The Perfumes: The A-Z Guide

Next come lactones in 1906, discovered by the Russian chemists Zhukov and Shestakov

Some of the most successful aromachemicals of all time were musks developed for laundry in the late 1950s that did not get chewed up by microorganisms.

Russian alcoholics drinking odekolon (eau de cologne) and sometimes writing novels afterward, such as Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki, bear witness to the relatively low toxicity of perfume materials. Most of them have a lethal dose around 300 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, which means a medium-sized human would have to swallow a liter of perfume before feeling seriously ill.