[Sca-cooks] Feast Ambience - incense

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

> Oh yes, I'm with you there. No problems with incense, in fact I find it
> rather pleasant and relaxing, but I have a very nasty reaction to most
> perfumes nowadays - my throat swells, my breathing becomes difficult and I
> break out almost instantly in a very painful prickly red rash on my face. I
> used to be a major fan of Chanel #5, Fendi, Red Door and other such scents,
> but now I can't even stand next to someone on the Tube who's used a little
> too much perfume (and it's amazing the number of women who can't tell the
> difference between scenting themselves and marinating themselves)[oblig.food
> content].

Hm. sounds like you may be allergic to one or more synthetics that are
used in perfume. In fact, you might be allergic to something that has
recently become synthetic-only. [Civet, for instance, though I doubt
there's civet in Red Door.]

> Perhaps it is the alcohol or fixative though, as I don't have any trouble
> with oil-only perfumes (I got a really nice one called 'Myth of the
> Morrigan' from the Perfumed Garden at Pennsic XXX) or alcohol-free perfumes
> (though there aren't many of them around).

Might well be synthetics, or something else that's common in commercial
perfume oils/fragrances. Try having someone open a bottle of 'perfume
diluent' (i.e. scentless wood alcohol, usually with some stablizing
ingredients) in your presence but far away, and see if you get a
reaction, if you feel up to testing it.

If you want to make your own alcohol-less perfumes (or synthetic-fragrance
-free perfumes) or have those around you make them, there's a good book
called _Perfumes, Splashes and Colognes_ out there on how to do it.

At the risk of sounding like Stefan, 've got notes on the relation of such
to period practice, on the web here:
http://www.Lehigh.EDU/~jahb/herbs/oil&water.html

> Though actually if we got people to wear period scents to feasts they
> wouldn't have alcohol in them would they? Wasn't that an C.18th innovation?
> Jadwiga?

Welll..... that's a tricky one. Alcoholic perfumes may well date back to
period, though we don't have a lot of info about when distilled 'waters'
became the carrier of choice for scent. Myth says distilled alcohol
perfumes date back to the late 1300s but there are no surviving docs that
I can find. On the other hand, they wouldn't be terribly similar to what
we think of as perfumes. (I hope to enter rosemary boiled in wine in the
Pennsic A&S, which is a skin wash that dates back to 1525.)

Dunno if that helps.

-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net OR jenne at tulgey.browser.net OR jahb at lehigh.edu
	"Index your brain."