Attar: The Fragrance of South Asia
Words by Rosa Kumar
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Attar: The Fragrance of South Asia by Rosa Kumar
Imagine capturing the pure scent of the earth after a rainfall; mitti attar, the oil perfume created with baked alluvial clay during the distillation process, does exactly that, reproducing an ancient and earthly scent for us to dab on our necks and wrists.
I have been on a multi-year long desperate odyssey to find my signature scent. After 27 years on this earth and not having found my trademark perfume, I grew concerned that my little nephews and nieces wouldn’t associate a smell with my presence. That seems a little ridiculous, but scent, emotion, and memory are deeply intertwined. Think back to spending time with your loved ones growing up, your mother or your neighbor’s granny, that uncle you don’t like, and the scents that they wore; when we get a whiff of someone wearing a similar fragrance in our adult life, it almost brings us back to those moments, looking through albums on your aunt’s couch, her Elizabeth Arden White Door puffing like a cloud around you.
Scent is memory and nostalgia, and I had no trademark. I was ordering sample after sample and spritzing myself at every department store counter at the mall to no avail. Everything smelled like alcohol to me, and that’s because every perfume I was spraying myself with did have alcohol in it, it’s actually the most voluminous ingredient in perfumes and colognes. After going down a rabbithole of research on fragrance chemicals and alcohol content in perfumes, I could never go back to wearing them because the health repercussions (discussed later in this piece) were too alarming. I shared my dilemma with my ever-patient parents, and my dad introduced me to attars as a natural alternative to chemical scents. By the time he was growing up in India they had completely fallen out of style, but he remembers his Nani wearing it, and the herby, earthly smell he associated with weddings, when copper vessels with tiny holes were filled with rose-scented attar and sprinkled everywhere. “It’s just sandalwood oil and a natural fragrance,” he said, “although I doubt they even make them anymore.”
With a history dating back centuries, attar is fragranced oil created by extracting the scent of flowers, botanicals, herbs, woods, musks, etc. Attar, itra, or ittar was likely derived from the Persian word for perfume, itir whose etymological origin lies with the Arabic itr (عطر). We can most likely credit the ancient Egyptians with their initial production and widespread use, but the Persian Abi Ali al Sina (or Avicenna as he’s known in the west), was a 10th century AD polymath who refined the process using distillation. Early versions of attar required the flower or herb to be crushed into the oil so it was a mixture rather than an infusion, but Abi Ali al Sina transformed the process and rapidly increased attar demand. Attar as natural perfumery really came into vogue when 10th century Yemini Queen Arwa al-Sulayhi had a unique attar made with flowers from the mountains and gifted them as luxury tokens to Arabian monarchs.