Once upon a time... there was a perfume industry. The Egyptians started it, the Greeks applied what they learned from the Egyptians, the Romans revolutionized the art of perfume making and the Moorish took it to the Spanish and the French, by invading their countries! In the meanwhile, the Venetian merchants, on top of merchandise purchased in Spain, brought to Florence a lot of information and secret about perfumery. Because of these information transfer, Florence became the center for perfumery for about one hundred years. Then the French created an industry, family owned and managed,and which remained that way for a couple of hundred years.

This industry grew until it became so big that it exploded into myriad of companies. Some of these companies made alliance with each other, some did not. The competition was fierce, casualties among the weaker perfumeries were numerous, outside the walls of Grasse and Paris, many companies, outsider to the perfume industry, were awaiting for victims.

The victims fell, companies were sold to petrochemical, pharmaceutical or other giants. It was the beginning of the era when the perfumers are drowned by numbers and statistics. The creativity of these perfumers being analyzed by financial auditing companies, the beginning of market tests, and when organizations with initials became indispensable: MSDS, CTFA, PETA, MCS, RIFM, IFRA, C of A, GC, ISO 9000 and the ever present, C.H.E.A.P. and F.A.S.T.E.R.

Farewell Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, hero perfumer from Patrick Suskind's book: "Perfume, the story of a murderer". It is now a new world.

At the end of the second millennium, the perfume industry is no longer a French or Italian industry only, it is now global and taste lost most of its individuality, to the discovery of global demographics. Trends are now similar in different continents because perfumes, and people, travel at supersonic speed. Each major country has now a different impact on the future of perfume creation.The perfumers of today are as attentive to the wishes of the women of Asia and south America as they are to the ones of the Parisians and New Yorkers.

Perfumers are ready to enter the third millennium and, who knows, they might have to be attentive, very soon, to the needs of female beings from other galaxies