Grasse lies in the south of France and has been a name linked with perfume for three centuries.
But the town’s original trade was not aromatics. It was tanning.
The problem with gloves
Medieval tanning used urine, dung and other organic matter. The finished product was durable and handsome, but it had a stubborn unpleasant smell.
Leather gloves were a luxury of the European nobility in the sixteenth century. Nobody wanted to wear a luxury that smelled of a tannery.
The solution: perfuming the gloves. The craft of perfuming arose as an ancillary service, attached to tanning rather than to beauty.
Three conditions that happened to coincide
Grasse had a microclimate suited to jasmine, orange blossom and tuberose — warm, sunny, sheltered from the wind by the Alps behind it.
Grasse already had chemical skills from tanning: distillation, maceration, handling fats.
Grasse was near the Mediterranean ports where aromatic goods from the East came ashore.
Those three conditions had nothing to do with each other, and they happened to converge on one small town.
When gloves went out of fashion
In the eighteenth century, taxes on leather rose and the fashion for perfumed gloves faded. The workshops of Grasse faced a choice: give up the trade, or sell the perfume on its own.
They chose the second, and the modern perfume industry began from there.
The lesson
The perfume industry was not born from a purely aesthetic aspiration. It was born from the need to cover an unpleasant smell, and it survived thanks to a chain of geographical and technical coincidences.
This pattern repeats elsewhere. Lemongrass is grown on a large scale because the soap and fragrance industries need citral, not because someone found lemongrass fragrant. Rosin is a by-product of the turpentine trade.
The world map of aromatics was drawn by industry and by land prices, not by aesthetics.