“Most customers prefer modern perfume and deodorants. A 100-ml vial of Ruh Gulab (rose attar), for instance, costs Rs.1,000-about $14, but you can get synthetic rose fragrance for as low as Rs.100, or less than $1.50. However unique Kannauj’s offerings maybe, the centuries-old business is slowly losing customers as India’s brand-conscious youths are increasingly turning to cheaper, alcohol-based products. It takes six to seven hours before all of the aroma is steamed out of the clay. The process of manufacturing mitti attar is similar to any other aromatic compound, but instead of flower petals the degs are filled with flat bricks of dried earth, a dash of water from the nearby pond and then the vats are sealed with clay. Kannauj’s most remarkable product is mitti attar, or “earth’s perfume”. The perfume is then transferred into camel-skin bottles whose porosity allows the excess water to evaporate away, trapping the fragrance and the oil inside.Ī workers attends to the large distillation vats called “degs”. The aromatic steam is then transferred via bamboo pipes to a receptacle containing sandalwood oil which acts as the base for the attar, or perfume. The flowers are mixed with water and heated in large copper vats called degs. Some 1,300 years later, nearly half of Kannauj’s 1.5 million residents are still involved in fragrance manufacturing using traditional methods.Įach morning local farmers pick a variety of flowers such as rose, jasmine, champaca, lotus, ginger lily, gardenia, and dozens of others and deliver them to over two hundred perfume distilleries dotting the city. Kannauj’s perfumes were famous among Mughal Emperors who ruled India for nearly 300 years. The ancient city has been home to the perfume industry since the days of Harshavardhana, who ruled north India in the 7th century. Kannauj lies on the banks of River Ganges, between the cities of Agra and Lucknow. While researchers are only starting to understand the chemistry behind this wonderful fragrance, a small town in Uttar Pradesh, India, has been capturing this smell in a bottle so that one could wear it on their clothes like a perfume for hundreds of years. But the geosmin can’t get into the air until the first drops of rain splatter on the ground and eject the geosmin molecules from the soil. When they die during periods of drought, they release a compound called geosmin which the human nose is extremely sensitive to. These bacteria are the main contributors to the distinct earthly smell. Love that musky, fresh smell of earth that permeates the air when the first rain of the monsoon hits the parched ground? It is known an petrichor, a pleasant cocktail of fragrant chemical compounds, some produced by plants, others produced by bacteria that live on the soil.
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