When did perfume become a strategy?
Because it didn't start that way. Four thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, the first fragrance was smoke — resins and wood burning upward, a message meant for the gods, not for a billboard. The word itself comes from the Latin per fumum — through smoke. That's all it was. A whisper rising through fire. Something sacred, invisible, and deeply honest.
In Egypt, they believed scent was the sweat of the sun god Ra. They buried perfume alongside their dead — not to sell anything, not to seduce anyone — but because fragrance was the bridge between the living and the eternal. Tapputi, the world's first recorded chemist, was a woman in Babylon distilling flowers and oils not for a brand campaign but for ritual, for meaning, for something she could not name but could feel.
The Persians had signature scents reserved only for kings. Not because a marketing team told them to. Because scent was identity. It was presence. It was who you were before you even spoke.
And now?
Now everything is a strategy.
I would say that even love and feeling have stopped being natural statements. They have become transactions. Something you perform. Something you post. Something you measure by the reaction it gets rather than the truth it holds.
Big brands spend millions on famous faces and even more on ads engineered to create feelings they think you want. They study your insecurities. They map your desires. They hand you a bottle and tell you this is who you could be — if only you buy it, spray it, become it. But it is the desire they are selling. Not the essence. Not who you actually are.
There is a difference between wanting to smell like yourself and wanting to smell like an idea someone else designed for you.
Perfume was born as prayer. As identity. As presence. Somewhere along the way, it became packaging.
And I think that's the real question — not which fragrance to wear, but whether you are still choosing from your own skin, your own memory, your own truth. Or whether you are wearing someone else's strategy and calling it yours.
The smoke still rises. But who is it speaking to now?