Recently I accompanied Mary Alice shopping for groceries. My job was to push the cart and since she is only 4 feet, 8 inches tall, reach products that are on the higher shelves. As we went down an aisle that had all the cleaning products, the smell made my eyes water and I began sneezing.

I was glad to get out of that aisle.

This reminded me of when I went shopping this past Christmas for a gift for Mary Alice. Selecting a gift for her is hard because we have been married for 68 years and we both have everything we need. I wanted to buy her perfume, because I knew the type of perfume she likes. I went to the store’s perfume counter and realized I had a problem — I could not remember the name of her favorite perfume.

Then I thought I would be able to identify the perfumes by the smell, however there were so many I soon realized that plan was not going to work.

Our word perfume comes from the French word parfum, which came from two Latin words: per meaning through and fumus meaning smoke. So perfume means through smoke.

Ancient people burned many kinds of resins, gums and woods at religious ceremonies. The pleasant smell of smoke from the burning incense drifted through the air. Fragrant woods and resins were often soaked in water and oil and the liquid was rubbed on their bodies as perfume. They even embalmed their dead with these liquids.

Perfumes have been found in tombs of Egyptian pharaohs that lived over 3,000 years ago. For hundreds of years, perfume making was an oriental art. Crusaders brought perfumes to England and France, which led to its popularity throughout Europe.

Perfumers learned very early that the best perfumes did not come from a single source but from a mixture of many sources. Many of the perfumes today come from a various combination of animal, plant and artificial scents, with the best perfumes containing large proportions of animal scents.

The odors of animals such as the castors of beaver, the musk of the deer, a fatty substance of the civet and even the essence of skunk go into the making of perfumes. Animal perfumes are preferred because their odors are strong, penetrating and last a long time. These animal odors are dissolved in alcohol to form a tincture before being used in perfumes

Many animal names are derived from their musk: the muskrat was named because of its large musk glands; names of the musk deer and musk ox come from their musk glands, and other animals such as the mink and weasel belong to the Mustela family because of their foul-smelling fluids. The mink’s scientific name Putoriums — which is no longer used today — means stinker, and refers to the foul-smelling fluid that the mink possesses.

The weasel also possesses this fluid, but neither uses their smell in the same way the skunk does.

Perfumes are also made from plants, especially those plants that have tiny sacs used to store fragrant substances. This substance is an oil that perfumers call essential oil. The most delicate perfumes come from the blossoms of plants.

These essential oils are taken from blossoms in various ways. Distillation is when the blossoms are boiled in water and turned into a gas that is then passed through tubing and cooled to make into a liquid again. In enfleurage and extraction, the flower petals are spread over glass plates covered with fat, which absorbs the essential oil. Later, the fat is put in closed containers with alcohol and heated. The alcohol dissolves the essential oil and rises with it to the top of the liquid fat. Then it is skimmed off.

In this method, a ton of flower petals give off about 10-16 ounces of essential oil. No wonder perfumes are so expensive. The last method is expressed, which means the essential oils are pressed out of rinds of fruits such as lemons or oranges.

No matter where the essential oil comes from or the methods used to extract, a slight mistake in removing the oil can cause the perfume to smell entirely different from the desired results. Of course, there are synthetic perfumes made by chemists. These perfumes are not considered cheap imitations because in many cases, this synthetic product is the same chemical as the natural essential oil and is likely to contain fewer impurities. However perfumes that are chemically made are usually cheaper than natural perfumes.

Throughout my career, I’ve smelled many animal odors and to name a few: the rank smell of the fox in the winter woods as the breeding season starts; an excited skunk; a whitetail deer when it becomes excited; opossum, which certainly has an odor entirely of its own; the smell of beaver castors; the odor of a mink or weasel and the stench of some of the viburnums in the fall.

All these smells were pleasant compared to a walk down the cleaning isle at the grocery store.

Bill Bower is a retired Pennsylvania Game Commission Wildlife Officer. Read his blog and listen to his podcasts on the outdoors at www.onemaningreen.com.