fragrance that is somehow recognizably new and full of character, shake their heads at the excesses of the marketing people and predict that all these "exciting new perfumes" will have the life expectancy of a mayfly.