Reconstructing historical perfumes with Geheugen van Geur

What historical recipe can make a perfume, a face wash and delicious-smelling incense in one? On Friday 11 October, the project Geheugen van Geur (Scented Memories), initiated by Jonge Akademie, came together to recreate seventeenth-century recipes for so-called Angel Water.

This cosmetic recipe was once very popular, and it was made with fragrant ingredients like rose water, plant-based resins and spices like cinnamon and cloves. When heated together, the ingredients separate into a dry and a liquid part. The liquid can be used as a perfume and to “beautify” the skin. The bulk of the dry ingredients left in the cooking pot were used to make little scented bags to perfume clothes, or processed further into incense cones – it would be a shame to let these valuable ingredients go to waste!

After a day of measuring, grinding, mixing, boiling, distilling and experimenting, we recreated the recipes in the Utrecht University ArtLab, using both a cooking pot method and distillation in our alembic. Working with historical recipes is an act of interpretation: things that were obvious in the past are rarely obvious to modern audiences, and it is useful to combine different fields of expertise.

Present for this experiment were an interdisciplinary team consisting of art historians Marjolijn Bol and Henrike Scholten of DURARE, the historians Ineke Huysman, Nadine Akkerman and Marianne Eekhout, and the perfume and cosmetics experts Marypierre Julien and Daan Sins, together with cognitive scientist Hanneke Hulst. To be continued!